short answer question

3

Citizens of Planet Earth

THE YOUNG ACTIVIST WHO helped force President Barack Obama's

hand on climate change never felt like his identity mapped neatly

onto the country he was born in. Growing up, Phil Aroneanu always

had the sense that he carried some kind of hidden awareness. Most

of the people he knew in the upper-middle-class suburb of New

York where he grew up were quote unquote ''American." Their first

language was English. Phil, who spoke Romanian at home with his

immigrant parents, did his best to be just like them. But he always

suspected that his true self was anchored in something larger than

his immediate surroundings. "I felt like I had this sort of secret,"

he explained. "I had to hide it a little bit to blend in."r As he got older,

the borders separating him from the rest of the world began to feel

more and more arbitrary. And he eventually came to realize that if you

act as if they don't exist, you can influence the decisions of powerful

leaders.

When Phil's parents emigrated from Romania, all they wanted was

a nice quiet life in the suburbs. In the context of his family's history,

that was a radical proposition. Phil's great-great-grandfather led

the Romanian socialist party until his execution in the early 1900s. A

generation later many of Phil's Jewish ancestors died in the Holocaust.

Those who survived grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae

Ceau�escu. ''A bunch of my ancestors who I never met were sent to the

gulag because they were the wrong kind of communist," Phil said. So

when his parents were lucky enough to escape to the United States in

their mid-twenties, their primary goal was stability. They "worked hard

Citizens of Planet Earth 59

to give my sister and me a good life," he said. "My upbringing was

much saner than any of my ancestors'."

But in some ways the world that Phil grew up in was much more

tumultuous and disorienting than anything his ancestors had experi­

enced. Like millions of other people born in the 1980s, Phil became a

teenager during an era of deep and rapid globalization. Throughout the

1990s an explosion of free trade and commerce turned him and his

generation into global consumers. The Internet grew from 16 million

users in 1995 to over 360 million in 2000. And the September rr terrorist

attacks showed that events on one side of the planet could have terri­

fying consequences on the other. Of all the turbulent changes caused by

globalization, however, none had as large an impact on Phil's teenage

identity as climate change.

Phil was fifteen when "a wacky physics teacher" in his high school

explained that the routines he took for granted-flicking on the lights in

the morning, getting a ride to school, heating up a snack in the micro­

wave before dinner, watching TV before bed-were setting in motion a

chain of events that could someday flood all the world's coastal cities,

drive a quarter of the Earth's species extinct, and send human civiliza­

tion into complete disarray. "When I learned about climate change, I

was like 'Holy shit, this thing is not just about the climate, it's about

everything we care about on Earth,"' Phil recalled. "It's sort of unex­

plainable, but it just hit me that this was something I'd be working on

for the rest of my life. "

As a teenager, he knew he was more likely to feel the full impact of

climate change in his lifetime than his parents or grandparents. "Young

people are at the front lines of this," he said. "We're literally fighting for

our lives." That realization affected his entire worldview. It made him

question the stable life in the suburbs that his parents had tried to build

for him-as well as the status quo that it supported. There must be

something wrong with mainstream society, he figured, if it was destabi­

lizing the atmosphere that thousands of years of human civilization had

depended on. As he got older, Phil decided to devote himself to radical

social change. "It seemed to be exactly the opposite of what my parents

wanted," he said.

60 ARE WE SCREWED?

In his early twenties Phil found a community that shared his views at

Middlebury College. As part of his undergraduate degrees in sociology

and anthropology, he took a seminar taught by the economics professor

Jon Isham called "Building a New Climate Movement." Its premise was

that the only way humankind could create the far-reaching economic

and political changes needed to address climate change was if a massive

social movement of regular people demanded them. They spent months

studying the civil rights movement, how it was run, why it succeeded,

and if its lessons could still be applied. Phil was fascinated. He and six

friends from the class began meeting to discuss how they could put the

ideas from the class into action. They formed the Sunday Night Group

and set a goal, which they later met, of pressuring Middlebury to go

carbon neutral. "It wasn't official," he said. "But we managed to mobi­

lize hundreds of students."

Around this time they started working with a scholar-in-residence at

Middlebury, Bill McKibben. In the late 1980s he'd written the best seller

The End of Nature, which was among the first books to explain the

looming crisis of climate change to a general readership. But in the

years since then McKibben had become increasingly frustrated that our

politicians and business leaders didn't seem interested in doing anything

to solve it. Like Isham, he believed that the pressure for solutions needed

to come from a movement of regular people. But as McKibben and Phil

and the others in the Sunday Night Club would come to realize, that

movement would need to be unlike any other in history. To reflect the

global scale of climate change, it would have to transcend every national

border on the planet.

That was a daunting proposition for seven undergrad students and

their adviser. No less so because the state where Middlebury is located,

Vermont, is among the most politically and environmentally progressive

in the country. Phil wasn't at all sure whether people in the rest of

America-let alone the entire world-cared about climate change as

much as they did. "We really didn't know if there was a movement out

there," he said.

To figure out if there was, they formed the organization 350. org. And

as they set about building the planet's first truly global social movement

Citizens of Planet Earth 61

on climate change, Phil realized that the tension he'd always felt between

his immediate surroundings and the world outside was shared more

widely among people his age than he'd suspected. Under the right

conditions it could be channeled in new and exciting and transformative

ways. By the time he reached his early thirties, it would influence the

decision making of the world's most powerful nation.

To UNDERSTAND THE GLOBAL identity on climate change that Phil and

the others at 350. org set out to build, it helps to meet one of the people

now in charge of growing and maintaining it. Allyse Heartwell was

born on the Hawaiian island of Oahu and raised in the Honolulu

suburbs. "I was a pretty outdoorsy kid," she said. "My parents took me

hiking a lot, and we lived in a house that was right on the beach." She

spent much of her childhood out in the azure-blue Pacific, poking at

tide pools, picking up crabs, swimming behind sea turtles. "It's kind of

weird to call it 'special' because that's the childhood everyone deserves,"

she said. "I can say I'm very lucky in that regard. I got to have a lot of

nature in my life."2 Hawaii is much more than just home to her. It's

where she feels most rooted as a human being.

After finishing high school, she decided to go to college in the most

exotic place she could think of: Rhode Island. ''All the ivy and old brick

and whatnot," she said. "We don't really have multicentury-old build­

ings in Hawaii. It seemed very romantic to me." During her four years at

Brown University, Allyse took a lot of courses in environmental studies.

One day she had a realization that changed her life. "I was sitting in the

windowsill of my college dorm, and it was spring, and the plum trees

were flowering," she said. As she looked out the window, she pictured

ocean water flooding Hawaii. She saw rain forests and coral reefs

becoming lifeless. "There are places and ecosystems that I love deeply

that are actively in danger," she realized. ''And why would I do anything

else with my life other than try to protect them?"

She moved to San Francisco after college and began working for a

nonprofit focused on local economic resilience. In her spare time she

volunteered on an urban farm. She read a lot of Internet articles about

ARE WE SCREWED?

the challenges facing human civilization. She soon became obsessed

with the idea that our global supply of oil is running dry-and that we

need to build a more resilient economic system capable of operating

without it. Allyse read sites like Energy Bulletin and Oil Drum every

day. Though she didn't consider herself an activist, she joined a Bay

Area group trying to raise awareness of peak oil. "I don't think that it's

likely that we're going to make smart choices in the next ro or 20 years,"

Allyse told Salon at the time, but "I would be kicking myself if I didn't

do something. "3

She would later apply the same logic to climate change. As massive

new sources of oil were opened up in Canada's tar sands and in U.S.

shale deposits, the concept of peak oil became less relevant. But if

anything, our need to move away from fossil fuels was more urgent than

ever. "This historical moment is such that one cannot confront the facts

of climate change-to say nothing of the worst-case predictions­

without being deeply, existentially afraid," she wrote.4 She figured it

was better to do something tangible about those fears than suppress

them. When the position of digital campaigner opened up at 350. org's

Oakland offices in 2orr, Allyse decided to apply for it. She wanted

to join the "fight for a livable planet" and be part of a "powerful and

beautiful" global movement.

