As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the U.S. and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage.
The 14-page proposal for a Green New Deal submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., does not actually mention Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), but that is the approach currently capturing the attention of the media—and taking most of the heat. The concept is good: Abundance can be ours without worrying about taxes or debt, at least until we hit full productive capacity. But, as with most theories, the devil is in the details.
MMT advocates say the government does not need to collect taxes before it spends. It actually creates new money in the process of spending it; and there is plenty of room in the economy for public spending before demand outstrips supply, driving up prices.
Critics, however, insist this is not true. The government is not allowed to spend before it has the money in its account, and the money must come from tax revenues or bond sales.
In a 2013 treatise called “Modern Monetary Theory 101: A Reply to Critics,” MMT academics concede this point. But they write, “These constraints do not change the end result.” And here the argument gets a bit technical. Their reasoning is that “the Fed is the monopoly supplier of CB currency [central bank reserves], Treasury spends by using CB currency, and since the Treasury obtained CB currency by taxing and issuing treasuries, CB currency must be injected before taxes and bond offerings can occur.”
The counterargument, made by American Monetary Institute (AMI) researchers, among others, is that the central bank is not the monopoly supplier of dollars. The vast majority of the dollars circulating in the United States are created, not by the government, but by private banks when they make loans. The Fed accommodates this process by supplying central bank currency (bank reserves) as needed, and this bank-created money can be taxed or borrowed by the Treasury before a single dollar is spent by Congress. The AMI researchers contend, “All bank reserves are originally created by the Fed for banks. Government expenditure merely transfers (previous) bank reserves back to banks.” As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, “federal deficits do not require that the Federal Reserve purchase more government securities; therefore, federal deficits, per se, need not lead to increases in bank reserves or the money supply.”
What federal deficits do increase is the federal debt; and while the debt itself can be rolled over from year to year (as it virtually always is), the exponentially growing interest tab is one of those mandatory budget items that taxpayers must pay. Predictions are that in the next decade, interest alone could add $1 trillion to the annual bill, an unsustainable tax burden.
To fund a project as massive as the Green New Deal, we need a mechanism that involves neither raising taxes nor adding to the federal debt; and such a mechanism is proposed in the U.S. Green New Deal itself—a network of public banks. While little discussed in the U.S. media, that alternative is being debated in Europe, where Green New Deal proposals have been on the table since 2008. European economists have had more time to think these initiatives through, and they are less hampered by labels like “socialist” and “capitalist,” which have long been integrated into their multi-party systems.
A Decade of Gestation in Europe
The first Green New Deal proposal was published in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Green New Deal Group in the U.K. The latest debate is between proponents of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, and French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling “Capital in the 21st Century.” Piketty recommends funding a European Green New Deal by raising taxes, while Varoufakis favors a system of public green banks.
Varoufakis explains that Europe needs a new source of investment money that does not involve higher taxes or government deficits. For this purpose, DiEM25 proposes “an investment-led recovery, or New Deal, program … to be financed via public bonds issued by Europe’s public investment banks (e.g., the new investment vehicle foreshadowed in countries like Britain, the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund in the European Union, etc.).”
To ensure that these bonds do not lose their value, the central banks would stand ready to buy them above a certain yield. “In summary, DiEM25 is proposing a re-calibrated real-green investment version of Quantitative Easing that utilizes the central bank.”
Public development banks already have a successful track record in Europe, and their debts are not considered government debts. They are financed not through taxes but by the borrowers when they repay the loans. Like other banks, development banks are money-making institutions that not only don’t cost the government money but actually generate a profit for it. DiEM25 collaborator Stuart Holland observes:
While Piketty is concerned to highlight differences between his proposals and those for a Green New Deal, the real difference between them is that his—however well-intentioned—are a wish list for a new treaty, a new institution and taxation of wealth and income. A Green New Deal needs neither treaty revisions nor new institutions and would generate both income and direct and indirect taxation from a recovery of employment. It is grounded in the precedent of the success of the bond-funded, Roosevelt New Deal which, from 1933 to 1941, reduced unemployment from over a fifth to less than a tenth, with an average annual fiscal deficit of only 3 percent.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was largely funded through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a public financial institution set up earlier by President Hoover. Its funding source was the sale of bonds, but proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more; and it funded all this while generating income for the government.
A System of Public Banks and “Green QE”
The U.S. Green New Deal envisions funding with “a combination of the Federal Reserve [and] a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,” which could include banks owned locally by cities and states. As Sylvia Chi, chair of the legislative committee of the California Public Banking Alliance, explains:
The Green New Deal relies on a network of public banks — like a decentralized version of the RFC — as part of the plan to help finance the contemplated public investments. This approach has worked in Germany, where public banks have been integral in financing renewable energy installations and energy efficiency retrofits.
Local or regional public banks, Chi says, could help pay for the Green New Deal by making “low-interest loans for building and upgrading infrastructure, deploying clean energy resources, transforming our food and transportation systems to be more sustainable and accessible, and other projects. The federal government can help by, for example, capitalizing public banks, setting environmental or social responsibility standards for loan programs, or tying tax incentives to participating in public bank loans.”
U.K. professor Richard Murphy adds another role for the central bank—as the issuer of new money in the form of “Green Infrastructure Quantitative Easing.” Murphy, who was a member of the original 2008 U.K. Green New Deal Group, explains:
All QE works by the [central bank] buying debt issued by the government or other bodies using money that it, quite literally, creates out of thin air. … [T]his money creation process is … what happens every time a bank makes a loan. All that is unusual is that we are suggesting that the funds created by the [central bank] using this process be used to buy back debt that is due by the government in one of its many forms, meaning that it is effectively canceled.
