SF Climate Rally - and so it goes

Climate scientists believe the 'next generation' oil sources, such shale and tar sands, must not become the new standard.  Therefore the planned XL Keystone pipeline, which will deliver tar sand oil from Alberta Canada all the way down to Texas, must be stopped. Otherwise it will be nearly impossible to ever hope to bend downward  the rising curve of polluting greenhouse gases. If this engineering monstrosity goes in as planned, it will signal that it is acceptable everywhere to use high carbon content tar sands and shale as a new energy sources – and as leading climate scientists James Hansen says “ If the pipeline goes in, it's games over.”  So all of the environmental groups are pulling out all stops to oppose it -  hence the big 'Climate Rallies' February 17th.

Last Sunday (2/17) I trooped into the city to attend a rally held in conjunction with the big February 17^th Climate Change event in DC.   As we arrived expensively produced heavy card stock signs were available (although if you didn't bring a stick to mount it on, you had to awkwardly hold it up by hand.) The signs said things like “Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline” and “It's Time to Cut Carbons”(of course the real activists brought their own homemade signs.) The people flooding out of the BART station for the rally were predominately gray haired, middle class Sierra Club types, or ex hippies who had settled into responsible professional lives (like me) and gotten old and gray in the process. There was a sprinkling of college kids but virtually no blacks, few if any Latinos or Asians or any of the hodgepodge of other non-white whatevers who more and more make up the Bay Area demographic. And where were all the high voltage scruffy radical Occupy movement types? Where were the rancorous pierced and tattooed X Generation skateboarders and punksters? No militant unruly Black Bloc types were in evidence, and I saw only one smiling Anonymous Guy Fawkes mask. It was mostly the upper middle class people who fund the eco groups - the organizations that send me emails every day at almost a spam volume with petitions to sign, donations to make and environmental bad news to report.  In most of the big anti-war marches I have been to the SF Tac Squad is all lined up along the way with their 2 ft long truncheons ready and waiting for an excuse to wade in and bust a few heads. This was not one the case yesterday. Only sprinkling of regular beat cops stood along the way looking bored with little to do.

So as we all arrived we were directed to parade around the the block and then funneled into the big concrete area that makes up north side of the Embarcadero Plaza. There we listened to some well meaning but  boring boiler plate and uninspiring speeches and the usual Greenesque rigmarole like Native American chanting and such. A couple of high school kids spoke as well as a SF Supervisor. There was talk about next time  calling on people to let themselves be arrested.  Unfortunately if there is no police action, it never makes the news in any meaningful way. Maybe 5000-6000 people were there, a good turnout but NOT NEARLY ENOUGH!! Hey, this isn't just another liberal/left   identity politics, anti-war, anti-US imperialism, anti Reagan/Bush/Obama lost cause campaign against the status quo. This it it!  If this issue is not taken very seriously very soon, we are all toast.

Bill McKibben of 350.ORG is behind this full court press to get across the board cooperation from the full spectrum of the environmental movement (and he has) and the hopefully eventually the entire 'the liberal/ left', and to develop something approaching a critical mass. Time is running out. Barack Obama is a Democratic Party politician but not an environmentalist. He is juggler of left center issues. Yet an important component of his base are the 'Greens.' So he can't ignore them but he can disappoint them – and has in the past.  Left to his own devices re: Keystone he would probably would have already let it sail through. The august opinion makers in the NY Times for instance have noted that even if the US doesn't let that shale oil pipeline run through the continental US, Canada will just pipe it over to their West coast and send it to China w/o the US getting a cut of the profits or the oil, and the high carbon content gases will wind up in the atmosphere anyway. So their advise: let it be built. And of course the Repubs will skewer Obama if he blocks it. Oh, the jobs lost! Oh the “energy independence'' we might have had! And besides the whole climate crisis is a monumental hoax, just a rich source of fat government grants for academic liberal Greenies! Besides most Americans above all else want cheap plentiful gasoline. Note all of this is coming to a head just as gas at the pump again is hitting in the $4.00 a gallon range. So again  the oil companies have conveniently discovered they need to shut down refinery operations “for maintenance.” And/or the oil speculators are at again it. So between the global banks and global energy companies we are totally screwed. All we have on our side are the wimpy and bought off (many are from coal dependent states) Democrats. Yet Obama must know it is now or never on addressing Climate Change. He even brought it up in his State of the Union speech. He is well enough informed to know a slow boiling crisis when he sees one. Yet nearly half the country is against him on this – remember 47% voted for anti-action on the climate Mitt Romney. The US is the only industrialized democracy in which their major conservative party is totally opposed to confronting global warming. But all are controlled in the final analysis by global capital. That's why Kyota and Copenhagen never led to anything but changes around the edges. Only the US, the leading (gluttonous) per capita consumer of fossil fuels as well as a major producer, can set the right example. Forget about China they are separate dimension to the problem. The US must lead.  And it must happen while the Demos are in or we are literally cooked.  Rejecting the siren call of shale oil is only the first step but it is crucial.

The underlying problem is the never ending riveting array of short term yet acute crisis's: economic imbroglios (brought on by the deepening crisis of global capitalism with its stranglehold on the entire planet), wars, political upheavals, the ongoing reactionary Muslim jihad with the West (and each other),  plus hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and mass shootings, and on and on. All of this drama is brought to us 24/7 by our friendly corporate media that feels it needs to entertain rather than inform. So nothing is ever put in context just a series of disconnected provocative random events. This noise distracts and blinds us to the coming doomsday scenario of an overheating planet moving inexorably into crisis mode.

A case in point. Today (Feb 18) in the two key leading US media newspapers the DC Climate Rally was not even mentioned. No pictures, no articles, no editorials, nuthin!. The only indirect reference was a Washington Post story about a hedge fund billionaire who spoke at the DC rally and who 'could be' the new Sec. of the Interior. Sure, after Harry Reid allowed the phony-baloney closure vote- filibuster process to survive intact. Get real! The Repubs know well how to say no.

Since the liberal media is downplaying the anti-XL pipeline movement I am guessing they are setting for Obama letting it happen. I hope I'm wrong!

 Obama letting it happen. I hope I'm wrong!