Allyse Heartwell appears to share that desire with many people her

age. For over a decade the veteran political pollster John Zogby has

done extensive public opinion research on the values held by U.S.

Millennials. He has concluded that this generation has a more global

perspective than others before it. Its members, he argues, are more

empathic toward other cultures. They're more likely to care about

global problems. They see national borders as a veneer, and they think

solutions to society's ills should transcend them. In short, Zogby's ten

years of polling suggest that members of Allyse's generation "express

opinions reflecting a larger vision of the world than their elders."5 They

see themselves as part of a "global society. "

That's not totally surprising for a generation that can barely imagine

what life was like without the Internet. In 2014 the Pew Research Center

set out to quantify the generational divide between these so-called

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Citizens of Planet Earth

digital natives and their parents and grandparents. A major survey of

thousands of Americans suggests that the average Millennial has 250

"friends " on Facebook, compared to 200 for Gen Xers and 98 for Baby

Boomers. Millennial respondents are twice as likely to say they've

shared a selfie online as Gen Xers, and ten times as likely as Boomers.

Statistics like this, silly as they may seem, were evidence to Pew

researchers that young people had "taken the lead in seizing on the new

platforms of the digital era. " 6

But people often forget that the Internet is only a tool. W hat's more

telling is how the tool is actually used. From an early age, people of

Allyse Heart well's generation used the Internet to experience events on

the other side of the planet in real time. It compresses physical bound­

aries. And in doing so it makes issues such as climate change, ones that

you don't necessarily experience firsthand, feel closer. "This increased

access to information has created a heightened awareness of the world's

challenges, often leading to a deeper commitment to social and

economic justice," argues Howard Dean, whose campaign for the

Democrat presidential· nomination in 2000 was among the first of any

U.S. candidate to effectively utilize the Internet. "This is the first genera­

tion that embraces the notion of 'shared fate.' They understand the

connection each has to the other across the globe." 7

In particular, they understand how that connection is threatened by

climate change. Unlike older generations, argues the North Carolina­

based psychotherapist Chris Saade, "who can put their heads in the

sand about what we have been doing to our planet, [young people]

are very aware of what's going on ... Because of the web, it's not

hidden any more. " 8 This appears to have had a formative impact on the

worldview of Millennials. In 2007 the education company BrainPOP

asked one thousand U.S. middle school students, who are now in their

mid-t wenties, to rank their greatest fears for the future. Nearly 60

percent said they feared climate change more than terrorism, car

crashes, or cancer. "We were not surprised in our survey to discover

that children are really worried about global warming," BrainPOP

said. "We have received thousands of e-mails from children expressing

their fears."9

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ARE WE SCREWED?

As those children entered adulthood, they put less emphasis on

national borders than their parents and grandparents. In years of

polling, Zogby Analytics found that almost one in three Millennial

respondents "prefer to be called 'citizens of the planet Earth'-more

than any other age cohort."ro A major 2014 study conducted by the

American National Election Study reached a similar conclusion:

70 percent of Boomer respondents felt their U.S. identity to be extremely

important, compared to 60 percent of Gen Xers and only 45 percent of

Millennials. u There are of course many complex reasons for this shift.

But it suggested that young people feel greater attachment to the planet

than to the country they were born in.

And they're more likely to support policies protecting the planet. In

2015 the Pew Research Center conducted a massive global survey-over

45,000 interviews in forty countries-on attitudes toward climate

change. It found that 85 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in the United

States supported an international treaty to limit carbon emissions,

compared to only 60 percent of people over 50. "Young Americans are

generally more concerned than their elders about climate change," a

report on the data concluded. Similar age gaps were detected in Europe,

Asia, and Australia. "This might be expected," the report explained,

"since the younger generation may see itself as most likely to have to live

with the consequences of global warming."12

That is effectively what 350.org discovered when it began reaching

out to young people across the world. Millennials were more likely to

see themselves as global citizens than their parents. They were more

connected online. They knew climate change threatened their survival,

and they wanted their leaders to do something about it. But the energy

produced by these tectonic generational shifts didn't have an outlet, and

so 350.org set out to provide it. It wanted to remind young people across

the world that they share a global identity. When Allyse Heartwell joined

the group, she was tasked with the daily work of helping maintain it. As

a campaigner at 350.org, and later as the group's digital director, she

would oversee the website updates, the e-mails, and the social media

blasts that remind someone in Bangladesh that they're fighting the same

struggle as someone in the United States. The true innovation of 350.org

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Citizens of Planet Earth

was to "expand people's sense of self," she said. And as the story of a tar

sands pipeline known as Keystone XL would later prove, it was the

group's greatest source of power.

THE IDEA THAT YOUR identity transcends national borders sounds like

a unique product of the digital era. But for centuries it's been ingrained

in the worldview of North America's original inhabitants. Before

European settlers arrived in the mid-r6oos, millions of indigenous

peoples lived a seminomadic existence-that is, their settlements

migrated along with the wildlife that they hunted. And though different

regions were home to different tribes, there was nothing comparable to

the rigidly defined borders that exist today. That all changed as European

settlers pushed west across the continent and confined what indigenous

people weren't killed by disease or armed conquest to a series of ever­

shrinking reservations separated from each other by the forty-ninth

parallel. Yet their modern descendants never forgot the borders that

were imposed on them. And in September 2orr I sat in on an emergency

meeting of indigenous people in the basement of a South Dakota tribal

casino who thought that by fighting a tar sands pipeline from Canada to

Texas they could help redress this legacy of oppression.

When the oil and gas corporation TransCanada first applied for a

permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline in 2008, it never could have

predicted the size and intensity of the public opposition that would

arise against it. The first phase of the project, a pipeline from Canada's

tar sands to Illinois that was known simply as Keystone, was approved

by the U.S. State Department with little public scrutiny. Initially the

project's second phase, a r,661-mile pipeline from Canada's tar sands to

a string of refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast, seemed no different.

But starting in 2oro a coalition of ranchers, environmental groups, and

indigenous leaders began warning about the impact of an oil spill from

Keystone XL as it crossed prime agricultural land and drinking water

supplies in the Midwest. 1 3

As that opposition grew stronger and better organized throughout

the summer of 2orr, I reached out to the Indigenous Environmental

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66 ARE WE SCREWED?

Network, and in early September its lead pipeline campaigner, Marty

Cobenais, asked if I had any interest in attending a high-level strategy

meeting of indigenous leaders from the United States and Canada. For

two days they would huddle in South Dakota's Rosebud Casino to draft

a Mother Earth Accord explaining the true impact of TransCanada's

proposal. If they could get the accord adopted by the National Congress

of American Indians, the biggest Native lobby group in the United

States, it could be presented to President Obama at the White House's

annual Tribal Nations Conference in December. "With an accord at

that level," Cobenais explained to me, "we believe the administration

would have a hard time saying yes to this pipeline."14 I quickly booked

my flight.