The invariable objection to that solution is that it would act as an inflationary force driving up prices, but as argued in an earlier article of mine, this need not be the case. There is a chronic gap between debt and the money available to repay it that needs to be filled with new money every year to avoid a “balance sheet recession.” As U.K. professor Mary Mellor formulates the problem in her book “Debt or Democracy” (2016):
A major contradiction of tying money supply to debt is that the creators of the money always want more money back than they have issued. Debt-based money must be continually repaid with interest. As money is continually being repaid, new debt must be being generated if the money supply is to be maintained. … This builds a growth dynamic into the money supply that would frustrate the aims of those who seek to achieve a more socially and ecologically sustainable economy.
In addition to interest, says Mellor, there is the problem that bankers and other rich people generally do not return their profits to local economies. Unlike public banks, which must use their profits for local needs, the wealthy mostly hoard their money, invest it in the speculative markets, hide it in offshore tax havens or send it abroad.
To avoid the cyclical booms and busts that have routinely devastated the U.S. economy, this missing money needs to be replaced; and if the new money is used to pay down debt, it will be extinguished along with the debt, leaving the overall money supply and the inflation rate unchanged. If too much money is added to the economy, it can always be taxed back; but as MMTers note, we are a long way from the full productive capacity that would “overheat” the economy today.
Murphy writes of his Green QE proposal:
The QE program that was put in place between 2009 and 2012 had just one central purpose, which was to refinance the City of London and its banks. … What we are suggesting is a smaller programme … to kickstart the UK economy by investing in all those things that we would wish our children to inherit whilst creating the opportunities for everyone in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK to undertake meaningful and appropriately paid work.
A network of public banks, including a central bank operated as a public utility, could similarly fund a U.S. Green New Deal—without raising taxes, driving up the federal debt or inflating prices.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”
Mark Schapiro is an award-winning environmental investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Our Food Supply.
In this transcribed excerpt from his presentation at the 2018 Bioneers Conference, Mark tells a truly fascinating story that weaves together American foreign policy, agricultural heritage harkening back to the birth of western civilization and how an Italian seed breeder working for the United Nations in the Middle East managed to shepherd a refugee seed collection through two wars in hopes of preserving an ancient genetic treasure that could help farmers adapt to climate change.
Investigative Journalist Mark Schapiro speaks at Bioneers 2018 as part of a panel on Evolutionary Plant Breeding, also featuring Cooper Freeman, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Program Manager; Leonard Diggs, Manager of Santa Rosa Junior College’s Shone Farm
When thinking about seeds, it’s important to understand the convergence of a couple of different events. First, we have a very powerful convergence of control over the seed industry. Three companies, all of which are chemical companies, now control over half of all commercially traded seeds. Secondly, you have very dramatic changes happening in the conditions for growing food, which are challenging the current model of agriculture.
In my previous book Carbon Shock, I wrote about climate change and all the ways in which it is putting pressure on our economy, our political systems, and the way we understand resources. I learned, from farmers in the Central Valley of California and all over the world, how conditions were changing from the way that farmers had grown up thinking they would be. Both organic farmers and conventional farmers are experiencing very profound change.
One of the questions that I wanted to ask as a journalist was, “What do those profound changes mean for the types of seeds that people use? And what do those changes mean at a time when the consolidation is increasing and a movement in response to that consolidation is also expanding rapidly.” I tried, in my book, to tell stories about the people that are involved in this struggle that is underway, and how this plays out for people all over the world.
War Zone in the Birthplace of Agriculture
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the city of Abu Ghraib became infamous as the location of the prison where horrible things were done by American soldiers to Iraqi prisoners. Prior to 2003, Abu Ghraib was renowned for being the host to an extremely important seed bank that collected seeds from all over that region. Iraq is the center of the fertile crescent and Abu Ghraib is located in the great Delta, the meeting of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which was the birthplace of domesticated agriculture. Seeds that have been planted for many, many centuries began their journey into our ecosystem in the Delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which means these seeds in Abu Ghraib were some of the most ancient domesticated seeds on the planet.
The conditions in that part of Iraq and the Middle East are hot and dry, which means that the seeds that have grown up there have become tolerant to extreme levels of heat and extreme levels of drought. Even during the crazy realm of Saddam Hussein, scientists would come from all over the world to study these seeds, and in some cases, bring them back to their home regions. It was a fantastic center for exchanging seeds.
In April 2003, American troops rolled into Iraq and made their way pretty quickly to Baghdad. As the fighting got more and more intense around Baghdad, the seed bank was hit by a random rocket – it’s unclear whether it was an American rocket or rocket from the Iraqi defenders – and the seed bank was rattled and almost destroyed.
A group of Iraqi scientists went into that seed bank and salvaged whatever seeds they could, threw them into a van and raced them across the border to safety in Syria. They drove the van to a small town called Tal Hadya, which is about 15 miles from Aleppo. In Tal Hadya there is a seed research center called the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). ICARDA, one of the UN’s network of seed research institutions, welcomed the refugee seeds. Some of the staff from ICARDA were familiar with these plants because they spent time training people in Iraq. There had been active exchanges between Tal Hadya and Abu Ghraib. Seeds from Abu Ghraib had been planted and were also preserved in the vault at ICARDA.
Growing a Mix of Seed Varieties
There they grew out many different seed varieties – millet, barley, wheat, numerous varieties of beans, peas, etc. Anyone familiar with the foods of the Middle East knows how much diversity there is and how much tasty food there is, much of which emanates originally from multiple thousands of years ago in the region.
