Fareed Zakaria interviews Tom Steyer

From an Article by Richard Valdmanis, Huffington Post, November 16, 2016

Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, who has spent more than $140 million on fighting climate change, said on Tuesday he will spend whatever it takes to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s pro-drilling and anti-regulation agenda.

The former hedge fund manager from California is putting together a strategy that will “engage voters and citizens to fight back” once Trump takes the White House in January, he told Reuters in an interview. However, he stressed he was not planning to fight Trump through the courts.

Instead, he would focus on “trying to present an opposite point of view and trying to get that point of view expressed, and communicated to citizens.”

Steyer’s pledge to fight Trump suggests an intensifying battle for U.S. public opinion on global climate change, an issue that has already divided many Americans, lawmakers, and companies between those who consider it a major global threat and those who doubt its existence.

Other U.S. environmental groups are also preparing to resist Trump’s agenda, with some vowing street protests and more established organizations that helped draft some of President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations preparing to defend them in court.

“We have always been willing to do whatever is necessary,” Steyer said, when asked how much money he was willing to spend to oppose Trump’s agenda.

Trump campaigned on a promise to drastically reduce environmental regulation and ease permitting for infrastructure, moves he said would breathe life into an oil and gas industry ailing from low prices, without harming U.S. air and water quality.

He has also called climate change a hoax and has promised to “cancel” the Paris Climate Accord between nearly 200 nations to slow global warming, a deal he said would cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars and put it at a disadvantage.

While the approach has cheered the industry, it has sent shockwaves through the environmental movement, which is confronting the prospect of losing all progress it made during the Obama administration.

Steyer, who had endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, called Trump’s policies dangerous.

“Every single one of these things, whether it was getting rid of Paris or cutting back the EPA, we think are extremely dangerous to the security of every American,” Steyer said. “We think it is based on willful ignorance of the facts and flies in the face of the realities facing the world.”

Arctic Drilling is also very controversial

Steyer’s main political vehicle, NextGen Climate, has called on the Obama administration to defy Trump’s pro-drilling agenda by issuing an order permanently blocking all new drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

Trump has also promised to ask Canadian oil pipeline company, TransCanada Corp, to resubmit its application to build a pipeline into the United States that would link Alberta’s vast oil sands to American refineries and ports on the Gulf Coast. The project, Keystone XL, had been rejected by the Obama administration after years of mass protests and lobbying by environmental organizations.

Steyer said the project may no longer make sense since a slump in oil prices has reduced the profitability of oil sands production.

Steyer, who four years ago left the hedge fund firm he co-founded to devote himself full-time to environmental activism, said young voter turnout in areas where NextGen focused its mobilization efforts during the 2016 campaign was up more than 20 percent from the last presidential election in 2012.

“Did we get the president we want, absolutely not. Did we get a majority of clean energy supporters in the senate, no,” Steyer said. “But in terms of what we did, and the strategy we took, we wouldn’t do anything differently.”

NextGen poured nearly $69 million into its elections related programs during the presidential campaign, according to federal records compiled by OpenSecrets.org, slightly lower than the $74 million it spent during the mid-term congressional elections in 2014, when only two of the six candidates it supported won.

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Tom Steyer: Clean energy actually creates more jobs

"Stop the Frack Attack" Rally

Environmental Uprisings Abound

S. Tom Bond, July 31, 2012

Largely unnoticed by the mainstream media (MSM), a whole series of strong environmental reactions are taking place over the country. They are seldom connected in the MSM, but they arise from the same cause.

Since this is being published in the Marcellus shale area, I would assume most of the readers would be familiar with the reaction that industry is getting in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and now in Ohio, Maryland and Delaware. The reaction started in Texas and the West, where shale drilling started, and it is now everywhere it has been tried. At present there are more than 200 Internet sites against shale drilling. Just this week past there was a demonstration against “fracking,” as it is commonly called, in Washington, D. C. [The “Stop the Frack Attack” rally may well have involved close to 10,000 people in its various aspects.]

A second huge protest has been against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which will bring the Canadian Tar Sands “oil” all the way across the U. S. from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The extraction of tar sands “oil” requires huge investment of energy, producing carbon dioxide at the source, and results in huge quantities of waste from the process. It pollutes surface water, causes cancer and other sickness, has very low energy return on energy invested, and pollutes aquifers. The pipeline crosses major rivers, including the Missouri River, the Yellowstone, and the Red River, and the Oglala Aquifer for a total of 2147 miles. Three feet in diameter, it is designed to move as much as 830,000 barrels a day. There is a full-fledged, national campaign to prevent it from being built. Not only environmentalists are fighting it, but also meteorologists (who fear the vast amount of carbon dioxide), public health people, farmers and many others.

Mountain top removal of coal is another topic readers will be familiar with here in Appalachia and across the nation. Powerful interests ignore health and social effects of the thousands of square miles affected by strip mining for coal.

Most people are familiar with the PB Macondo well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico through the high profile “we’re good guys” advertisements on TV. The three month long, 5, 000,000 barrel leak was the result of incompetence and indifference on the part of BP and its subcontractors. This kind of deep-ocean drilling is being done all over the world, and BP is well and thoroughly hated in the Gulf.

So what is going on? Is there some kind of plot against the hydrocarbon extraction corporations, so favored by government and investors? Hardly. There are two big reasons for the reaction. The first is the growing recognition that the earth’s temperature is rising because of human activity.

Foremost among causes of global warming is additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Although the increase in temperature is slight by some standards, enough is known about earth’s climate in the past to understand that carbon dioxide is capable of warming the earth substantially and having dire effects. The time has come when climate change deniers, financed by the very interests finding new ways of getting additional carbon out of the earth to burn, are loosing their creditability. It is clear carbon dioxide is the culprit.

Few people understand that the carbon dioxide produced by burning carbon in fuels weighs far more than the carbon. The ratio is 12 to 44. One pound of carbon in a fuel produces three and two-thirds pounds of carbon dioxide. Whole geological formations have been converted to get the energy. A ton of coal produces over three and a half tons of carbon dioxide.

The second reason for these political movements is also simple to understand. In resource development, the “easy stuff,” the part that yields product with least effort and investment is taken first. As time passes more difficult resources are drawn on. The human race is going to greater extremes, using more difficult technology, investing more energy, taking greater risk, doing more environmental damage to get carbon energy.

Environmental damage is really destruction of other resources to get the objective, in this case energy. Environmental damage is loss of pure water, soil that can produce food, timber, un-contaminated living space and other resources society needs. It is frequently seen to some as an effort to maintain a pristine original state of the out of doors, a conservatism of “nature.” This is true of parks. But “nature” is the standard of comparison, not the final objective for large areas. Protection of biological productivity is the value most everywhere.

As time passes we will see more and more people adopting this view of nature. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, the sentiment will coalesce into a movement against subsidies for hydrocarbon miners, against exceptions for them from laws designed to protect the public from toxins, and against exceptions to laws to protect their workers. Hopefully we will see laws favoring renewable energy and ways to get energy from the constant immense flows around us in sunlight, wind and waves of the sea.

The good news is that efficiency of solar, wind and wave power, being in the early stages, is increasing rapidly. In a few years these will be cheaper than the increasingly expensive hydrocarbons. After all, human history goes back over 10,000 years. Won’t hydrocarbons be useful in the future if we don’t burn them all up in the next few decades?

S. Thomas Bond is a farmer and citizen of Lewis County, West Virginia.  He is a retired chemist and teacher in the public schools.