People were coming to the meeting from all over the place. One

leader was flying in from Canada's frigid Great Bear Lake near the

Arctic Circle; another was flying from Frog Lake in central Alberta; a

husband and wife were driving east on Highway r8 from the Pine Ridge

Indian Reservation; and several more driving west from Minnesota on

Interstate 90. I flew into Sioux Falls on a crisp and sunny autumn after­

noon. Seen from my airplane window, South Dakota reminded me of a

tile bathroom floor. Earthy rectangles of green, brown, yellow, and red

were lined up in geometric precision. The view on the ground, after I

landed at the Sioux Falls Regional Airport, reinforced that image. In my

rental car I drove past endless fields of corn, wheat, soybeans, and

sunflowers. The smell of manure was everywhere.

Along the way I flipped from one radio station to the next: KBHB

8ro AM Five State Ranch Radio; the daily Farm and Ranch Review on

KWY R Country 1260; and K ILI Radio 90.r, Voice of the Lakota

Nation. South Dakota is home to one of the largest indigenous popula­

tions in the United States, with over 71,000 Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota

peoples spread over eight reservations. The proposed Keystone XL

route wouldn't enter any indigenous reserves as it traversed South

Dakota, but it would go under tributaries of the Missouri River flowing

alongside tribal territory. University of Nebraska engineering professor

John Stansbury had calculated that an oil spill could release a toxic

chemical plume "possibly stretching for 450 miles."15

Citizens of Planet Earth

The pipeline also had a wider historical significance. The flat and

austere countryside that I drove past on my way to the Rosebud Casino

had been contested ever since settlers began pushing west in the 1800s.

A compromise was reached in 1851, when Lakota leaders signed the

first Treaty of Fort Laramie with Washington, giving them control over

tens of millions of acres across the Great Plains. But decades of

encroachment and war eventually shrank those borders to a few impov­

erished reservations. Many Lakota people think the full 1851 territory is

still rightfully theirs. And it wasn't lost on them that Keystone XL

would cut through it. Leaders like Rosebud tribal chief John Spotted

Tail believed that in fighting the pipeline, they could "take a stand

against the nearly 200 years of judicial injustice inflicted upon Indian

tribes."

In the distance I saw a small jumble of beige buildings. As I

approached, I could read the casino's official slogan: "A little bit of

Vegas on the prairie." Inside the casino I was pointed to a small room in

the basement. I'd arrived a bit early, and attendance was so far modest.

Scanning the room, I saw white farmers in flannel and blue jeans, leaders

from the Rosebud tribal council, a few residents of South Dakota's Pine

Ridge Indian Reservation, some antipipeline activists from Nebraska,

and Cobenais, the meeting's organizer. I poured some coffee into a

Styrofoam cup and took a seat at the back. Slowly the room filled out.

Alex White Plume, a fifty-nine-year-old from Pine R idge, kicked things

off by delivering an opening prayer in the Lakota language.

After he was finished, White Plume looked at the white farmers with

a mischievous smile. "Excuse me if I just spoke too fast for you to

understand," he said. The whole room erupted in laughter. But the

mood grew serious when Cobenais projected an aerial photo of

Canada's tar sands-the same area that I'd visited in Chapter 2-onto

the basement wall. In the photo you could see miles of strip-mined

darkness where the thick boreal forest used to be. The bitumen that was

extracted from these mines would pass less than seventy miles from the

Rosebud Casino as it was pumped through Keystone XL to refineries

in Texas. "Jesus," one of the farmers muttered. White Plume added:

"Something bad is coming to our nation and to our land." 16

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68 ARE WE SCREWED?

Four hours into the Rosebud Casino meeting, the Canadian delega­

tion arrived. It included Dene Nation leader Bill Erasmus, from Great

Bear Lake in Canada's North West Territories, which is downriver

from the tar sands; and George Stanley, a tribal leader from Alberta's

Frog Lake, which is located right in the heart of the Cold Lake tar

sands deposit. In some ways this meeting was Erasmus's idea. A few

weeks earlier he had come to an important realization about the indig­

enous opposition to Keystone XL. "Our peoples in Canada and the

United States have been working in isolation," he explained to me. "I

became intrigued by the idea of bringing us together."17

Many North American indigenous communities do not recognize

the forty-ninth parallel. Like the borders encircling their reservations,

they see it as an artifice imposed by European settlers. Rather than

identify as Canadian or American, aboriginals from both sides of the

border prefer to think of themselves as a continental peoples. Yet local

priorities and distance often thwart cross-border cooperation. The plan

at today's meeting was to draw from their shared sense of identity to

create a two- to three-page Mother Earth Accord opposing Keystone

XL. Erasmus and Stanley, who sat on Canada's Assembly of First

Nations, hoped to get the accord adopted by the wider leadership.

Cobenais, in turn, would help push it to the National Congress of

American Indians. Both groups wanted to present the accord directly to

President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state,

later in December.

By now we'd been in the meeting for nine hours. Marty Cobenais

decided to call it a day. Everyone else was staying at the casino's Quality

Inn, so I got a room there as well. The receptionist gave me a ten-dollar

credit for the slot machines down the hall. Later that evening I drifted

asleep to a glowing TV screen and the howl of prairie wind.

The meeting was slow to start the next day. After a breakfast of

doughnuts and orange juice, I joined Alex White Plume outside as

he smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. "The ones with filters give you

bad breath," he explained. Dark clouds spat rain onto the casino's

parking lot. White Plume revealed a surprising fact: he claimed to be

descended from the same tribal band as Crazy Horse, the Lakota

Citizens of Planet Earth

warrior who in 1874 wiped out General Custer's cavalry regiment at

Little Big Horn.

Given his ancestral history, White Plume saw the Keystone XL pipe­

line as more than just a threat to South Dakota's natural environment.

In some ways he saw it as a test of his people's commitment to their

surroundings and history-the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle

to protect their land and identity from the impositions of an unjust

political and economic system. "When the settlers came and killed off

all our buffalo, they wiped out an ecosystem that we depended on,"

White Plume said. "And now they're trying to bring dirty oil through

our country." He paused for a second, and then laughed slowly and

sadly. Back inside the casino, Chief John Spotted Tail expressed a

similar sentiment. "Our ancestors protected the land when they were

alive," he said at the meeting. "Our belief is that we need to do the

same." 1 8

For the remainder of the day, Erasmus and Stanley and Cobenais and

Spotted Tail and everyone else at the meeting worked as fast as they

could to finalize the Mother Earth Accord. While they drafted new

clauses and crossed out old ones, I took a walk through the fields

surrounding the casino. And by the time I returned, it was nearly

finished. A draft copy affirmed the obligation of Native communities i n

the U nited States and Canada "to protect and preserve for our descen­

dants, the inherent sovereign rights of our Indigenous Nations," and it

warned of the potential for Keystone XL to "impact sacred sites and

ancestral burial grounds, and treaty rights throughout traditional terri­

tories." The accord concluded by calling on President Obama and

Secretary Clinton to "reject the Presidential Permit for the Keystone XL

pipeline."

I had a flight to catch so I left the meeting before it was finished.

Months later it would be adopted by the National Congress of American

Indians. And when the accord finally made it to Obama, it had thou­

sands of signatories. But as I drove north through the Rosebud

Reservation and then east on I-90 past fields of corn and wheat, all I

could think of was White Plume's sad laughter in the casino parking lot.

To him as well as the other indigenous leaders, Keystone XL was about

69

ARE WE SCREWED?

more than a steel pipe. It represented an economic and political system

that cared little for the survival of his people or the planet. And in his

fight against the pipeline, White Plume drew from a shared identity that

transcended borders.

Such ideas would later become central to 3 50.org's campaign against

Keystone XL. Few could have guessed it then, but they eventually would

help get the pipeline rej ected.

