May 17, 2024
Source: Counterpunch
Image by Greenpeace Russia, Creative Commons 3.0
Prologue
On May 10, 2024, my friend Jay Jones, emeritus professor of biology at La Verne University, invited me to see a documentary he was presenting to his students and colleagues. The documentary, The Oil Machine, was done in 2022 by BBC. It is one of the best films I have watched on the origins of climate change. That is, the film explains the massive technologies necessary to extract oil from dangerous water like those of the North Sea. The film shows how oil companies drill the seas for petroleum. They then sell petroleum to the business and population of the planet, thus triggering the chaos and emergency of a warming planet.
History of oil
Petroleum companies knew of the planetary climate warming effects of the burning of their product. Martin Hoffert, professor emeritus, New York University, said to FRONTLINE that while working for NASA in the mid-1970s, scientists figured out that the atmosphere of the planet Venus was pure carbon dioxide. This made the planet very hot. The temperature of its atmosphere, according to the latest science, is more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit and capable of melting lead. “It was a kind of unified idea,” Hoffert said, “in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that greenhouse gas warming was caused by high concentrations of carbon dioxide. At the same time, some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere. And we have seen this curve of increasing carbon dioxide—it’s become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem—where CO2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year. And we can attribute that to greenhouse gases, primarily fossil fuel burning.”
Not merely NASA scientists but Exxon Mobil scientists agreed that burning fossil fuels was bad for the climate of the planet. One of the Exxon scientists, Edward Garvey, said to FRONTLINE that “If we didn’t reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion, we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future…. we knew that changes were going to be necessary. But I think Exxon was afraid we would change too fast. You just can’t shut off the fossil fuels because all of society depends on… [them].”
Exxon Mobil abandoned its research on climate change. It decided to keep making money and ignore the deadly consequences of manufacturing heat for the planet. It has been raising doubts on the cause and effect connecting fossil fuels and climate change. It sent a written message to FRONTLINE, saying: “Exxon Mobil has never had any unique or superior knowledge about climate science, let alone any that was unavailable to policymakers or the public.”
Despite the deceptions of Exxon Mobil, the idea of global warming was catching up with American politics. In a 1988 Senate hearing, James Hanson, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, left no doubt that burning fossil fuels harmed the planet. “I would like to draw three main conclusions,” he said to the Senators. “Number one, the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
Hansen confirmed the early scientific finding from the mid-1970s that human actions, namely the burning of fossil fuels, cause higher temperatures. So, climate change was anthropogenic. The 2022 BBC documentary was more powerful evidence that oil drilling was a perpetual political and technological process of planetary destruction. I was astonished by the gigantic machinery put to work for oil extraction. Humans looked like insects invading a nest through large cylindrical tubes. Yet these engineers are capable of establishing tiny metal stations in the middle of the vast and angry seas. They send their sophisticated drills and pipes to the buried oil, where they suck it to fill their infinite barrels. The barrels of oil sell and their oil burns to power factories producing goods and electricity as well as power countless machines: cars, trucks, busses for civilians and the military, leaf blowers, tractors, harvesters, ships, ferry boats, fishing boats, yachts, civilian airplanes and warplanes, helicopters, tanks, submarines, warships, etc.
Greenhouse gases
The burning of petroleum gives off greenhouse gases like heat-catching carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases capture and contain solar heat, which otherwise would have escaped into space. Greenhouse gases slowly release the energy they captured from the Sun, thus increasing global temperature with all that entails. Rising temperatures unsettle ecosystems and societies with dire consequences: flooding, rising sea levels, heat waves through land and seas, melting of ice, and droughts. These violent weather phenomena threaten life and civilization. For example, Bangladesh and its more than 170 million people find themselves almost under water.
Millions of human beings will become environmental refugees. The Oil Machine documentary warned that about 250 million refugees will be moving from the tropics to northern countries. Where are these refugees supposed to go for shelter and food and work?
Wildlife faces extinction. Humans have taken over most of the lands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, seas and mountains and coasts that housed and fed birds, fish, mammals, insects, and amphibians. Rising global temperatures multiply the human and natural enemies of wildlife and increases its rate of disappearance forever.
The Oil Machine did not say much about the unpleasant ecological effects of oil drilling, though looking at the expressionless face of a young boy looking into nothingness said it all.
Why should our youth come to grips with the monstrous nemesis irresponsible old people, billionaires, and corporations built? And what can a young person do — in 2024? Why should millions of innocent young boys and girls the world over have to think of heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods and fires? They never had a chance to shape the future, exactly like facing instant death from a potential explosion of a nuclear weapon. These facts drop us from civilization to another dark age.
