Bernie Sanders Deserves Better
01 March 2017
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I was shocked to learn that last week the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) gave Sen. Bernie Sanders a score of 6 percent in their 2016 National Environmental Scorecard. LCV claims that Sen. Sanders received such a low score because he missed votes while he was running his historic presidential campaign. But there may be more to the story than we're being told.
Those of you who have seen Gasland I and II know that fracking is very personal for me. One of the reasons I was a proud surrogate of Bernie's is because he was the only candidate to call for a national ban on fracking. So when I see him being treated this way by an organization, whose board of directors is known to support and promote fracking, it's also personal.
The bottom line is LCV's scorecard system is flawed and fails to evaluate lawmakers on their full body of work. That's why, according to their scorecard, pro-fracking senators like Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Corey Gardner (R-CO) actually score higher than Bernie. That's just plain ridiculous.
It's no secret that LCV, who endorsed Sec. Clinton during last year's primary, have contempt for Bernie. I experienced this firsthand while serving on the Democrat's platform committee fighting for a national ban on fracking to be included as part of the party platform. The pushback I received from LCV Chairwoman Carol Browner, and many others from the Clinton camp, was astonishing. Not to mention the fact that LCV even endorsed candidates known to support the fracking industry and take their money—and 2016 was not the first time. This is antithetical to the organization's mission statement, which includes a commitment to "electing pro-environmental candidates who will champion priority issues." There is nothing pro-environment about fracking, and to say otherwise is nothing short of pronouncing alternative facts.
Bernie had the most ambitious climate platform in presidential history and he has continued his leadership since the campaign—standing up for Native American rights and against the Dakota Access Pipeline, standing up for environmental justice and standing up against President Trump's agenda, which includes rolling back as many environmental regulations as possible and letting fracking run rampant throughout our communities.
At a time when we all have to come together, we should be standing with proven climate and environmental champions, not throwing them under the bus to score cheap points with the political establishment.
Please join me in telling the LCV to start acting like true environmental leaders and adjust Bernie's score to account for his historic presidential campaign that consistently elevated climate change and environmental justice as national issues. LCV should also make a commitment to the people and its members that they will no longer support pro-fracking candidates and reflect accurate scores for lawmakers who promote or otherwise support this climate-altering practice.
Deia Schlosberg, the producer of my new climate change documentary, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change, was arrested Tuesday in Walhalla, North Dakota, for filming a protest action against a pipeline bringing Canadian tar sands oil into the U.S.
The action was conducted by Climate Direct Action, but Deia was not part of the group and did not participate in the action, only filmed it. Her film footage was confiscated and she is currently being held in jail.
According to Reuters:
A spokeswoman for the Pembina County Sheriff's Office confirmed that Schlosberg was being held at the jail but declined to release any further information, referring calls from a Reuters reporter to State's Attorney Ryan Bialas. Bialas could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Deia is an award-winning filmmaker in her own right, and How to Let Go of the World, which she produced, is the third film in the Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning Gasland series.
Here's my Facebook live video from Tuesday after I learned about Deia's arrest:
Arrest of journalists, filmmakers and others witnessing and reporting on citizen protests against fossil fuel infrastructure amid climate change is part of a worrisome, growing pattern. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, was arrested last month for covering Native American-led protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The actress Shailene Woodley was arrested and jailed this week while leaving a protest at a construction site for the Dakota Access Pipeline. She was singled out and was told by police that she was arrested because she was well known and has 40,000 people watching her Facebook page.
Journalism is not a crime, it is a responsibility. The actions of the North Dakota police force are not just a violation of the climate, but a violation of the constitution.
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Tonight my new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change debuts on HBO at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
How to Let Go of the World is unlike any other documentary you've ever seen on climate change. Traveling to 12 countries on six continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks, what is it that climate change can't destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away?
So what should you do? Watch the film tonight with your friends. If you're like me and don't have a TV, you can get a free trial of HBO NOW and stream the film online. I'll be hosting a live video chat after the film to talk about what we need to do next but here's a few idea to get you started.
