Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
On some long-distant day when some as-yet-unborn historian sits down to write the story of climate change—the story of the greatest crisis humans ever faced—it’s possible that they’ll choose an anecdote from this past week as a way into the story. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, it understandably didn’t get much notice, but JPMorgan Chase announced on Friday that Lee Raymond will no longer serve as the lead independent director of the world’s largest lender to the fossil-fuel industry.
I’ve told the backstory at much greater length here, but, briefly: Raymond was a key Exxon executive from the nineteen-eighties onward—the years when the company was one of the most profitable in the world. (If you want a full account, read Steve Coll’s majestic “Private Empire.”) Those were also the years when Exxon’s scientists discovered—before it was publicly an issue—that climate change was real and dangerous, and when Exxon’s executives decided to join with others in the industry to cover up that truth. Raymond gave the single most audacious speech of the era, telling a World Petroleum Congress audience in 1997, on the eve of the Kyoto climate talks, that the planet was cooling, and that it made no difference if we acted then or waited a quarter century.
Raymond retired from Exxon as C.E.O., in 2005, having earned a reported six hundred and eighty-six million dollars; in his retirement, his job was to help run the board at Chase. Advocates have urged Chase to remove him as lead independent director because of his climate-denying past, and last month the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, joined the fight, pledging to vote the city pension fund’s Exxon shares against Raymond; he persuaded the New York State comptroller and the Pennsylvania state treasurer, in turn, to join him. One can only speculate, but this clearly put pressure on giant investors such as BlackRock, who have been making climate-friendly noises; in any event, as the Financial Times reported, Chase has removed Raymond from his position, though he remains on the board.
The effect is probably practical and definitely symbolic—Raymond’s removal ratifies the notion that, after a decade of relentless campaigning by activists, Big Oil is no longer quite as big. It’s true that, in the same week, much of the industry got the bailout that it had been asking for from Washington. But that was scant cause for celebration: the International Energy Agency released new numbers, predicting that global oil demand would drop nine per cent this year. As economists at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis pointed out, the fossil-fuel sector really faces long-term solvency problems, not just short-term liquidity woes. Demand growth had been slowing in recent years, as regulatory pressure began to mount, as a result of all that activism, and as renewable energy got cheaper. Even before COVID-19 really bit, Exxon had been “humbled,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek, becoming a “mediocre” company. Now it seems entirely likely that we have seen peak oil demand, a moment that the oil companies had predicted wouldn’t come for decades. Here’s the energy analyst Kingsmill Bond’s precis: “If demand for fossil fuels bounces back in 2021 by half the amount it fell in 2020, and grows at 0.5% a year, it would take 8 years to get back to where the industry started. And in the meantime, the renewable energy revolution has not stopped.”
This process will accelerate in places where governments rebuild their economies with Green New Deals, and lag in places where a move back to private cars combines with cheap gas prices to keep the S.U.V. era alive a little longer. But the key point is that, as the industry flags, so will its political power. “The ability of the industry to dictate to governments will weaken,” Bond said, “and the capacity of incumbents to frustrate the growth of renewables will reduce.” Exit Lee Raymond, stage right.
Passing the Mic
Vanessa Hauc took over in March as the anchor of Telemundo’s weekend newscast, but she didn’t give up her other role, leading the Spanish-language network’s environmental-investigative unit for its remarkable program “Planeta Tierra.” She’s also notable for the fact that, in February, she was the first climate journalist chosen to ask questions at a Presidential debate.
Every poll shows that Latinx Americans are the group most concerned about climate change in the country—why?
The climate emergency is affecting everyone on the planet, but not equally. It disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable populations—women, children, and minorities, among them Latinos. Here in the U.S., half of our community lives in the twenty-five most polluted cities in the country, and in neighborhoods that are close to factories and refineries with high levels of pollution. Latino children are forty per cent more likely to die from asthma than non-Latino white children. Our communities work in sectors that are directly impacted by heat waves and extreme-weather events, like agriculture, construction, and landscaping. For us, the climate emergency is a reality affecting not only where we live but where we work. Still, I see my community as a powerful force of change. We care deeply about the environment. Our connection with nature is ancestral—it’s in our DNA. I still remember my trips to the market with my grandmother, in a small town in Colombia, where all the fruits and vegetables were organic and sold to us by local farmers. I remember she didn’t use a plastic bag but a costal, a bag made of dry leaves to carry practically anything. Many of my dresses first belonged to my sisters. I then passed them on to my cousins in Peru. We walked when we could, we shared rides, and food was the center of family gatherings. We feasted around my grandmother’s delicious recipes from Peru.