Nobody was paying attention to the ICARDA facility 10-20 years ago. It was just another agricultural institution for dry regions. But now the climate of many places is becoming more like those hot dry areas; large parts of the United States, as well as other parts of the world, resemble the Middle East. The seed bank outside of Aleppo had become an extremely important institution.
For about 10 years the Iraqi seeds were grown out – the whole mix of different related varieties together – at the Syrian seed bank. Syrian farmers traditionally grow wheat with multiple varieties in the same field.
Agriculture, Climate and Conflict
Then war came to Syria. There are many different tensions that contributed to the war, but one was related to agriculture. By 2010, the Syrian government was pursuing an effort to consolidate farms into larger and larger operations that used more uniform seeds. Then a drought hit. The newer uniform seeds were much less responsive to drought than the traditional seeds may have been. The drought decimated the farmer’s crops. There were multiple causes that led to the tensions in Syria, but that is one factor that I’ve seen convincingly argued.
Aleppo was a redoubt of the rebels for many years, and was one of the strongest centers of resistance in a horrible civil war that has been tearing Syria apart. So the rebels took control of the seed bank.
I talked to scientists who were there at that time. The rebel commander who took control of the area around Tal Hadya, just 15 miles from Aleppo, was a farmer. He understood exactly the importance of this seed bank, and he struck a deal with the scientists. He said, “We’ll keep your electricity going and we’ll get you diesel to run the tractors so you can keep growing your plants, I just want you to provide food to help feed the troops.” The UN had lost control of the area, so it was the rebels and the scientists who cut a deal.
That deal lasted until the fall of 2016, when the government forces of Bashar Assad launched attacks on Aleppo. They were horrible and brutal. There were barrel bombs. Many, many innocent people were killed during that time period.
As the war came closer and closer to Tal Hadya, the electricity started failing. So, a group of scientists bundled a whole bunch of seeds from the Tal Hadya seed bank into a van and raced them across the border into Lebanon, where they are being grown out today in the Bekaa Valley, which is controlled by Hezbollah who are completely cool with this enterprise. The scientists affiliated with the UN are now going in and out of this area and trying to keep those seeds from Syria and Iraq alive. The efforts by those scientists to save the seeds illustrates how important the world perceives these seeds to be.
Saving the Seeds, Continuing the Experiment
Italian scientist, Salvatore Ceccarelli, an ingenious seed breeding pioneer who worked for 25 years at the seed bank outside of Aleppo, took two 20 kilo sacks of wheat seeds that he was responsible for, put them on an airplane and took them to Italy. The seeds in the sacks were a mix of several different varieties. He turned them over to a rural seed NGO in Italy, which then dispersed them to several farmers in Tuscany and Sicily.
What does it mean to grow out a population of seeds? The broad genetics of the different varieties gives the whole mix a greater resilience to varying and extreme weather conditions. Italy has been undergoing a severe drought and severe rise in temperatures, causing extreme stress on commercial wheat and creating a serious crisis in the pasta industry. This mixed population of seeds grown together is evolving over several years and is producing very hardy wheat crops.
It is a fascinating experiment. The Tuscany wheat produces a higher yield than the Sicily wheat because there’s more rain in Tuscany. Both are being called the Aleppo mix in recognition of where these seeds came from.
But the only seeds you can legally sell in the market in Europe and in the United States are seeds that are single varieties, one type of seed that’s repetitive and that guarantees that it will essentially reproduce the same plant characteristics over multiple generations. In contrast, the seed mix evolves and adapts to changing conditions.
While Ceccarelli was doing this experiment, a coalition of agricultural groups lobbied the European Union in Brussels. Based on scientific arguments, they convinced the European Union to wave a set of laws that require that seeds be of a single variety allowing this population of wheat seeds, as well as some barley and millet, to be grown.
The highly successful experiment ran for about five years in Italy until it ended in December of 2018. The thesis of the experiment is that breeding multiple varieties of seeds with a broad range of genetics in the same field leads to crops that are able to respond to a broad set of environmental conditions. Ceccarelli’s argument is that this approach is the best way for farmers to respond to climatic changes.
Editors Note: Our deepest thanks to Mark Shapiro for telling this story at Bioneers – and, as usual, it doesn’t stop here. Learn more about a project in the US inspired by Dr. Ceccarelli’s work. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and Shone Farm of Santa Rosa Junior College are conducting an Evolutionary Plant Breeding Project, implementing some of the same techniques in their fields in northern California.
As Bobby Kennedy Jr. said, “Dr.James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos – a modern-day hero who has braved criticism and censure and put his career and fortune at stake to issue the call to arms against the apocalyptic forces of ignorance and greed.” Among the world’s top climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen describes the dire urgency for dramatic global climate action, including the immediate end to new coal plants. Since 1981 he has served as head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He will share his personal odyssey into climate action, including civil disobedience.
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
Chloe Maxmin represents District 88 in the Maine House of Representatives. She’s the youngest woman in the Maine House of Representatives and won her election running as a Democrat in a district that is one of the oldest in the state and had never elected a Democratic to the state house.
Representative Maxmin has been active in climate organizing and politics since she was barely a teenager. She co-founded Divest Harvard, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Brower Youth Award, and is a contributor and fellow at The Nation. We first met Chloe when she gave a keynote address to the Bioneers Conference in 2014 and have been witness go the leadership that she’s shown on a regular basis at national and local levels since then. Chloe generously paused her busy schedule to speak with Bioneers’ Teo Grossman about the groundbreaking Green New Deal for Maine, the power of youth movements today, and the big question of whether our current system is capable of dealing with the challenges we face.