What are we doing in the next 5 years?
One of the scientists interviewed for The Oil Machine was Sir David King, UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, 2000–2007. “I believe,” he said, “that what we do over the next five years will determine the future of humanity for the next millennium.” King is probably right, though he did not explain what it was necessary to be done in the next 5 years. Climatologists have warned repeatedly we must start by eliminating 50 percent of the fossil fuels no later that 2030. The global climate forum in Paris, in 2015, urged governments to get rid of 50 percent of their fossil fuels by 2030. Yet almost no government has kept that promise. In fact, oil-rich countries and giant oil companies are expanding their drilling. Such irresponsible behavior is unlikely to keep the global temperature bellow 1.50 Celsius above the temperature of the pre-industrial age of mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the largest polluters, China, the US, India, Russia, and the EU countries, have not promised to cut their greenhouse gases by 50 percent before 2030. And the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine are rapidly increasing the fossil fuel footprint on the planet. Thus, if the next five years continue to be engulfed by the lies of the fossil fuel industry, denying climate change, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the next millennium will be a millennium of darkness and possible human extinction.
The oil octopus
The Oil Machine directed the attention of the viewer to the power, hubris, and giantism of the petroleum conglomerate. At the same time, it left no doubt how pervasive petroleum has become in human lives, from our reliance on petrochemicals (pesticides and synthetic fertilizers) for food production; powering the armed forces; and taking the infinite forms of plastics. These immortal products are nearly everywhere; from children toys to the packaging of our food, to plastic water and soft drink bottles, to a myriad little plastic drug bottles, to plastic covers for newspapers delivered at homes, to plastic dog poop bags, etc. The list is very long.
Epilogue
Big oil is chemical and political power that threatens civilization and our Mother Earth. We need to wake up and say no more. Young and old must join hands to protest the invisible tyranny of the concentrated power of fossil fuel billionaires. They don’t belong in a democracy with claims to civilization. Violent storms, hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves are “wreaking havoc and pushing millions of Americans out of their homes each year.” Even home insurance is failing all over the country. Science is on our side, however. Astronomers see the connections between the atmosphere of the stars they study and the atmosphere of the Earth. They express grief and disappointment with rising temperatures on our planet. Raisa Estrela, a NASA astrophysicist, is heartbroken over the degradation of wildlife. She said: “We have this beautiful diversity of life that took us more than 2.5 billion years to reach.” Scientists like Raisa should join in a national and international campaign to abandon fossil fuels and move fast towards energy alternatives like the Sun and wind. Elect politicians who are committed to sustainable public electric transport for livable cities and towns. The first time in my life I travelled by bullet train was in Chine in 2019. Why is the United States not constructing bullet trains? And fill towns and cities with electric trams? Are car companies still in charge of transportation? Protected bike lanes would also diminish polluting cars in the streets. And like Singapore, expand or build new electric subways to serve all neighborhoods. Owners of conventional petroleum-powered cars and trucks who insist on driving their vehicles should pay high fines, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Install solar panels on the roofs of all homes, parking lots, and all buildings, private and public. If “public” utilities are unhappy with solar power, tell them to reform or go out of business. State and federal governments can rapidly build the carbon-free transportation and electrification infrastructure.
These measures would start a broad dialogue on the purposes of science, democracy, and life in a changing climate and world. We certainly don’t want to move the Earth on the path of planet Venus. High levels of carbon dioxide in Venus made that planet inhospitable to life. We don’t want to see the same misfortune strike planet Earth, our only home in the universe.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.
Image by Greenpeace Russia, Creative Commons 3.0
Prologue
On May 10, 2024, my friend Jay Jones, emeritus professor of biology at La Verne University, invited me to see a documentary he was presenting to his students and colleagues. The documentary, The Oil Machine, was done in 2022 by BBC. It is one of the best films I have watched on the origins of climate change. That is, the film explains the massive technologies necessary to extract oil from dangerous water like those of the North Sea. The film shows how oil companies drill the seas for petroleum. They then sell petroleum to the business and population of the planet, thus triggering the chaos and emergency of a warming planet.