WHE N PHIL ARO N E ANU WAS at Middlebury College, he and the six

other students who'd formed the Sunday Night Group kept running into

the same problem anytime they debated what possible difference they

could make on climate change. The issue was so huge and daunting and

scary that most regular people assumed their actions couldn't possibly

make a meaningful difference. So they turned inward. They blocked it

out. But their adviser McKibben came up with a potential way to reverse

that impulse. If you could expand people's sense of self, he figured, and

show them that the anxiety they feel about our civilization's future is

shared by their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens, they'd be

more likely to believe change is possible. So in 2006 he suggested to the

Sunday Night Group that they organize a march across Vermont.

Hopefully, McKibben said, they would "make some headlines" and "get

people riled up." 19 The result was better than they could have predicted.

More than a thousand people hiked for five days from Robert Frost's

cabin in central Vermont to the federal building in Burlington.

Still, it was one thing to get people riled up in progressive Vermont.

A true test of their ability to build a social movement around climate

change would be whether the rest of America cared. "We really didn't

know," Phil said. In order to find out, they teamed up with national

green groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and

the Sierra Club and put out the word that they would be hosting a

national day of climate-change-themed events in April 2007 called Step

It Up. It was based on the decentralized structure of the Internet.

Anyone could j oin. They could set up a march, a bike rally, a public art

display-whatever they wanted-and then upload photos or videos of

70

Citizens of Planet Earth

it to the Step It Up site. The result would be a visual archive demon­

strating to someone in Alaska, say, that people in Florida and across the

United States cared as much about the climate as they did. "We wanted

to test the assumption that there are people out there who want to take

part in [a movement] ," Phil explained.

Their assumption ended up being totally correct. Mountaineers

skied Wyoming's melting Dinwoody Glacier. Scuba divers took photos

of Key West's endangered coral reefs. Gardeners planted native trees in

downtown Oklahoma City. Activists walked the levees of New Orleans's

Ninth Ward. In total there were more than fourteen hundred events.

More than twenty members of Congress attended rallies. And McKibben

was asked to testify before a House committee on climate change three

days later. "We weren't professional organizers," Phil said. "It was pretty

unbelievable what we were able to do." The seven recent college gradu­

ates and their adviser McKibben realized that people all over America

were sick of a status quo that didn't take their future survival on this

planet seriously. "We realized, 'Wow, there is a movement, they're out

there, and all they really needed was permission to do their work,"' Phil

said. "We thought, 'What if we could take this global?"'

To do that, their group needed a name. By the time Phil and his six

friends made it to that December's international climate talks in Bali,

they still hadn't thought of one. The talks themselves were demoral­

izing to witness. "We're sitting there watching the. negotiations unfold

painfully slowly," he said. "No one was agreeing to anything." But as it

was all about to wrap up, they got an e-mail from McKibben, who

explained that the NASA climatologist James Hansen had just a calcu­

lated a new threshold for climate change: if concentrations of carbon

in the atmosphere exceeded 350 parts per million, every coastal city on

Earth could be submerged underwater. McKibben suggested they

name the group after Hansen's calculation: 350. At first Phil and the

others thought it was weird. But it grew on them. It was culturally

neutral. It transcended national borders. "It lent a sense of scale to what

we were doing," he said.

The .org part came later. When they got home, they were faced with

a practical dilemma: how did seven college grads in Vermont build a

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72 ARE WE SCREWED?

global movement? "We just decided to divide up the world into seven

pieces," Phil said. He was given the Middle East and Africa. "There's no

way that one American like me with almost no contacts in the region

was going to make this happen," he thought. "So I just started cold­

calling environmental and development organizations in literally every

country on those continents." He sought out youth leaders. He set up

endless Skype sessions. He flew out to conferences. His pitch was simple

and compelling, in many ways mirroring the model established by Step

It Up. He asked people across the region to join the 350. org mailing list,

wait for the group to issue a call to action, set up an event in their area,

brand it somehow with "350," and share photos and videos online. This

is what the .org in 35o's name came to stand for. It refered to a social

network. And to a global identity.

Tapping into that identity was easier than Phil had expected. He

didn't have to convince anyone that climate change is a big deal. The

young people he met across Africa and the Middle East felt it every

day. "They were like ' yeah, duh,"' he said. They saw it affect the

food they grew and the water they drank. "They understand climate

change is happening in a way that a lot of Americans don't because

we're insulated from what's happening in nature," he said. But

those young people lacked an outlet for their anxiety, or the sense their

actions could make any sort of difference: "It's hard to feel agency

on something as big as climate change if you don't feel part of a move­

ment that's global." Phil provided basic leadership coaching. He

provided tips on how to organize events and shoot videos of them.

"Some of the people we trained ended up taking part in the Arab

Spring," he later claimed.

Meanwhile the other six organizers at 350. org were reaching out to

people across North America, South America, India, China, Europe,

and Oceania. After two years, 350.org decided to test the power of what

it had created. In late October 2009, two months before the interna­

tional climate negotiations in Copenhagen would start, it put out a call

for action. The goal was to show world leaders that young people all

over the world wanted a treaty capable of ensuring their survival. "Our

hope is that a huge worldwide outpouring on Oct. 24 will set a bar to

Citizens of Planet Earth 73

make any action in Copenhagen powerful," McKibben wrote in an

e-mail to supporters.2°

More than five thousand organizers in 181 countries responded to

350. org's call. Foreign Policy described it as "the largest ever global

coordinated rally of any kind," while CNN called it "the most wide­

spread day of political action in our planet's history. " 21 Phil Aroneanu

was twenty-five years old at the time. "It was pretty incredible for a

bunch of college kids and a professor," he said.

BuT T HE EUPHORIA PHIL felt was short-lived. The world had projected

big hopes onto the Copenhagen climate change talks. World leaders,

UN officials, activists, and pretty much anyone involved with climate

change saw in them the potential to create a historic treaty capable of

limiting the global temperature rise to safe levels. Instead, the talks

collapsed. Major emitters like the United States and China feuded

endlessly. The result was a climate treaty so weak that Al Gore called it

"an abysmal failure."22 More setbacks were soon to come. That April,

BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and leaked

more oil than any other spill in history. An even more demoralizing

setback came later that summer, when the Senate defeated a wide­

ranging bill to cap U.S. carbon emissions and push America's economy

toward clean energy. Green groups had spent over $22 million trying to

get it passed. Yet ExxonMobil on its own had spent $27 million lobbying

against the bill, and the oil and gas sector as a whole spent more than

$175 million. It was "easily an industry record," the watchdog group

OpenSecrets noted.23

Those events were painful for Phil and the others at 350.org to

witness. But they contained a crucial lesson. "We saw the limitations of

just doing feel-good days of action," he said. Such actions i mplied that

climate change could be won if enough people became aware of the

crisis and demanded that leaders take it seriously. Yet the disasters in

Copenhagen, the Gulf of Mexico, and Congress had revealed just how

resistant our political and economic system was to truly transformative

change. Phil knew the global awareness and energy that 350.org was

74 ARE WE SCREWED?

creating needed to be focused on challenging that system's legitimacy.

But where would you even start? "We haven't built the kind of political

power that we should," McKibben lamented.24

Their network could bring tens of thousands of people into the

streets. But behind closed doors, the Exxons of the world could simply

block whatever they demanded. So it wasn't enough for them to protest

the status quo. They had to threaten it. "We needed to rethink

ourselves," Phil said. Nearly a year went by without a feasible option.