TEO GROSSMAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS & RESEARCH, BIONEERS: We spoke with you last year during your primary race. You’ve since won the election and taken office. Congratulations! I’m curious what it feels like now, having won the election, now you are actually representing all the people in your district, which is a different job than campaigning for them, I suppose.
REP. CHLOE MAXMIN (D – NOBLEBORO), MAINE: Thank you! It is a very different job than campaigning. It’s kind of ironic to me how they’re two completely different skill sets but both vital and complementary if done right. It is an honor to represent my community and my home that I love. I represent a very conservative community, even though I’m a Democrat. A lot of people put their faith and trust in me, and that is something that I think about every day and will never take lightly. I am very committed to actually representing my district, which should be obvious but it actually seems to be kind of novel to always be asking, “What does my district think?” whenever we’re going to take a vote in Augusta.
Sign for Chloe Maxmin’s recent campaign.
When I really think about it, I don’t think of myself as somebody who is on the inside of the system. I’ve fought outside the system for so long and been so frustrated at its lack of empathy, urgency, attentiveness, representation. I am really trying to do things differently and to focus most of my energy on how I can bridge what’s happening in Augusta and in these political spaces with the realities in my community and among my constituents, what we’re talking about, and what we’re thinking about.
REP. MAXMIN: Yes, I sponsored Maine’s Green New Deal. It genuinely came out of conversations I had when I was knocking on doors in my district. I live in a very rural natural resources-based community, and we don’t really talk about climate change, we don’t really talk about green jobs, but everything I heard was, “We want good jobs, we want growing industries, we want to protect our natural resources, we want to lower our property taxes, we want to make sure that we’re really boosting vocational training and technical training.” All these different themes to me are what a Green New Deal mean. It’s an economic revitalization strategy.
I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to push a climate bill or not because I’m just so frustrated with how politics deals with climate change, but I decided to do this and call it a Green New Deal to really call attention to a radically different way of thinking and talking about climate policy in Maine specifically but also in general. What we created is targeted legislation instead of a very broad resolution, and it’s very Maine specific. It leaves out some big things like agriculture and transportation, but that’s because we really focused on economic growth and rural development.
The other unique thing about our bill is that, since day one, the labor community has been involved with crafting it. One of the main purposes of the bill is to build a broad platform so that we can have broad political power instead of a niche political power, which is how it usually works in Maine. As we transition to renewable energy, the bill is asking how we make sure that all Mainers are treated fairly and equitably.
The first part of the bill is the Renewable Energy Mandate, which moves Maine to 80% renewable energy electricity consumption by 2040, about double where we are right now. The second part of the bill creates a task force on a Green New Deal, which is where a lot of these green jobs programs will be fleshed out. These are going to be major programs, and they have to be thought through and researched before we just throw in legislation. The other big part of that task force is creating a subsidy for solar power and heat pumps for low-income homes in our low-income heating program and tax incentives for middle class homes that want to go solar. Again, we are focusing on the most vulnerable folks as we make this transition.
The third part of the bill is Solar on Schools, which will create a voluntary net metering program for public schools in Maine. We’re teaming up with a bond proposal that would increase access to renewable energy for schools. This is an educational opportunity, a labor/economic growth opportunity, but also will lower the costs of operating our schools so that our property taxes aren’t going up.
The last part of the bill is a Commission on a Just Transition, which is a body that will report annually on how/if our renewable energy transition is just and equitable. The task force and the commission both have very unique memberships. The task force has young folks, climate scientists, local energy developers, people from frontline communities, labor voices, people who have an existential stake in making this transition just and rapid. The Commission on a Just Transition includes people who are impacted by this transition. So we’re really bringing to the table all of these voices that have been traditionally left out of this conversation.
I debated whether or not to keep the title of the bill the “Maine Green New Deal” because it’s now become very contentious, and it was not back when I first thought of this. I decided to keep it because I knew that everyone would be excited and would look at the bill. That part has been really successful, and the bill has been received really well. A lot of people are excited to mobilize around it, and the launch of the legislation definitely created the space that I wanted to have this new conversation about climate. Obviously there is some pushback, but this pushback is good because we’re talking about this issue in a different way.
TEO: I’d like to get your take on workforce development, a “Just Transition,” and the costs and economic potential of a Green New Deal. You got your start working on Divestment, which has continued to grow – Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund divested recently and the total numbers are upwards of $6 trillion committed to divestment. Now we’re talking about the other side of things: what to invest in. How would this work and what’s the forecast for Maine? Anything you learned from the Divestment movement that applies here?
REP MAXMIN: That’s such an interesting question. I think especially with this bill, since it will eventually be binding legislation, it’s really combining the divestment and the investment conversation. They’re intertwined in this context because, by investing in and requiring renewable energy, we’re divesting from fossil fuels, and part of what this bill does is really draw attention to the impact of that divestment. For example, we’re moving to 80% renewable energy consumption by 2040 instead of 100% because there are lots of folks in Maine who work in the fossil fuel industry. We don’t have any extraction here, but we have a lot of pipelines, compressor stations, oil tankers,and all that kind of stuff. So we’re really looking at the cost of divestment in these communities. It has a real impact.
As we’re making progress, we need to be investing in technical training, apprenticeship programs, green jobs, strategy, and growth programs. We need to be training a whole new workforce and creating economic opportunities like putting solar on schools, for example, or solar on low-income homes, or solar on middle class homes.