1. Leave your house. You know you're on the right track when you've left your house. Climate change is too far along for you to simply click on anything or sign a petition. I need you to go out and find your local climate action group, join it and get involved. Join a protest, join a sit in, take action, plan a march, work to develop renewable energy in your community but above all leave your house. Turn off the computer right now and match outside. What I mean is join the movement.
July 24 get out of your house and join the March For a Clean Energy Revolution in Philadelphia outside of the DNC.
2. Work with other people. Climate action is a team sport. Take the focus off of yourself and on to your community. Don't try to save the world alone. You will make the best friends you have ever had while doing this work, this is the time to meet the people you will fight along side of for the rest of your life.
Host a Let Go and Love watch party. The film is available all summer on HBO NOW.
3. See the intersectionality and fight for justice. Our whole system needs to change, our values need to change. Climate change is not just about climate change. Climate change is a result of inequality, it is a result of economic injustice, it is a result of energy and factory farming and institutionalized racism. So see that all of these fights are bound up in the fight against climate change. And start showing up for those movements too. Our current system is based on greed, competition, violence, institutionalized racism, materialism and fossil fuels. Those are probably our worst human qualities. Time to start to focus on a different set of values, courage, creativity, resilience, civil disobedience, revolution, human rights, democracy, community and love. We can only build a better more sustainable world when we see the connections between things.
4. Do what you love. I'm not an organizer. I am a filmmaker. I can't organize a sock drawer. If I went into this as an organizer because I felt I had to, I would have quit in three weeks. As a filmmaker however, I am still here eight years later, three films and countless short films later and I am doing what I love. The movement needs you to do what you love and it needs you. You may find also, that you fall in love with it. We have to love what we do, we have to love the Earth. When we love something we must protect it. The more you exercise love, the more loving you will be and the more you will love your life, the life we are trying to make better.
5. Surrender. Realize that we don't save the world, we only save today. So don't shame yourself. We're all in the same boat, we say “I don't know how to save the world, yet I must save the world. I don't know how to save myself, yet I must save myself. I don't know where my soul resides, yet I must discover my soul because I live within it." The world is saved and lost every day, not all at once.
6. Support renewable energy through political action and group action as well as individual action. We need an overhaul in our whole system, we need massive political change if we are going to overhaul our entire energy system. So don't just buy an electric car and get solar panels and change your light bulbs, go vegetarian and pat yourself on the back and call it good. Yes that is good, but it won't get us anywhere if we focus on the individual.
So yes, fix the power in your own home, change your diet and change your lightbulb, but do it in a way that creates a community, not just the self-satisfaction part of this all. The aim is to transform society and that means working with everyone, changing laws and changing systems.
7. Put your whole body into it. Dance. March. Sing. Run. Get inspired, inspire your friends. Dance break: share this video and watch my new film.
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We need democracy like we need water. California primary voters must choose Bernie Sanders or the state will continue to experience a serious drought of both.
Despite California's claims to be an environmental leader, its government has been co-opted by the oil and gas industry and its citizens and climate are suffering. Gov. Brown has turned a blind eye to poor and Latino communities living next to polluting fracking wells and fracking wastewater being used to irrigate crops.
California primary voters must choose Bernie Sanders or the state will continue to experience a serious drought of both. Photo credit: Berniesanders.com
Under a Hillary Clinton presidency, California and the rest of the country would get even more fracking and fracked gas infrastructure. Her campaign took nearly $7 million from oil and gas lobbyists. Her State Department created the Global Shale Gas Initiative to promote fracking in 30 countries. Newly unearthed State Department emails show how aggressive that initiative was, working closely with oil and gas companies and enlisting help from 13 federal agencies to expand fracking into Europe, even where governments opposed it.
As president Bernie Sanders would support state fracking bans, ban fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, end government subsidies for oil and gas companies and bar their lobbyists from the White House. He'd change the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, so it would require reducing methane as well as CO2 emissions and favor building renewables instead of more gas plants.