History of oil
Petroleum companies knew of the planetary climate warming effects of the burning of their product. Martin Hoffert, professor emeritus, New York University, said to FRONTLINE that while working for NASA in the mid-1970s, scientists figured out that the atmosphere of the planet Venus was pure carbon dioxide. This made the planet very hot. The temperature of its atmosphere, according to the latest science, is more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit and capable of melting lead. “It was a kind of unified idea,” Hoffert said, “in the terrestrial planets of our solar system that greenhouse gas warming was caused by high concentrations of carbon dioxide. At the same time, some research scientists were making observations of carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere. And we have seen this curve of increasing carbon dioxide—it’s become a classic icon of the carbon dioxide problem—where CO2 keeps going up and up a few parts per million every year. And we can attribute that to greenhouse gases, primarily fossil fuel burning.”
Not merely NASA scientists but Exxon Mobil scientists agreed that burning fossil fuels was bad for the climate of the planet. One of the Exxon scientists, Edward Garvey, said to FRONTLINE that “If we didn’t reduce fossil fuel consumption in a significant fashion, we were going to be facing significant climate change in the future…. we knew that changes were going to be necessary. But I think Exxon was afraid we would change too fast. You just can’t shut off the fossil fuels because all of society depends on… [them].”
Exxon Mobil abandoned its research on climate change. It decided to keep making money and ignore the deadly consequences of manufacturing heat for the planet. It has been raising doubts on the cause and effect connecting fossil fuels and climate change. It sent a written message to FRONTLINE, saying: “Exxon Mobil has never had any unique or superior knowledge about climate science, let alone any that was unavailable to policymakers or the public.”
Despite the deceptions of Exxon Mobil, the idea of global warming was catching up with American politics. In a 1988 Senate hearing, James Hanson, director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, left no doubt that burning fossil fuels harmed the planet. “I would like to draw three main conclusions,” he said to the Senators. “Number one, the Earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, that the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
Hansen confirmed the early scientific finding from the mid-1970s that human actions, namely the burning of fossil fuels, cause higher temperatures. So, climate change was anthropogenic. The 2022 BBC documentary was more powerful evidence that oil drilling was a perpetual political and technological process of planetary destruction. I was astonished by the gigantic machinery put to work for oil extraction. Humans looked like insects invading a nest through large cylindrical tubes. Yet these engineers are capable of establishing tiny metal stations in the middle of the vast and angry seas. They send their sophisticated drills and pipes to the buried oil, where they suck it to fill their infinite barrels. The barrels of oil sell and their oil burns to power factories producing goods and electricity as well as power countless machines: cars, trucks, busses for civilians and the military, leaf blowers, tractors, harvesters, ships, ferry boats, fishing boats, yachts, civilian airplanes and warplanes, helicopters, tanks, submarines, warships, etc.
Greenhouse gases
The burning of petroleum gives off greenhouse gases like heat-catching carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases capture and contain solar heat, which otherwise would have escaped into space. Greenhouse gases slowly release the energy they captured from the Sun, thus increasing global temperature with all that entails. Rising temperatures unsettle ecosystems and societies with dire consequences: flooding, rising sea levels, heat waves through land and seas, melting of ice, and droughts. These violent weather phenomena threaten life and civilization. For example, Bangladesh and its more than 170 million people find themselves almost under water.
Millions of human beings will become environmental refugees. The Oil Machine documentary warned that about 250 million refugees will be moving from the tropics to northern countries. Where are these refugees supposed to go for shelter and food and work?
Wildlife faces extinction. Humans have taken over most of the lands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, seas and mountains and coasts that housed and fed birds, fish, mammals, insects, and amphibians. Rising global temperatures multiply the human and natural enemies of wildlife and increases its rate of disappearance forever.
The Oil Machine did not say much about the unpleasant ecological effects of oil drilling, though looking at the expressionless face of a young boy looking into nothingness said it all.
Why should our youth come to grips with the monstrous nemesis irresponsible old people, billionaires, and corporations built? And what can a young person do — in 2024? Why should millions of innocent young boys and girls the world over have to think of heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods and fires? They never had a chance to shape the future, exactly like facing instant death from a potential explosion of a nuclear weapon. These facts drop us from civilization to another dark age.
What are we doing in the next 5 years?
One of the scientists interviewed for The Oil Machine was Sir David King, UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, 2000–2007. “I believe,” he said, “that what we do over the next five years will determine the future of humanity for the next millennium.” King is probably right, though he did not explain what it was necessary to be done in the next 5 years. Climatologists have warned repeatedly we must start by eliminating 50 percent of the fossil fuels no later that 2030. The global climate forum in Paris, in 2015, urged governments to get rid of 50 percent of their fossil fuels by 2030. Yet almost no government has kept that promise. In fact, oil-rich countries and giant oil companies are expanding their drilling. Such irresponsible behavior is unlikely to keep the global temperature bellow 1.50 Celsius above the temperature of the pre-industrial age of mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the largest polluters, China, the US, India, Russia, and the EU countries, have not promised to cut their greenhouse gases by 50 percent before 2030. And the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine are rapidly increasing the fossil fuel footprint on the planet. Thus, if the next five years continue to be engulfed by the lies of the fossil fuel industry, denying climate change, and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the next millennium will be a millennium of darkness and possible human extinction.