Maine is a very rural state, and we’re also one of the poorest states in the nation with one of the highest income tax rates. What we are always seeking here in Maine is sustainable industries. So many of our industries, like our logging industry, for example, or our paper mills, have been declining because the world is changing. We’re always trying to find that next thing and incentivize those folks to come to Maine. Our farming community is a huge part of that, growing hemp and sustainable crops and creating resilient food systems. Our fishing industry is a huge part of that, but we want to make sure that we’re creating an even broader field for people. Because of our previous administration, we have not made much progress towards making Maine a renewable energy industry hub. We have a lot of work to do to really bring people to our beautiful state and make sure we have true vibrant economic development here.
TEO: I was doing a little research prior to our conversation and I was pleasantly surprised by the total amount of renewable energy used in Maine in terms of the overall energy mix.
REP MAXMIN: Yes, right now about 75% of the electricity that is generated in Maine comes from renewable energy, but not all of that energy is consumed in Maine. Right now our retail electricity consumption is about 40% renewable. However, our Renewable Portfolio Standard kind of acts like a cap and there’s absolutely no incentive to consume more than 40% renewable in the retail sector. That’s where this bill comes in.
TEO: That’s a good base to build from. I mean…some of us living in other states would be happy to have that problem.
REP MAXMIN: It is definitely. I think Maine is brilliant and beautiful. I’ve argued that we can be a real climate leader because we’re an extremely purple state, and we’re a very poor state, we’re a very rural state, and our entire economy will collapse if the worst of climate change comes to pass.
TEO: Why is that?
REP MAXMIN: Because the majority of our economy is based on our natural resources and our tourism industry. The things that are bringing people to Maine are disappearing and the things that are sustaining Maine outside of the tourism industry are also disappearing. Our lobstering industry, for example. The lobsters are already moving north. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans. Shrimping, scalloping, fishing, these are multi-multimillion dollar industries in Maine, and they’re at risk of extinction if we don’t do something. Maine is all about our natural resources, our woods, lakes, rivers, oceans, and even in my lifetime living here I’ve seen it change drastically.
TEO: I recently spoke with Vien Truong, CEO of Green For All, about the Green New Deal. Part of our conversation focused on the reality that although much of the conversation is at the federal level, so much of the actual work that needs to be done will likely take place at regional, state and local levels. Numerous pieces of ambitious clean energy and “Green New Deal” legislation are being introduced at the state and city levels across the country. Are you tracking what’s happening elsewhere on this front? What do states bring to the table in this regard? How do your efforts fit into a much larger movement?
REP MAXMIN: First of all, we need everything. We need federal action, state, local, municipal — at every level we’re regulating different things, so we need it all. Right now federal action, I think, is hopeless, so the states better get going. Some states already have, but we have not here in Maine.
Speaking from the perspective of a Mainer, we have a very prideful and independent culture here. We do not like anything top-down. When we’re talking about building a climate justice movement that it is very Maine specific, it makes sense to not just take whatever is happening at the national level and just smush it down onto Maine. That would never work, and it would be a losing game. I really believe that each state should have its own comprehensive climate justice energy policy.
I have been talking with a lot of different folks working on labor/climate bills to kind of get a sense of where we’re matching up, and we’re definitely on par with what the other renewable mandates are, and specifically for the efforts that have heavily involved and prioritized labor. I think there are lots of unique parts about our bill, like who we’ve included on these task forces and the commission, our Solar-on-Schools piece, and how we’re using it as an organizing tool statewide. But all the efforts echo each other to some extent.
I think when some people hear about our bill, how we’re “only” 80% or how it establishes a task force, they say, “But climate change is so urgent, we can’t study it anymore!” There is a whole conversation to be had regarding whether our political system is built to deal with a crisis like this. I don’t think it is at all.
It’s frustrating, but this is the point that we’re at. We have to be intentional and strategic with our policy and how we’re thinking about this transition. I don’t think rushing it through, not thinking about it and not bringing all the right people to the table is going to get us anywhere good. It will just replicate the same problems and improper power dynamics that we’re struggling with right now with the fossil fuel industry. We have a chance to do things right, and I think we should take that really seriously.
TEO: That’s fascinating. It must be really different for you to approach the urgency and immediateness of the response required from the perspective of an elected official compared to the thinking that might have come when you were a 20-year-old climate activist in college.
REP MAXMIN: When I was 20 (and I’m only 26, so it’s not like that was that long ago!) if someone had put forward a bill saying anything less than 100% by 2030, I would have been very frustrated. But what I keep saying to people is that, to me, our Green New Deal bill does match the urgency of the crisis. It matches the urgency of the climate crisis because we’re building a platform for action that is creating actual political power that can actually pass this type of legislation with support from the labor community.
It’s a bill that came from the perspective of my community, which has been completely left behind by the Democrats. My whole focus now is rural politics because I don’t think we can achieve the kind of policy that we want on climate, healthcare, anything, if we’re not broadening our base and really involving people who are struggling with our movement. To me, this is bold, and it is exciting. It’s very different. And I think it can change the way that we organize around these issues in Maine and ultimately everywhere, when we get all the rural communities on board.
My goal with this Green New Deal bill was to take something that’s traditionally associated today with hyper liberal politics and translate it to a rural state and a rural community. I think we did that pretty successfully.
TEO: I don’t believe the Sunrise Movement was around while you were in high school and college but clearly they’re cut from the same cloth as the Divestment movement that you were engaged in. How do you feel about the work that young people are doing today to drive action and policy change?
Sunrise Movement Members in Washington D.C. (credit: shutterstock.com)
REP MAXMIN: I’ve always felt so grateful to work with youth organizers because youth is its own kind of expertise. There’s a moral clarity and purpose there that I don’t think exists anywhere else. Unfortunately because of that clarity, youth voices have often been dismissed as naïve, or told “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And we’ve really listened to different voices, and those voices have not served us well. We keep electing older folks, but we keep having the same problem. I think part of what’s happening in our country is that we’re just fed up with politics as usual, and we’re seeking different ways to influence our political system.