The choice between these two futures is an existential one. Here's why:
Fracked oil and gas operations leak natural gas, which is mostly methane, a warming agent 86 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years. Industry statistics indicate onshore operations annually emit over four times more natural gas than the massive blowout at the Aliso Canyon storage facility. Just weeks after it was capped, Gov. Brown signed a bill allowing SoCalGas to resume operating there, provided the wells pass safety tests. But they aren't “safe;" they leak. SoCal's Aliso Canyon facility was only the best known leak; CPUC found hundreds of others last year, including a different Aliso Canyon operator caught deliberately venting natural gas in January, in the middle of the blowout.
Meanwhile the industry is pushing more fracked gas pipelines, gas plants and injection wells, which means more leaks. California is green-lighting and enabling the expansion. Over the past year the state even approved fracking wastewater injection wells near fault lines, raising earthquake risks.
If it stays on this path, it will lock in fracked oil and gas for the next 40 years. Then we can forget about California's environmental leader image or meeting Paris climate agreement goals of keeping warming under 2 degrees centigrade (we've already locked in 1.5 degrees, at 2 degrees sea levels rise 5 to 9 meters).
Even as it struggles with Biblical droughts and wildfires, California continues to frack oil wells and expand fracked gas infrastructure, further damaging the climate. This sets a hypocritical example for the rest of the world. As the world's eighth largest economy, California's choices influence others'. As the world's third largest consumer of gasoline and diesel, with the fourth highest per capita GHG emissions, it should make better ones.
California could set a very different example by choosing the only candidate who opposes fracking. Clinton and Brown both worked against concerned citizens trying to ban fracking; Sanders invited us into his office to talk policy. He and we understand we need nothing less than a political revolution to say "no" to big oil and gas and start scaling up renewables now.
So there's more at stake in Tuesday's primary than California's 475 delegates. Whether or not the outcome clinches the nomination, it will send an influential global signal about what Californians are prepared to do about climate change. And as California goes, so goes the planet.
Josh Fox's final film in his GASLAND trilogy How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change opens in the Los Angeles area on June 3 and airs on HBO June 27.
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The climate science is uncompromising. We've already warmed the earth 1 degree Celsius. And we have enough carbon and methane and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and enough heat in the oceans to warm the earth another half a degree Celsius already. So if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions right now, we've already reached the 1.5 degree threshold. The current 1 degree rise has already increased extreme weather, caused mammoth floods and unprecedented drought, it has gotten the ice caps to start a menacing thaw. The consequences of 1 degree have been far more severe than we ever imagined and we are on our way to 1.5 no matter what we do.
Now here's the really tough part: At 2 degrees of warming, this gets much much worse. We are at an apocalyptic vision of the planet that few people want to imagine. We see worsening ocean acidification and other habitat loss that will kill off 30-50 percent of the species on the planet, we will see tropical diseases explode out of control and perhaps most damaging the slow thaw of the ice caps enters a critical and irreversible phase leading to between 5-9 meters of sea level rise.
What sea level rise could look like at the Statue of Liberty in New York City. Photo credit: Climate Central
At 7 meters of sea level rise, the greenhouse that just held the democratic debate in Brooklyn, where we saw the most robust discussion on climate change and fracking ever in presidential politics, will be under water. This kind of sea level rise will render New York City mostly uninhabitable. Sure, the Brooklyn Bridge won't be underwater, but the on-ramp will be. Subways will be submerged, the Lower East Side, the Financial District, Red Hook, The Rockaways, the coast of Williamsburg, disappear under the east river and life in the Big Apple is nothing like what it was before.
And this is not just trouble for New York city—most of our major coastal cities would suffer the same watery fate, including Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, Charleston, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco and Oakland. All will face a crisis of sea level rise, not to mention the millions of toxic sites that are on the coast lines that will need to be moved or remediated if we are not to contaminate the oceans in a nightmare of drowning refineries, nuclear plants, chemical factors, gas stations and the like.
