November 2022 Networker:
The Worlds Beneath Our Feet |
| Volume 27 (9), November 2022 |
Executive Director’s Note: “…So That the Earth Might Sing” |
| “We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe.” — Robert McFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey*
Years ago, I was one of three members of an Illinois commission charged with determining the suitability of a site for a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. Would this site safely store the waste for 500 years? As part of the state’s effort to answer that question, geologists mapped the subsurface geology using geophones and acoustics.
During the hearings on the site suitability the geologists took us out to the field to show how this mapping technique worked. They hooked the geophones to microphones so we could hear the sounds the scientists were recording. I was astounded to hear the creaks and moans. Those weren’t sound waves released by the geologists in their mapping effort. These were the sounds the Earth made. It wasn’t silent deep below the surface of the Earth!
I asked one of the geologists if the Earth sang. He said, “No. It only groans.”
I have been haunted by that comment over the years. It came to mind in 2016 as I stood on the banks of the Des Moines River while they drilled under the River to make a tunnel for the Dakota Access pipeline. The noise was fearsome. They drilled from both sides of the river and hoped to meet in the middle. They didn’t on the first two tries. The drilling and the roar were interminable.
Now the fossil fuel industry has new plans for occupying and disturbing the deep subsurface world: storing carbon dioxide (CO2) from carbon capture and storage projects or using the CO2 to extract more oil from nearly depleted wells. They want to use the vast wilderness under our feet to absorb the huge quantities of our waste, the very waste that has destroyed our atmosphere.
In my younger days, I frequently spoke to school children about the environment. Garbage was the issue of that generation. At some point in every talk I gave, a young boy, and it was almost always a boy, would have this great idea. Shoot the garbage to the moon!
Burying CO2 is an idea equivalent to that of a grade school child. Shove it below ground even though we don’t have the slightest inkling of the ecology of that world. Out of sight, out of mind.
Robert McFarlane says “[w]e are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint—and so is place…. ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland.”
My radioactive waste commission rejected that site, and in the end, no new radioactive waste facility was sited in the Midwest. We were unanimous in our decision that the waste would be a hazard to future generations. One of my fellow commissioners had been an engineer on the Alyeska crude oil pipeline in Alaska. Seeing the damage done by the pipeline, he had vowed to never allow that kind of damage to happen again.
In this issue of the Networker we speak on behalf of the Earth and future generations with a close look at the consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s callous disregard for the wild ecology of the below world. We do this so that, in McFarlane’s words, we “…see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.”
We do this so that the Earth might sing.
*All Robert McFarlane quotes from Underland chapter entitled “Descending,” pp. 11 and 15 |
Big Oil vs. The Future of Young People |
| By Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow |
| Big Oil, led by ExxonMobil, is engaged in a life-or-death struggle for survival. Numerous authoritative studies have concluded that any new oil or gas projects will heat the planet beyond the so-called “safe” limit established by the Paris Agreement in 2015. But new drilling projects are the lifeblood of the oil industry; as oil fields age, they peter out, so new sources of oil are essential for the industry’s survival. A new study has just revealed that 96 percent of oil companies worldwide have “frightening” plans to expand. Risking the future is what oil executives do. As Scientific American has reported, Exxon executives knew 45 years ago that fossil fuels would heat the entire Earth, disrupting the global distribution of water (which has now happened). In a series of talks to corporate executives during 1977-1978, Exxon’s senior science advisor, James Black, told Exxon’s top brass that “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels." Black told Exxon decision-makers, “Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” according to a written summary of his talks that Black prepared. In response to Black’s revelations, Exxon devoted a decade to serious scientific research on carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate change. During those years Exxon scientists published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers on climate science.
Then, as Bill McKibben sums it up, “ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.”
Today, to assure their continued profits, the oil corporations spend lavishly to influence U.S. (and global) climate policy. For example, according to Open Secrets, in 2020, the U.S. oil and gas industries donated $12.0 million to members of the U.S. Senate (84 percent to Republicans, 16 percent to Democrats) and $17.1 million to members of the House of Representatives (80 percent to Republicans and 20 percent to Democrats). They also spent an additional $55.6 million hiring 634 lobbyists—more than one lobbyist for each of the 535 members of Congress. In sum, the oil and gas industry spent $82.8 million to influence Congress in 2020 (that’s an average of $154,000 for each of the 535 members of Congress in 2020 alone).
Perhaps this explains why Congress in August of this year enacted a new law intended to expand the oil industry at enormous public expense. The “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” (IRA) solidifies a Big Oil agenda that has been unfolding for several decades, largely out of public view. Continue Reading |
The Pore Space Beneath Our Feet: What We Mean When We Say Carbon Storage |
| by Sandra Steingraber, Senior Scientist, SEHN |
| The grainy rocks that underlie many parts of the United States—including the place where I grew up in central Illinois—are currently being sized up to serve as a mass carceral system for molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) apprehended from the stacks of coal-burning power plants, gas-fired power plants, ethanol distilleries, and various other industries. This is the storage part of carbon capture and storage (CCS), a process by which solvents (or membranes) are used to capture CO2 from industrial exhaust, pressurize it into a liquid, and then transport it via pipeline to places with rocks deemed capable of functioning as subterranean CO2 prison houses for all eternity. Another type of carbon capture, still in the research and development stage, uses chemical processes to snag CO2 molecules right out of the atmosphere and then bury them. This is called direct air capture. Either way, the official term for the storage component of the process is “geological sequestration.” (An alternative experimental process that seeks to turn the captured CO2 into stone is called mineralization. See sidebar story for a taxonomy of the carbon capture landscape.) Promoted as a solution to climate change, carbon capture has received major support by the Biden Administration—and withering criticism from both scientists and frontline communities. Heretofore, most of these objections have focused on the above-ground components—the parts that you can see, hear, and smell. The carbon-capturing equipment, for example, is highly visible if only because it’s typically powered by massive gas turbines. The turbines’ own emissions are not captured. Nor are any toxic co-pollutants such as benzene, soot, and smog-making nitrogen oxides, which still pour freely out of the stacks. Hence, the energy-intensive act of capturing carbon makes local air pollution worse, raising health risks in the communities where it is deployed. And because power plants and other heavy industries targeted for carbon capture are disproportionately located in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, the act of capturing carbon is an environmental justice issue. In short, point-source carbon capture is loud, smelly, and polluting—and extends the lifespan of polluting industries that might otherwise be shut down and replaced by, say, solar arrays. Unsurprisingly, people who live in the surrounding community and whose health is being imperiled have opinions. Continue Reading |
Clean Beauty Is Booming, and Black Consumers Fear Being Left Behind
“Change has been incremental, but it’s been so slow… I think when something is slow and difficult, people stop paying attention to it.” Our board member Bhavna Shamasunder, associate professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, was principal researcher on the “Taking Stock” study, which found that Black women regularly use twice the number of hair products than White women. These products may contain toxins including carcinogens. Plastic Recycling is a Dumpster Fire
WNYC’s program The Takeaway interviewed our board member, environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman, “who says historically, recycling has created the appearance of a solution to the waste problem. But the greater issue is the chemical toxicity at the root of plastic production itself.” |
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