I know all the Sunrise folks, I think what they’re doing is amazing. They have absolutely turned the tide on the national climate conversation. That’s the power of young people.
We have our public hearing for the Green New Deal on the Youth Climate Day of Action in Augusta so that all young folks have an opportunity to come testify and actually have their voices heard in front of the committee. Most of these folks can’t vote because they’re too young. So how are they supposed to have a voice? It’s time.
Introduced bu Dune Lankard, Alaskan Indigenous Social Entrepreneur
The revered Gwich’in Elder from Alaska, who has won many awards for her work to protect the arctic national Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, including the Goldman environmental Prize, depicts how her people are being severely impacted on the front lines of rapid climate change, and how they are responding.
This speech was presented at the 2009 Bioneers National Conference.
“All the traditional seeds are like brothers and sisters. It was mostly the women who kept the seeds. My mother told me she had to trade seeds with my “Tia” in Ohkay Owingeh because every five years we have to keep rotating the seeds to invigorate them with other seed sources from the different waters: Rio Embudo, Rio Grande, Rio Santa Cruz, Rio Chama.”… Estevan Arrellano, New Mexican historian
Seed saving was once a central part of people’s cultural lives and an essential aspect of food security. Even though most people may not think much about seeds anymore, they still play a profound role in our lives. Plants are arguably the keystone kingdom of life, given their unique ability to photosynthesize the sun’s energy into vital carbohydrates, which in turn feed animals, people and microbes.
Seeds from food crops embody the evolutionary genetic information of thousands of years of adaptation. Season after season, they dynamically respond to environmental conditions. Protected within the seed coat, lying dormant are the plant embryo and the stored nutrients the mother plant has provided to ensure the greatest opportunity for success of the next generation. When conditions – soil temperature, day length and moisture – are right, the seedling emerges and thrives on those stored nutrients until it has the capacity to gather nourishment from the surrounding environment through the development of new roots.”
THE GENESIS OF AGRICULTURE The genesis of agriculture involved farmers selecting and saving seeds from plants that had the characteristics they most desire, such as flavor, stature, and resistance to drought. 10,000 years ago, the first farmers gathered seed heads from wild grasses in the Middle East, grew them out and selected and bred for what has evolved into modern day wheat varieties.
The cultural story differs with each plant, but the process is essentially the same. The dynamic legacy of seeds nurtured by the symbiotic relationship between people and plants has traditionally been driven by farmer-based knowledge and skills.
SEED MONOPOLY Unfortunately, we now have a troubling loss of diversity and monopolistic control of the most fundamental source of our food. Perverse patent laws allow corporations to own life-forms through their genetically engineered seeds, and three chemical companies now control more than 60% of the seed market. Governments around the world have approved these mergers, leaving no way for citizens to sue or break them up. Even more disturbing is the fact that these companies continue to buy up seeds and then “shelve” them as a way to eliminate competition, further limiting the diversity of seeds that farmers can buy and plant.
Before 1924, the USDA sent their employees around the world to find seeds that fit eco-niches in the U.S. and then gave the seeds to farmers for free through their local representatives. But big business saw seeds as a potential commodity and, throughout the 20th century, pushed farmers into the system we have today.
SEED DEMOCRACY A new seed democracy is more important than ever. Each year at the Bioneers Conference hundreds of people gather to exchange seeds they have saved. This simple act helps to adapt seeds to the local environment, preserve biodiversity and maintain some measure of democratic control over seeds in the face of global monopolization of this precious resource. In contrast to global seed monopolization, the seed exchange is a sharing community of grassroots gardeners and small farmers who are carrying on the thousands-year-old tradition of exchanging open-pollinated seeds. Saving seeds advances local food sovereignty and extends the legacy of participation in the co-evolution of people and plants.
Since the birth of agriculture, saving seeds has been basically second nature for most of humanity. In our modern world, however, many of us aren’t even minimally conversant in the act of growing and harvesting our own food, let alone well versed in how to select and save seeds. Luckily, there are resources in our community we can turn to for guidance. In this transcribed conversation from a workshop at the Bioneers Conference, three expert seed savers share their best practices and discuss the implications and deeper meaning of seed saving in the modern era.
John Navazio, Senior Scientist for the Organic Seed Alliance and a Plant Breeding and Seed Specialist for Washington State University Extension.
Matthew Dillon, Director of Agricultural Policy & Programs for Clif Bar & Company and the cultivator for Seed Matters, an initiative of Clif Bar Family Foundation
SARAH McCAMANT: Know Your Seed, and know what you’re planting.
Sara McCamant
Make a label and remember what it is. You need to know whether it’s a hybrid or an open-pollinated variety, because when you save seed from hybrids, they do not grow true the next year. You’re going to get some other version, and probably end up trying to figure out why your Sun Gold tomato doesn’t look like a Sun Gold tomato the next year because it was a hybrid. So you’re looking for open-pollinated varieties.
Hybrids either say “great new hybrid” in their description, or they say F1, which means it’s the first generation of a cross. People do save seeds from hybrids, but I’m not going to encourage that because it is a breeding project, trying to stabilize a new variety and bring it back to being open-pollinated. John, how do you describe open pollinated?
JOHN NAVAZIO: Really, in botanical terms, it means that it’s freely allowed to pollinate with other plants of that same variety within that group of plants that you’re growing when you’re growing them. So in some cases we have “selfers”, which are actually selfing, but it essentially means that it’s not a controlled pollination, which is often what the seed companies are doing, especially with hybrids.