The oil octopus
The Oil Machine directed the attention of the viewer to the power, hubris, and giantism of the petroleum conglomerate. At the same time, it left no doubt how pervasive petroleum has become in human lives, from our reliance on petrochemicals (pesticides and synthetic fertilizers) for food production; powering the armed forces; and taking the infinite forms of plastics. These immortal products are nearly everywhere; from children toys to the packaging of our food, to plastic water and soft drink bottles, to a myriad little plastic drug bottles, to plastic covers for newspapers delivered at homes, to plastic dog poop bags, etc. The list is very long.
Epilogue
Big oil is chemical and political power that threatens civilization and our Mother Earth. We need to wake up and say no more. Young and old must join hands to protest the invisible tyranny of the concentrated power of fossil fuel billionaires. They don’t belong in a democracy with claims to civilization. Violent storms, hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves are “wreaking havoc and pushing millions of Americans out of their homes each year.” Even home insurance is failing all over the country. Science is on our side, however. Astronomers see the connections between the atmosphere of the stars they study and the atmosphere of the Earth. They express grief and disappointment with rising temperatures on our planet. Raisa Estrela, a NASA astrophysicist, is heartbroken over the degradation of wildlife. She said: “We have this beautiful diversity of life that took us more than 2.5 billion years to reach.” Scientists like Raisa should join in a national and international campaign to abandon fossil fuels and move fast towards energy alternatives like the Sun and wind. Elect politicians who are committed to sustainable public electric transport for livable cities and towns. The first time in my life I travelled by bullet train was in Chine in 2019. Why is the United States not constructing bullet trains? And fill towns and cities with electric trams? Are car companies still in charge of transportation? Protected bike lanes would also diminish polluting cars in the streets. And like Singapore, expand or build new electric subways to serve all neighborhoods. Owners of conventional petroleum-powered cars and trucks who insist on driving their vehicles should pay high fines, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Install solar panels on the roofs of all homes, parking lots, and all buildings, private and public. If “public” utilities are unhappy with solar power, tell them to reform or go out of business. State and federal governments can rapidly build the carbon-free transportation and electrification infrastructure.
These measures would start a broad dialogue on the purposes of science, democracy, and life in a changing climate and world. We certainly don’t want to move the Earth on the path of planet Venus. High levels of carbon dioxide in Venus made that planet inhospitable to life. We don’t want to see the same misfortune strike planet Earth, our only home in the universe.
Evaggelos Vallianatos is a historian and environmental strategist, who worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency for 25 years. He is the author of seven books, including the latest book, The Antikythera Mechanism.
The Race to End Fossil Fuel Production
Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.
Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.
By John Feffer
May 16, 2024
Source: FPIF
Las Nueve Niñas, XR Ecuador, anti-mining groups, and indigenous activists march through Quito to the national court to demand an end to illegal gas flares in Yasuní National Park. | Image credit: @udapt_oficial
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.
Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.
Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.
Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.
One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”
Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.
Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.
“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”
One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.
But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.
These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.
The Example of Yasuní
The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.
That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.
“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”
The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”
In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.
But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.
But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.
The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”
Looking at the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.
“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”
But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”
The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.
Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.
Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.
Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.
Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.
In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”
In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.
Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.
“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.
“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.
A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.
The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”
He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”
John Feffer is the author several books including the recently published North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories). For more information about his books and articles, visit www.johnfeffer.com
Las Nueve Niñas, XR Ecuador, anti-mining groups, and indigenous activists march through Quito to the national court to demand an end to illegal gas flares in Yasuní National Park. | Image credit: @udapt_oficial
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.
Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.
Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.
Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.
One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”
Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.
Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.
“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”
One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.
But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.
These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.
The Example of Yasuní
The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.
That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.
“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”
The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”
In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.
But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.
But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.
The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”
Looking at the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.
“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”
But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”
The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.
Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.
Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.
Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.
Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.
In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”
In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.
Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.
“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.
“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.
A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.
The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”
He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”
John Feffer is the author several books including the recently published North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories). For more information about his books and articles, visit www.johnfeffer.com
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