But in the summer of 2or r N A S A climatologist Hansen seemed to

provide one. That June he wrote an incendiary critique of TransCanada's

Keystone XL project. Opposition to the tar sands pipeline was growing

in Canada and across the U.S. Midwest-thanks in part to the people I

met at the Rosebud Casino in South Dakota. Few people outside the

region were paying much attention, but James Hansen was determined

to change that. "If this project gains approval," he warned on his

website, "it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands

monster." Keystone XL would lock us into decades of reliance on the

planet's most polluting oil. It would, he argued, be "game over" for

the climate. 25

This was a very unusual statement to make, especially for a high­

profile public figure like Hansen. "Even the most radical climate activ­

ists weren't saying stuff like that at the time," Phil said. From a national

perspective, Hansen's "game over" argument made little sense. The

Keystone XL pipeline would carry 800,000 barrels of tar sands a day to

refineries in Texas. There would be a lot of climate-warming carbon in

those barrels, equivalent to every car and truck on the road in Canada.

But the tar sands industry would expand with or without Keystone, and

new pipelines were being built all the time. What made this particular

one "game over" for the climate? The University of Alberta economics

professor Andrew Leach spoke for a lot of skeptics when he scoffed that

Hansen's argument was "laughably out of context. " It was the type of

thing "most likely to be ignored as alarmist." 26

But Hansen wasn't looking at Keystone X L from a national perspec­

tive. He was looking from a global one. If we burned all the planet's oil,

coal, and gas reserves, it would take us well over the safe carbon

Citizens of Planet Earth 75

concentration of 350 parts per million that he'd identified back in 2007.

However, if we succeeded in leaving much of that coal in the ground, as

well as high-polluting oil sources like the tar sands, "it is conceivable to

stabilize [the] climate."27 What Hansen suggested in his paper was that

Keystone XL represented a political and economic system that intended

to take us over a dangerous threshold. It wasn't the pipeline itself that

would be "game over" for the climate but our status quo. It mirrored the

message that 350. org was sending with its days of action: a photo of

one person skiing down a glacier, say, wouldn't help fix climate change,

but the knowledge that it represented a global movement might.

Hansen's paper caused a debate within 350.org. Should it join

the public opposition to Keystone XL? By the narrow definition of

people like Leach, Keystone XL was just one more pipeline traversing

the United States. The question Phil Aroneanu and the others asked

themselves was whether they could convince people to accept Hansen's

wider global definition: that the pipeline symbolized a society intent on

destroying the planet. Intellectually, it was a lot to ask of people. "I

thought it was a bad idea when I first heard about it," Phil said. "We

made a big bet basically. " But there were advantages to joining the

Keystone XL fight. The pipeline was tangible in ways that carbon emis­

sions are not. A single person would decide its fate: President Obama.

So if 35 0.org could pressure Obama to reject it, it would be a financial

and moral blow to the fossil fuel industry. It would directly threaten the

status quo.

That was a big if, of course. America's most influential green groups

had spent more than $22 million lobbying to get a climate bill passed

through Congress, and still the fossil fuel industry had defeated them.

How did seven recent Middlebury grads and their old adviser hope

to do any better? What 350. org eventually decided was that it would

use a strategy that the green groups had been reluctant to consider: it

would try to get its supporters arrested. The radical climate activist

Tim DeChristopher had been urging 350.org to do this for years. "He

was like 'You guys say you're building a movement, but you're not

willing to put your bodies on the line,"' Phil said. "And we'd be like

'Nobody's ready to do that yet."' But by the summer of 2ou things had

ARE WE SCREWED?

changed. Copenhagen had failed. New climate laws had died. Congress

was hopelessly polarized. The fossil fuel industry was reaping record

profits. Then here came this pipeline. "We were young in age, and we

could take risks," Phil said. "That actually put us in a pretty powerful

position. "

I N LATE J U N E 2 o r r , 350.org sent out an invitation t o its supporters.

"We want you to consider doing something hard," McKibben, Hansen,

and other prominent activists wrote in an open letter. Later that August,

350. org would be helping lead a two-week demonstration in front of the

White House. The target was Keystone XL, "a r,500-mile fuse to the

biggest carbon bomb on the continent"-the Canadian tar sands. They

urged people "to come to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks

of the summer" to protest the pipeline. But, they warned, it could "get

you arrested." This wasn't just about a piece of steel. Anyone who

attended would be standing up for a fairer and less destructive future.

"It's time to stop letting corporate power make the most important

decisions affecting our planet," the letter read. "We don't have the

money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our

bodies. "28

By the time the protest began, more than two thousand people had

signed up. What happened on day one set a pattern for the next two

weeks. A group of people sat down in an off-limits area near the White

House, police told them to leave, anyone who didn't was arrested, and a

new group moved in. This wasn't the sort of thing mainstream green

groups were normally comfortable with. For decades they'd written

reports, lobbied politicians, and led letter-writing campaigns. "They'd

never really thrown down publicly in a mass protest kind of way," Phil

said. But midway through the protest the leaders of the Natural

Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra

Club, and several others wrote to President Obama to express their soli­

darity. "Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil

disobedience," they explained. "Regardless . . . we want to let you know

that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the

76

Citizens of Planet Earth 77

Keystone Pipeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested

daily outside the White House. "29

The protest was radicalizing America's green movement, "shifting

their strategies," Phil said. It was also pushing Keystone XL onto the

national radar. When it first began, few reporters had heard of the pipe­

line. That's one reason 350.org scheduled the protest in late August, one

of the deadest news times of the year. "Congress was on break, so we

were the only story in town," said 350.org cofounder and communica­

tions director Jamie Henn. "The first few days I did press, and we were

ignored by everything but Democracy Now." But as the arrests added

up-more than 1,250 in total, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Daryl

Hannah-so did media coverage. The New York Times, Washington

Post, USA Today, CNN, and Politico reported on the protest. "We saw

how it began to break through," Henn later recalled. "People hadn't

seen something like this done before on climate. "3°

Republicans were also beginning to notice. Later that fall, 350.org

worked with the Sierra Club to organize a massive follow-up protest.

On a chilly November afternoon more than twelve thousand people

encircled the White House to protest Keystone XL. The message seemed

to resonate. Four days later the U.S. State D epartment decided to post­

pone a decision on the pipeline until the 2012 presidential election was

over. Republicans were pissed. "That was the point where we were

all like 'What's going on?"' a GOP aide later explained to Politico .

Keystone had gone from "being a quirky Energy and Commerce

subcommittee issue to being a full House national issue," said Lee

Terry, a Republican House member from Nebraska.31 It became a staple

on Fox News and right-wing radio. In April 2012 Mitt Romney himself

took it on. "I will build that pipeline if I have to myself," said the

Republican nominee for presidentY

Keystone XL opponents dared him to try. By the time Allyse joined

350.org as a digital campaigner, their numbers and intensity were

surging. "It was clear Keystone XL was animating people," she recalled.

In early 2013 Sierra Club leader Michael Brune broke w ith his group's

120-year ban on civil disobedience in order to get arrested outside the

White House. "We need to create political moments that break through

ARE WE SCREWED?

the lethargy and the paralysis that is gripping Washington," he said.33

Days later more than fifty thousand people, many of them in their

twenties and early thirties, rallied across the U. S. capital. Even at that

point 350. org still considered it "an incredible long shot" that Obama

would reject the pipeline, Allyse explained. "But it was an impossible

battle that thousands and thousands of our supporters cared deeply

about. "

Many progressive commentators couldn't understand why. To most

media and policy people-and I'll admit that for a time I shared their

concerns-Keystone XL was just a pipeline. If it was rejected, others

would surely be built. Weren't there better things to get people riled up

over? More potentially effective things, like an economy-wide tax on

America's carbon emissions? "Greens are wrong to make their political

stand on the Keystone pipeline," Time's Bryan Walsh argued. 34 The

New York Times's Andrew Revkin deemed it "an unnecessary issue"

that let conservatives misrepresent progressives as "anti-jobs. " Michael

Levi from the Council on Foreign Relations argued that fighting

Keystone XL was polarizing U.S. politics to the point where Congress

would never pass new climate policies. 35

To 350.org they were all missing the point. Critics like Walsh and

Revkin and Levi were focused on the national implications of a piece

of steel, but the people fighting Keystone XL saw it in global terms.