John Navazio
Essentially we’re talking today about annual and biannual plants. Annuals are very easy to think of because they complete their entire reproductive cycle, their complete life cycle, within one season. So you plant them in the spring, they go through summer, they flower, they make seed, and then all annuals die at the end of one growing season.
As a seed saver with annuals, the thing to think about is how much variation is there in the time of flowering between the varieties of a crop. We’re based in Washington State, almost to the Canadian border, and we work with northern farmers all the way to northern Alberta, Maine and Quebec. So time to flowering and then being able to plant that crop early enough so it fully matures seed is very crucial. And even for you here in paradise, here in California, where you have a much more lengthy season, there are still some things that I’m sure do not fully mature in this climate. So that’s one of the things you have to be conscious of before you get into full blown seed saving.
And in some cases you need to be conscious of, gee, I have a lettuce, but I don’t want it to flower too early; I want it to be in the vegetative stage for long enough. So you start to play with the timing of this crop in its vegetative versus reproductive stage. It gives me a nice lettuce for a few weeks of harvest before it flowers, and then still matures in time to give you a full satisfying seed crop.
Matthew Dillon
MATTHEW DILLON: I want to add that it’s not just about the seed crop being able to get to maturity, it’s also about being able to harvest the seed crop before the rains come in. Brassicas, kales, broccolis, mustards, lettuce, and spinach are all dry-seeded crops as opposed to wet-seeded crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, melons that you’re harvesting from the flesh of a fruit. In dry-seeded crops you not only want maturity, you want to make sure that you’re going to be able to get that seed off the plant before moisture puts that seed at risk of fungal diseases, or of even sprouting on the plant. Sometimes lettuce that starts to seed will sprout while it’s still in the flower head. So it’s not just about maturity before cold comes, it’s also about maturity and harvestability before adverse weather sets in.
JOHN NAVAZIO: Let’s go ahead and define biennials. Biennial means two seasons of growth to complete the life cycle. It’s amazing how many garden plants are biennials. The great advantage of being a biennial from the plant’s perspective is that it stores sugars in one form or another during the first season of the life cycle, so that then when the second season comes, it can put all of that stored energy into a large amount of seed. Swiss chard, for example, stores a lot of food in their leaves; cabbage is another example of that. Biennials, on a plant-for-plant basis, tend to produce much more seed than the annuals do because of this effective plant strategy.
So the defining thing about biennials that many people growing them don’t really realize is that they require something called “vernalization”, which means it takes 8-10 weeks of temperatures at or below 50 degrees before they flower. Many of these plants evolved in semi-temperate or sub-tropical regions where in winter they can survive being outside without being completely frozen, as would happen in further north regions of temperate zones. They survive during the winter, but they go through enough cold so it essentially signals to the plant that it is safe for them to start growing again and go into the reproductive phase. So when you have biennials that flower during the first season of growth, you should never save seeds from biennials that flower during the first season. It means they’re prematurely flowering.
Even in San Juan Bautista the other day, we were in a Swiss chard trial where plants had been planted in late June and some of them were flowering. Very undesirable. Don’t think, Ah, this is great, I don’t have to go through all that waiting all winter and going through vernalization, I can get my seed now. You will be selecting for an annual cycle on that plant.
Cabbage is one member of the brassica oleracea species – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, collards. So when you grow biennials, you must consider how well they do vegetatively in the first year, because you want it to be a good quality cabbage or a good quality beet, carrot. And then you think about how well it stores over winters in your climate. Many of you here in California can just leave these crops out in the field during the winter and they will flower successfully the next year, and won’t get frozen out. But we often do selection in carrots for how well they store, because where I live we often have to store our carrot roots for four and a half or five months.
Then it’s important to look at how well they do as a flowering crop the next year. A lot of people abandon looking at plants for how much vigor health and general overall health during the flowering stages. They don’t think about that.
Then, in some of the OSA seed guides that are coming out you’ll see we describe the optimum over wintering size. That would take a whole class just to talk about. You don’t want a carrot that’s too big or too small to go through winter. There are optimum sizes for all of these crops.
MATTHEW DILLON: Experiment. That’s how we got here in the first place. You as the seed saver experiment with what works in your garden, on your farm, in your system, and through all of this information, if it’s sometimes getting a little technical, just keep that in mind. The only mistake you can make is not trying at all.
SARAH McCAMANT: Yeah, though I made some pretty bad mistakes.
JOHN NAVAZIO: I bet I’ve made more mistakes than you have.
SARAH McCAMANT: It’s just sad when you lose something that you really liked by a bad mistake.
JOHN NAVAZIO: But then you learn your lesson even better.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. Like putting some wet seed in and it all rotted. We put this as number 2, because one of the things that I discovered that was really different being a seed saver than a gardener was that I needed to be able to pass information along and track it all the way through. This means that your labels can’t fade, you actually need to remember what you planted. When you save it, you need to make sure the bags are labeled. You need to track and record, and the more information the better. So you’re tracking information like health and vigor of the plants, when are they mature, how long does it take for them to germinate. The more information you track, the better seed saver you’ll be, and the more information you can pass on as you share the seed with other people. Just labeling and tracking information is such a different thing when you go from gardener to seed saver, and really getting systems to record that information that isn’t out in the garden. Let me tell you how many labels fade, maps, little notebooks where you write descriptions — make sure they’re out of the garden. It’s something you keep track of through the whole process, because you lose labels every step of the way if you aren’t careful.