It is clear that we have not done enough thinking on this subject and the political system has not done anywhere near enough to address the issue or inform the public.
It's time for New York City and the rest of the coastlines to wake up to climate change.
Join me for an emergency climate discussion each night after the screening of my new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change, April 20-28 at the IFC Center in New York City.
The truth is, we have a very narrow window of time to drastically reduce our emissions if we have any hope of slowing climate change.
But New York state is under attack from a web of fracked gas pipelines, power plants and storage facilities that will lock us into decades of more fossil fuel use.
Each night, I'll be joined by amazing folks like James Cromwell, Susan Sarandon, Benjamin Barber, Anne Bogart and many more to talk about climate change and all the things climate can't change—love, community, democracy.
Don't miss these historic screenings and discussions in the state that banned fracking and is one of the cities most threatened by climate change.
There's a reason that fracking was mentioned in the debate and has become a central issue in the New Yorker primary. It's because New York has worked hard to share the science on fracking. People refused to let the most powerful industry in the world bury the truth.
Now New York City needs to do the same on climate change. If this city doesn't get involved and realize fracked gas pipelines and power plants upstate pose as big of a threat as fracking did (and some not so far upstate like the AIM Pipeline), we're going under water.
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The Town of Wawayanda is in the fertile, black dirt region of New York State, not far from Pennsylvania. Like many communities in neighboring Pennsylvania, the rural way of life in this area of Orange County is now under threat from America's shale gas boom.
New York has banned fracking, but not the mass build out of fracked gas infrastructure and that's put many New York communities on the fossil fuel chopping block.
If these plants are built you can say goodbye to New York City.
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) has proposed to build a 650-megawatt fracked gas power plant in Wawayanda. The residents of Orange County already know firsthand that living near fracked gas infrastructure poses many of the same health risks as living next to fracking wells.
In 2013, a fracked gas compressor station was built in nearby Minisink, New York to move gas along the Millennium Pipeline. Because of emissions from the compressor station children living nearby began suffering from nosebleeds, rashes, headaches and dizziness.
A study done by the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project in November 2015 found that the air pollution around Minisink was worse than that of a big city. Families with homes close to the compress station have walked away from them.
CPV's fracked gas power plant would release 43 times the emissions as the compressor station. And it's just one of some 300 fracked gas power plants that are being proposed all over the country. If these plants are built you can say goodbye to New York City.
Researchers are finding that the web of fracked gas infrastructure that crosses all over the country has a big emissions problem. And those emission aren't just bad for local air, they're catastrophic for the climate.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, is 86 -105 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than C02 in the first 20 years it's in the atmosphere. Cornell Earth systems scientist Robert Howarth said since the planet responds so quickly to methane, if we want to slow global warming, we must immediately and drastically reduce methane emissions.
But what Howarth and other researchers studying emissions are finding are scary rates of leakage from extraction to delivery. There's continual leakage at the wellhead, there's leakage from the storage and processing facilities, purposeful venting and also accidental leaks. There's leakage in the pipeline systems, distribution systems and storage systems.
If just 3 percent of the fracked gas being mined and supplied to the power plant leaks throughout its life cycle, natural gas is worse than coal for global warming. In the Uinta Basin, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found 6 to 12 percent leakage rates for natural gas production. And before the Aliso Canyon disaster, they found leakage in the Los Angeles Basin was 17 percent. Harvard found that the U.S. shale boom over all has increased global methane emissions by more than 30 percent.
The U.S. has a serious methane problem that will go from bad to dire pretty fast if we build 300 fracked gas power plants.
That's why the first New York screening of my new documentary on climate change will be with community members fighting to stop the CPV Valley fracked gas power plant.
Our climate will get fracked unless we do.
If you live in the Sugar Loaf, New York area, join us for this historic screening or click here to find other screenings throughout the U.S.
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When we hear politicians and gas companies extoll the virtues of fracking, jobs created by drilling is usually high on their list of talking points. But the jobs created by fracking are not the kind of quality jobs American workers deserve.