To them, the pipeline represented a political and economic system that

had no regard for the planet. "It was symbolic of a larger story," Allyse

said. The only way they were going to defeat Keystone XL was to

convince Obama this larger story was legitimate. So far they hadn't

been successful. In March 2012 the president had invoked national secu­

rity to approve the bottom half of Keystone XL-from Oklahoma to

Texas. "We need as much [ oil] as possible," Obama said.36 But a year

later, after winning reelection, he signaled that he was coming around

to 350. org's view. "The pipeline's impact on our climate will be abso­

lutely critical" to deciding if it gets built, he said.

"That was a turning point," Henn argued. "That said to us, okay,

we're on our turf here. It isn't a debate about jobs, about the American

economy, about energy independence-it's about climate change."37

78

Citizens of Planet Earth 79

Keystone XL's youngest opponents were convinced they could win

the debate. In March 2014 more than twelve hundred college students

and recent grads gathered in Washington, D. C., for a protest march

named XL Dissent. The Nation later remarked on the "sheer size,

intensity, and noise" of their march from Georgetown University to the

White House, where nearly four hundred of them were arrested. "The

inaction on the part of Obama and the system in general is what's

making [this] necessary," explained Tufts University junior Evan Bell. 3 8

Phil helped train some of the leaders but wasn't directly involved.

"Young people really took it to the next level," he said. "They felt very

strongly like their lives were going to be on the line because of Keystone."

Since 350.org joined the fight in 2orr, more than seven hundred anti­

pipeline protests had taken place across the United States. By 2015 it

was clear they were having an impact. Obama was sharing his skepti­

cism about Keystone XL openly. At one point he referred to tar sands

oil as "extraordinarily dirty." But nothing could have prepared Phil and

Allyse and everyone else at 350.org for what happened on November 7.

Standing at a podium inside the White House, Obama announced he

was officially rejecting the pipeline. Approving it, he said, would under­

mine America's "global leadership" on climate change. 39

"I cried so many times that day," Allyse Heartwell recalled. "To actu­

ally see that win happen felt extraordinary and hopeful. " "It was huge,"

Phil said. "It basically said that even though the game is rigged, even

though the fossil fuel companies can outspend us, we can still beat

them. " Obama no longer viewed Keystone XL as just a piece of steel.

He saw it the way that seven recent college grads and their adviser

wanted him to back in 2orr: as an opportunity to reject the legitimacy

of fossil fuels.

Tms WAS A WORST-CASE scenario for the fossil fuel industry. It was bad

enough to lose a potentially lucrative export route from Canada's tar

sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. But by rejecting Keystone XL, Obama

had revealed a vulnerability that the industry had tried to conceal for

years. I was first clued into it when I visited Washington, D.C., one chilly

80 ARE WE SCREWED?

February to meet and interview the oil lobbyists trying to persuade the

Obama administration to approve Keystone X L . What I learned was

that it's in the fossil fuel industry's best interest to debate the future in

the narrowest possible national terms. To the lobbyists I interviewed,

Keystone XL was merely a steel pipe-one that would create thousands

of j obs, reduce America's reliance on foreign oil, and have little impact

on U.S. carbon emissions. The last thing those lobbyists wanted was to

debate Keystone XL on the global terms set out by 3 50.org. As

TransCanada's CEO Russ Girling would later acknowledge, "We were 0ill prepared for what ensued. "4

When I arrived in Washington that February, Canada was exporting

more than r . 2 million barrels of oil per day to the United States and had

plans to nearly triple that amount by 2020. Canada was by far America's

largest supplier of foreign oil. But up in the tar sands province of

Alberta where that oil was produced, people were unsure how long this

lucrative relationship would last. During the run-up to the 2008 elec­

tion, Obama's top energy adviser, Jason Grumet, had declared that

carbon emissions from the tar sands were " unacceptably high. " " If the

only way to produce those resources would be at a significant penalty to

climate change," he explained, "then we don't believe those resources

are . . . going to play a growing role in the long term future. "41

For the eight years that George W. Bush was president, tar sands oil

from Canada had been an easy sell. It powered the U.S. economy. It cut

reliance on the Middle East. It created j obs. By the narrow terms of

national interest there was little to debate. But now Barack Obama was

threatening to widen those terms. By evaluating the climate impact of

the tar sands, he was proposing to make them global. That was not a

debate that producers of the world's most polluting oil wanted to have.

"As long as George Bush was the president, [the tar sands] had a certain

umbrella, had a certain protection," one Canadian politician fretted in

2009. "It was clear [then that] the United States was not going to impose

any legislative or regulatory changes that would harm our operations

and our export of oil from Athabasca tar sands. But that has changed."42

If the tar sands industry wanted to keep selling millions of barrels of

oil to the United States, it had to persuade American decision makers to

Citizens of Planet Earth 8r

think nationally instead of globally-just as they had under George W.

Bush. In Washington, D. C., I arranged to meet Paul Frazer, one of the

high-powered lobbyists hired by Alberta's provincial government to do

the job. I thumbed through a copy of the New Yorker as I waited in the

spartan front lobby of his downtown office. Then Frazer burst into

the room with a firm handshake and a smile. "Hello! How are you?" he

exclaimed. His hair was parted down the middle, and he was wearing

black and white polka-dot suspenders, a yellow tie, and impossibly

shiny shoes. It was the outfit of a professional charmer.

His job was to convince senators, energy officials, and other key

policy makers in the U.S. capital that the climate change impact of tar

sands production was none of their concern. During our half-hour chat,

he provided several versions of the pitch he used. Carbon emissions in

Canada were a challenge, he admitted, but companies like Exxon were

doing their best to lower them. "Canada can chew gum and walk at the

same time," he said. Having brushed off those concerns, Frazer quickly

pivoted to the jobs, prosperity, and security the U.S. gains from having a

big source of oil next door. Frazer was so confident in his approach that

when fifty Democratic members of Congress wrote a letter in 2010

warning about the "climate change implications" of the Keystone XL

pipeline, Frazer told his employer back in Alberta to relax. "I said,

'Take a breath, this isn't going anywhere,"' he said. "'It's not like the

sky is falling. "'43

In retrospect, the sky was beginning to fall-at least for Keystone

XL. After Frazer and I said our goodbyes, and as I stood waiting for the

elevator to take me down to street level, it dawned on me that money

and charm can hide the truth for only so long. For a year after the

Democrats' 2010 letter, lobbyists like Frazer continued their PR offen­

sive as if nothing happened. "The message in Washington has been that

there are no problems with the oil sands industry at all," an environ­

mentalist explained to me.44 By the summer of 2ou that message was

becoming much harder to defend. First came Hansen's prediction that

Keystone XL would be "game over" for the climate, and then 35 0.org's

two- week protest outside the White House.

Few people felt the impact more than the CEO of TransCanada.