Many Latino families are like that. We recycle by nature. We believe in conservation, and no food will go to waste in our homes. We are a community that is ready to act on the climate emergency and that wants to be a part of the solution. The challenge we face is to insure that those communities have a platform and the necessary resources and information to work on solutions and live sustainable lives.
What are the other issues that really draw a strong response on “Planeta Tierra”?
“Planeta Tierra” shines a light on the greatest challenges we are facing today, from plastic pollution to the loss of biodiversity and deforestation. But we frame our stories on solutions. We look for the stories of people who are making a difference. For example, entrepreneurs who are rethinking their way of doing business and creating more sustainable products. We interviewed a fashion designer in Mexico who is creating leather from the leaves of nopal, a traditional Mexican vegetable. We also ran a story about a factory that is producing plastic out of avocado seeds. We recently highlighted the work of women who are redesigning our food systems to make it healthy for us and for the planet, too. The story of our changing planet can feel overwhelming. Many of us have felt paralyzed in front of the magnitude of the challenge it presents. Therefore, as a journalist, my job is to inform my viewers about our changing climate in the most rigorous and scientific way. But, as an environmentalist, my job is also to give them hope, to empower them to be part of the solution, to offer the tools and information they need to really be agents of change.
Climate School
If there is one essay from the weeks of pandemic I wish I could make everyone read, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s offering on The New Yorker’s Web site. No novelist has engaged as long or as successfully with the climate crisis. (Anyone who loves Gotham should immediately buy Robinson’s “New York 2140.”) Speaking of our quarantine, he writes that “we realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters.” But, he continues, thanks to global warming “we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants.”
It’s true that coal, oil, and gas use have fallen as we locked down, but the interesting thing may be that they’ve fallen so little. As the Grist reporter Shannon Osaka points out, even with economies at an unprecedented idle, emissions are only slated to fall by five or six per cent. The NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt explains: “People focus way, way too much on people’s personal carbon footprints … without really dealing with the structural things that cause carbon dioxide levels to go up.” Every life, even in quarantine, uses lots of energy for light and heat. And if you’re binge-watching at all hours? According to one U.K. study, “The energy generated from 80 million views of the thriller Birdbox is the equivalent of driving over 146 million miles and emitting over 66 million kg of CO2.”
Thirty-two environmental organizations signed a letter to the asset-management firm BlackRock asking that it divest its holdings in Drax, which operates the biggest wood-burning power plant in the U.K. Rita Frost, a spokeswoman for the Dogwood Alliance in the southeastern U.S., where much of that wood is cut, said, “We witness the social and environmental impacts of the biomass industry first hand. If BlackRock is classifying this as sustainable investment, we urge them to think again.”
Here’s a really illuminating piece on the rocky but still remarkable progress that Germany has been making toward renewable power. Dan Gearino really explains what may be the most complex and hopeful energy story on the planet.
Scoreboard
Solar power just keeps getting cheaper, especially if you have a large, hot desert to work with: the latest bids for a giant array in Abu Dhabi show the price continuing to drop toward an almost unbelievable one cent per kilowatt-hour.
A new study of tree mortality last month concluded: “forests are in big trouble if global warming continues at the present pace. Most trees alive today won’t be able to survive in the climate expected in 40 years,” because “the negative impacts of warming and drying” are already outpacing any fertilizing effect from extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “We really need to be able to hear these poor trees scream,” an Australian researcher said. “These are living things that are suffering. We need to listen to them.”
Warming Up
On the list of people who have willingly paid a price for their climate activism, few rank much higher than Tim DeChristopher. He was sentenced to two years in federal custody, for falsely bidding on Utah oil and gas leases as a protest. I will never forget visiting him in a high-desert prison on the California/Nevada line. He sent along this song, “Brother,” by the Los Angeles folk rockers Lord Huron. If it works for him, it’s probably useful.