They are not the kind of jobs American laborers have fought and died for throughout our country's history.
They are extremely dangerous, exposing workers to chemicals whose long-term impacts on human health are yet unknown. In fact, the fatality rate of oil field jobs is seven times greater than the national average.
In our new short film, GASWORK: The Fight for C.J.'s Law, we conduct an investigation into worker safety and chemical risk. We follow Charlotte Bevins as she fights for CJ's law—a bill to protect workers named for her brother CJ Bevins, who died at an unsafe drilling site.
We interview many workers who have been asked to clean drill sites, transport radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals, steam-clean the inside of condensate tanks which contain harmful volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other chemicals, and have been told to do so with no safety equipment.
A lot of reporting has been done on the health impacts fracking and drilling have on local communities, but often the story of the workers, the folks who are exposed to fracking chemicals and unsafe working conditions around the clock, goes untold.
GASWORK has rare interviews with oil and gas workers who have come forward to speak out about the unsafe conditions.
One worker from western Pennsylvania told us he was hired by the fracking industry in the early days of the rush to drill the Marcellus Shale to cover up toxic spills in his own community, near the forests and streams where he would hunt and fish, near the front yard where his children play.
The industry won't tell you that the "good" jobs created by fracking are paying men to poison their own communities in order to feed their families. They won't tell you that those jobs are not union jobs and if you get hurt, you are on your own. And they won't tell you that the transition to 100 percent renewables will create hundreds of thousands of safer jobs.
That is one reason we joined workers from the renewable energy industry in an act of civil disobedience on the banks of Seneca Lake in May. Along with 19 others, we blockaded the gates of Crestwood Midstream, a Houston based company whose plan to turn the Finger Lakes into the gas storage and transportation hub for the northeast includes storing gas in rickety salt caverns under Seneca Lake.
One of the men we were arrested with was Joe Sliker, CEO of Renovus Energy, a local renewable energy company. As he stood in front of a large truck being driven by a fossil fuel industry employee, Joe offered the workers at Crestwood a chance to join the energy revolution American workers deserve.
“I'm here to offer them a choice. I'm here to offer all of those people a better job. Today. Right now. Solar is rapidly expanding. These are real, good jobs. We pay better wages. It's safer. We offer full benefits and paid time off and we respect our team," says Sliker.
It was an amazing thing to witness, a table full of job applications, ready for workers who want to switch employers. The solar revolution is ready to build a new workforce right now.
According to a study done by Professor Mark Jacobson at Stanford University, transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy would create 174,775 construction jobs and 94,644 operation jobs in New York state alone. The state where Crestwood wants to turn a rural wine making region into a fossil fuel energy hub. The state where C.J. Bevins was killed at an oilrig site.
We know many of the labor laws we have today we're won by fossil fuel industry workers. They risked everything, often facing violent retribution from their own government, because they dared to believe they deserved safe working conditions and fair compensation.
We know we stand on the shoulders of those great men and women and that we must continue the fight for safe, good paying jobs in this country. We must have a fair and just transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and support the workers and communities that have for so long powered our lives.
The industry doesn't want you to know that we care deeply about its workers. That we thought about them this past Labor Day Weekend, knowing people are still working unsafe jobs in America today, all the while feeling the warm summer sun and cool breezes that could be powering our country and a new revolution of safe jobs.
We thought about them and all those who came before. The coalminers, the steel workers, the men and women who worked in the factories, they taught us a very important lesson, one that has echoed throughout history only gaining strength as it has been proven to be true again and again.
They taught us that to challenge the powers at be, we must unite.
A new study shows that GASLAND screenings played a pivotal role in growing the anti-fracking movement and passing fracking bans. We believe the number one reason that is true is because those screenings brought people together.
That is why we are asking you to host a watch party of our new short, GASWORK: The Fight for C.J.'s Law.
Stand with us against jobs that poison workers and communities. Stand with us for safe, clean energy jobs. Stand with us for the energy revolution American labor deserves.
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