82 ARE WE SCREWED?

When Russ Girling took his job in 2010, he assumed that most

Americans were concerned only about their national interest-that they

would easily overlook the tar sands industry's soaring emissions to gain

the four thousand construction jobs and millions of barrels of oil that

the Keystone XL pipeline would provide. "My job, as I expected when I

came in, would be pretty much ninety-nine percent focused on running

the business," Girling said. He was wildly mistaken. Within a few years

he found himself trapped in a global debate about the carbon impact of

tar sands. " Girling figures he spends half his time trying to assure skep­

tics that pipelines proposed to carry oil-sands crude, known also as

bitumen, won't destroy the planet," read a Bloomberg profile of the

CEO.45

Among the skeptics Girling had to assure was his own mother. One

of her favorite actors was Robert Redford, who put out a video

describing tar sands as " the dirtiest oil on the planet." She asked her son

whether that was true. No, Mom, Girling attempted to explain, I'm not

going to " blow up the planet. " Another personal affront came in 2014,

when Neil Young-whose music Girling described as " really, really

good"-toured Canada criticizing the tar sands and Keystone XL. One

colleague later explained that " I'm not sure I've ever seen Russ lose his

cool." But the TransCanada CEO, who earned over $8 million in 201 2 ,

admitted that the tar sands opposition was getting t o him. "These 6 things grind on you 24/7, " he said.4

As opposition to Keystone XL became louder and more sustained,

Washington's fossil fuel lobbyists found it harder to dismiss their indus­

t�y's impact on climate change. So they added another argument to

their repertoire. The bluntest and most forceful version of it I heard

came from Jane Moffat, executive director of the Canadian-American

Business Council, a cross-border trade group with strong ties to

Washington's diplomatic community. Its members include ExxonMobil,

ConocoPhillips, and Shell. Moffat and I met in an office overlooking K

Street, which is to lobbying what Wall Street is to finance.

Like Frazer, Jane Moffat radiated charm and energy. "So great to

meet you!" she said upon my arrival. But she lacked some of his smooth­

talking veneer. When I asked her about the green groups raising concerns

Citizens of Planet Earth

about Keystone XL, her reply was swift and dismissive: "They just

scream on the paper about a bunch of stuff that isn't even true. I don't

think anybody takes them seriously. " I countered that people seemed to

be taking their concerns more seriously all the time. She quickly pivoted.

"We're not getting off fossil fuels in the next thirty to fifty years,

are we?" she asked. "We're not shutting down the pipes tomorrow." To

her, the idea of shifting off oil was " nai:ve." And once policy makers had

accepted her version of the status quo, she was certain they'd see

Keystone XL as little more than a steel pipe. "The pipeline's only really

about this big," she said, making a circle shape with her arms. "It's not

that big. "47

As I left Moffat's office, the gesture stayed in my mind. She wanted to

shrink the terms of the Keystone XL debate to the space between her

arms. But for the tens of thousands of people whom groups like 350.org

had rallied against the pipeline, those terms were as large as the Planet

Earth. They weren't protesting a piece of steel. "The question now is

whether we continue down the path toward cataclysm or make a bold

break towards a brighter future," wrote Conor Kennedy, the eighteen­

year-old son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., before being arrested outside the

White House in 2014. 8 4 By then the fight against Keystone XL had

become a referendum on the legitimacy of a status quo that threatens

the planet-along with the survival of an entire generation.

The fossil fuel industry knew it represented that status quo. But its

lobbyists had prepared a seemingly convincing response to people like

Conor-they denied that they were the ones perpetuating it. The

clearest articulation of this argument was made to me by Cindy Schild,

a spokesperson for the most powerful fossil fuel lobby group in the

U nited States, the American Petroleum Institute. I met her inside the

institute's hulking Washington headquarters, which I reached by

pressing an elevator button marked ''APL" In 2oro its members had

spent $146 million lobbying Congress. They played a key role in killing

the climate laws that would have pushed America away from oil and

gas. But to Schild, the true blame for climate change rests with regular

people-not the corporations she represented. "We certainly don't have

consumers who are willing to conserve," Schild said. "That doesn't

83

ARE WE SCREWED ?

seem to happen. "49 She saw this as the main flaw in our system. Every

day people across the world demanded oil and gas. And until they cut

back, projects like Keystone XL would provide it.

When Obama officially rejected the pipeline in 201 5, he in effect

called bullshit on Schild's argument, along with the others I had heard

from Washington lobbyists. In the wake of his decision, the CEO of

TransCanada declared that "rhetoric won out over reason." 0 5 What

actually won out was a new generation's worldview. It was the idea that

our identities don't map neatly onto the countries where we were born.

That in an era when our political and economic system literally

threatens human survival, we need to think beyond national borders.

Phil Aroneanu and Allyse Heartwell and 3 50 . org didn't invent this

global identity. But they provided a powerful outlet for the anxiety it

created, then aimed it against a visible symbol of our status quo. Their

ability to defeat Keystone XL revealed that the corporate power under­

pinning it was more fragile than previously thought.

It was the last victory that Phil would celebrate at 3 50.org. In early

201 6 he announced on his blog he was leaving the group. " We've built

an incredibly powerful global climate movement that is unstoppable,

and for that I (and future generations) will be forever grateful," he

wroteY But it'd been nearly a decade since he cofounded the group.

He was in his early thirties. He wanted to explore new things. One

area that excited him was electoral politics. The youth-led social move­

ment that 3 5 0 . org had helped build was now wielding real power. To be

truly effective, though, it had to do more than just get pipelines

rejected-a fact made painfully clear when Donald Trump revived

Keystone XL in early 2017. " We need to learn how to unelect people

and elect people, " Phil told me. "I'm hoping to spend time figuring out

how to do that." In fact, a movement of young people in Canada had

already taken that step. And as I'll explain in Chapter 4, what they

achieved was globally significant.

84

Notes

50 Nicholas Ellan, "Yes, It's Okay To Talk about Climate Change Right

Now, " Nicholasellan.ca, May 4, 2016, http://www.nicholasellan.caho16/

05/o�yes-its-okay-to-talk-about-climate-change-right-now/.

5 1 Holthaus, "We Need t o Talk."

52 Elizabeth Kolbert, "Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change,"

New Yorker, May 5, 2016, accessed August 9, 2016, http://www

.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/fort-mcmurray-and-the-fires-of-climate­

change.

3 . CITIZENS OF PLANET EARTH

1 Phil Aroneanu, interview by author, February 17, 2016. All quotations

from Aroneanu come from this interview unless otherwise cited.

2 Allyse Heartwell, interview by author, March 1 8 , 2016. All quotations

from Allyse come from this interview unless otherwise cited.

3 Katharine Mieszkowski, "The Oil Is Going, the Oil Is Going!" Salon,

March 22, 2006, http://www.salon.com/20o6/o3h2/peakoil/.

4 Allyse Heartwell, "Things to Lose," aheartwell.blogspot.ca, June 30, 20 1 3 ,

http://aheartwell.blogspot.ca/ 201 3/ 06/things-to-lose.html.

5 Charlene Porter, "Young U.S. Adults Bring New World View to National

Problems," Philadelphia News, September 27, 201 3 , http://www

. zogbyanalytics.com/news/335-young-u-s-adults-bring-new-world-view-to­

national-problems.

6 Pew Research Center, "Millennials in Adulthood," Pew Social Trends,

March 7, 2014, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/201�03/07/millennials­

in-adulthood/.

7 Haley Cohen and Howard Dean, "The First Global Generation,"

Huffington Post, April 2, 201 3 , http ://www.huffingtonpost.com/haley­

cohen/global-generation_b_3oooo6 5 .html ?utm_hp_ref=tw.

8 Gayle Macdonald, "Youth Anxiety on the Rise Amid Changing Climate,"

Globe and Mail, May 1, 2014, http ://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/

health - a n d - fitness/heal th/you th-anxiety-on-the-rise-amid-changing­

climate/article1 8 372258/.

9 BrainP O P, "Kids Fear Global Warming More than Terrorism, Car Crashes,

and Cancer, According to National Earth Day Survey," PRNewswire,

April2o,2007,http ://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kids-fear-global-

258

N otes 259

warming-more-than-terroris m-car-crashes-and-cancer-according-to­

national-earth-day-survey-5 8684647.html.

ro John Zogby, "Enter the First Globals," Forbes, July I, 2or 3 , http://www

. zogbyanalytics.com/ news/ 3 I 2-enter-the-first-glo bals.

II Lynn Vavreck, "Younger Americans Are Less Patriotic. At Least, in Some

Ways," New York Times,July 4, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/zo14/o7/o5/

upshot/younger-americans-are-less-patriotic-at-least-in-some-ways.html.

r2 Bruce Stokes, Richard Wike, and Jill Carle, "Global Concern about

Climate Change, Broad Support for Limiting Emissions," Pew Research

Center, November 5, 2or 5 .

I 3 Geoff Dembicki, "Gulf Disaster Raises Alarms about Alberta to Texas

Pipeline, " Tyee, June 2r, 2010, http://thetyee.ca/Newshoro/o6h r/Alberta

To TexasPi peline/.

r4 Geoff Dembicki, "On Both Sides of Border, Indigenous Groups Oppose

Keystone," Tyee, October 5, 2ou, http://thetyee.ca/Newshou/ro/05/

Keystone-Indigenous-Opposition/.

I5 Ibid.

I6 Ibid.

I7 Ibid.

r 8 Ibid.

r9 Matthew Nisbet, "Nature's Prophet: Bill McKibben as Journalist, Public

Intellectual and Activist," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and

Public Policy, March 2or3, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/matthewnisbet/

files/d-78-nisben.pdf.

20 Ibid.

2r Will Bates, "24 Hours That Shifted the World," 350.org, October 25, 2or2,

http://3 50.org/24-hours-shifted-world/.

22 Brittney Martin, ''Al Gore: 2or5 Paris Conference Will Spur Global

Climate Change Policies, " Dallas Morning News, March r4, 20r 5 , http://

trail blazers blog. dallasnews.com/ 20 I 5 Io 3/ al-gore-20 I 5-paris-conference­

will-spur-glo bal-climate-change-policies.html/.

23 Evan Mackinder, "Pro-Environment Groups Outmatched, Outspent in

Battle Over Climate Change Legislation," OpenSecrets, August 2 3 , 2010,

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2o ro/o8/pro-environment-groups-were­

outmatc/.

24 Nisbet, "Nature's Prophet."

25 James Hansen, "Silence Is Deadly, " June 3, 2ou, http://www.columbia

.edu/-j eh r/mailings/ 2or r/ 2or 1060 3_SilencelsDeadly. pdf.

260 No tes

26 Andrew Leach, "On the Potential for Oilsands to Add 2ooppm of C O 2 to

the Atmosphere," Rescuing the Frog, June 4, 20I I , http://andrewleach. ca/

oilsands/on-the-potential-fo r-oilsands-to-add-2ooppm-of-co2-to-the­

atmosphere/.

27 Hansen, "Silence Is Deadly. "

28 Maude Barlow et al., "Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience

to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline," Common Dreams, June 23, 20I I ,

http://www.commondreams.org/views/ 201 1/06h 3/environmental-leaders-call­

civil-diso bedience-stop-keystone-xl-pipeline.

29 Timothy Gardner, "U.S. Green Groups Write Obama to Oppose Oil

Pipeline," Reuters, August 24, 20I I , http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa­

keystone-protest-idUS TRE77N8DF2o1 ro824.

30 Ben Adler, "The Inside Story of How the Keystone Fight Was Won," Grist,

November 6, 201 5 , http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-inside-story-of-how­

the-keystone-figh t-was-won/.

3 1 Darren Samuelsohn and Darren Goode, "Why G O P Embraced Keystone,"

Politico, December 20, 20I I , http://www.politico.com/storyh0I I/1 2/why­

gop-embraced-keystone-o7o722.

32 Adler, "Inside Story. "

3 3 David Roberts, "A Chat with the Sierra Club's Michael Brune about Civil

Disobedience," Grist, January 28, 201 3 , http://grist.org/climate-energy/

a-chat-with-the-sierra-clubs-michael-brune-about-civil-disobedience/.

3 4 Bryan Walsh, "Greens Are Justifiably Mad about the Oil Sands Pipeline.

But Sitting Out 2012 Elections Would Be Insane," Time, August 26, 20I I ,

http://science.time.com/20 1 1/08/26/greens-are-justifiably-mad-about-the-oil­

sands-pipeline-but-sitting-out-2012-elections-would-be-insane/.

3 5 David Roberts, "The Virtues of Being Unreasonable on Keystone," Grist,

February 19, 201 3 , http://grist. org/climate-energy/the-virtues-of-being­

unreasonable-on-keystone/.

3 6 Bryan Walsh, " Obama's Energy Strategy: All of t h e Above-and a L o t o f

Oil," Time, March 22, 2012, http://science.time.comho12/o3/22/obamas­

energy-stra tegy-all-of-the-above-and-a-lot-of-oil/.

37 Adler, "Inside Story. "

38 Wen Stephenson, "Nearly 400 Arrested at XL Dissent- the Largest White

House Civil Disobedience Action in a Generation," Nation, March 7,

2014,https://www.thenation.com/ article/nearly-400-arrested-xl-dissent-largest­

whi te-house-civil-disobedience-action-genera ti/.

Notes 26I

39 Joel Gehrke, "Obama Kills Keystone Pipeline to Preserve America's

'Global Leadership' on Climate Change," National Review, November 6,

2015 ,http ://www.nationalreview.com/ article/ 426706/ symbolic-a bama-kills­

keystone-act-glo bal-leadershi p-j oel-gehrke.

40 Rebecca Penty, "How a C E O Reacts When Robert Redford Pegs Him a

Villain," Bloomberg, February 19, 2002, http://www.bloomberg.com/

news/ arti des/ 20 14-02- 19/how-a -ceo- reacts-when -ro ber t-redford-pegs­

him-a -villain.

41 Geoff Dembicki, "Alberta's Hired Gun in Washington," Tyee, March 29,

201 1 , http://thetyee.ca/Newsho1 1/o3h9/AlbertasHiredGun/.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Geoff Dembicki, " Climate Group Says Washington's Oil Sands War Is

'David vs. Goliath,"' Tyee, March 28, 20n , http://thetyee.ca/Newshor r/

03/ 28/DavidV sGoliath/.

45 Penty, "How a CEO Reacts. "

4 6 Ibid.

47 Geoff Dembicki, "War Cry of the Oil Sands Lobby: 'Us Against the

World,"' Tyee, March 30, 20n , http://thetyee.ca/Newshor r/03/30/Us

AgainstThe World/.

48 Stefanie Spear, "Breaking: 400 Youths Arrested at White House Protesting

Keystone XL Pipeline," EcoWatch, March 2, 2014, http://www.ecowatch

. com/breaking-400-youths-arrested-at-white-house-protesting-keystone­

xl-pip-1 8 8 1 8699 39.html.

49 Geoff Dembicki, "Oil Sands Lobbying Without End, Vows American

Petroleum Institute," Tyee, April 6, 20n , http://thetyee. ca/Newshor r/

0�06/LobbyingWithoutEnds/.

50 Canadian Press, "TransCanada CEO Russ Girling: 'Rhetoric Won Out

Over Reason,'" Maclean 's, November 6, 201 5 , http://www.macleans

.ca/politics/ottawa/transcanada-ceo-russ-girling-rhetoric-won-out-over­

reason/.

5 1 Phil Aroneanu, "Moving on From 350.org . . . " blog.philaroneanu.com, 2016,

accessed August ro, 2016, http://blog.philaroneanu.com/post/134882029226/

moving-on-from-35oorg.