We have some envelopes and labels here for seed projects, and you can see we recommend: common names, Latin names, did you keep it isolated, did you select for vigor, a good description of the plant, what year – that’s really important – when was the seed saved? Because if you start seed saving and you don’t write the year, then all of a sudden you have three jars of kale and you’re like, “I don’t know which one is the freshest.” All of that information is very key, so save information, not just seed.
MATTHEW DILLON: You’re not just saving information about the technical aspects, the dates to maturity and everything Sarah mentioned, but it’s also important as a seed saver to save the story of where you got the seed. Even if you don’t know much, even “I just got this from my friend Bill and he didn’t tell me much information but it’s Bill’s favorite bean, and this is what I do know”. And you start to pass that down generation to generation as well.
We don’t always have the exact story. In fact, we rarely have the exact story about any of the heirlooms we pass on. There are many different iterations of seed stories out there for each variety, but I think it’s important to keep that weave alive, keep that heritage alive and to strengthen it each generation by collecting our own stories.
SARAH McCAMANT: When we hold the story, we feel more responsibility to carry it on. I worked on a farm years ago in Santa Cruz owned by Mary Sagorini[ph], a 95-year-old Italian woman, and took care of her orchard. She gave me some bean seed, and I just called it Mary Sagorini’s bean seed. All of a sudden you feel that responsibility. It’s not Blue Lake 724 or whatever. There’s a name and a person, and the more you create what we call seed culture, seed connections, the more likely you are actually going to care for that. We need to bring it back and make it have meaning in our lives.
So the third one is watch for is cross-pollination, which is when we start getting more technical. This is the place that separates beginning seed savers from more advanced seed savers. We always tell everyone to start with the easy ones we call self-pollinators – lettuce, beans, peas, tomatoes – because you don’t have to worry that much about cross pollination with those.
When you move into the more difficult ones, what makes it more difficult is that you have to be aware of pollination and make sure that you’re not getting two varieties crossing and ending up with something different. You have to understand how things pollinate and what they pollinate with. That’s where it gets much more technical and you need books if you’re not already a biologist or scientist who’s been working with this, and where it can give you a little information.
We created this chart, because it talks about how they pollinate. There are different types, self-pollinated, wind pollinated, insect pollinated. And I’m going to let John take it from here on that.
JOHN NAVAZIO: In selfers, “self” means self-pollinated, versus wind or insects, which are always cross-pollination mechanisms.
Self-pollinated systems essentially have a mechanism to cause selfing most of the time, not always. This is biology, folks. There are always exceptions, always a chance of crossing. That’s an evolutionary mechanism built into them to cross a small amount of the time, to mix up the genetics, and to basically incorporate the best genes from other members of that population. So remember that. It’s not 100% all the time.
They always have perfect flowers, which just means both male and female sexual parts. And the pollination and fertilization occurs in two different mechanisms. The first is – if you want the $5 word – is cleistogamous, petals that remain closed throughout the entire flowering process. Essentially, they are restricting insect pollination in that way, even though they’re showy flowers.
How does that work? Some of the Fabaceae, also called legumes, are very showy, but they remained closed. Well actually they’re still attracting insects that are crossing them at a small rate in any given generation.
And then there are other examples. There are self-pollinated plants in the Asteraceae – lettuce and chicories are the most notable – and even though they have open flowers, the pollination and subsequent fertilization that creates the seed happens before the flower opens. So even though blue-flowered chicories are beautiful and open fairly early in the day, that pollination has happened long before they opened, sometimes the day before, and that’s why they can still be selfers.
In cross-pollinated systems there’s always some kind of biological mechanism to assist in crossing. Showy flowers and wind are important – showy flowers, insects; wind for wind pollinated. You’ll have basically separation of male and female sexual parts in different flowers, which means like in squash, you have separate male and female flowers. Easy. You also in some cases have separate male and female plants like in spinach.
Self-incompatibility, just remember, it exists. There are certain crops that just will not receive their own pollen, even though they have perfect flowers. Dichogamy, a temporal separation of sexual parts, and you’ll actually have, like in carrots, where the female part of the flower is fertile before the male, before the anthers shed their pollen. So then the bees and the hover flies and the wasps that are crawling all over your carrots are easily crossing, because on any one flower they’re landing on, there’ll be this separation where they’re not pollinating and recognize pollen at exactly the same moment.
All you need to know is: Is it a crosser? And do I have to worry about cross pollination? How much separation?
SARAH McCAMANT: Let’s talk a little bit more about what you can do if you want to grow plants that are cross pollinators. One is that you can just grow one variety and then make sure, for all the gardeners, that you are watching what your neighbors are growing, because a lot of these can cross pollinate up to a mile. The wind-pollinated crops they recommend a mile isolation from other varieties going to seed.
Some of it you can do by hand pollination. So you can grow squash and actually take control of when and how they pollinate, and you cover the flowers so nothing else can pollinate. Those are techniques that a lot of books describe.
Sometimes you can separate them by time. You can do two varieties of sometimes that would normally cross, but you plant one a little earlier, or two corns, where maybe one’s a 90-day and one’s a 110-day, and so they’re actually going to drop their pollen at different times.
So there are different ways you can control pollination, and deal with cross pollination or not. The simplest one is to just grow one variety and figure out who else around you is growing and make sure they’re not growing something that’s going to cross. That’s the main way I’ve always done it in my garden. But it is tricky, because there are pretty large distances you have to control, and that’s what makes home gardeners get a little overwhelmed with this. “Well I don’t know what everyone else is growing around me.” And then you have to look at other ways of controlling it.
If you go to Seed Savers Exchange, they grow hundreds and hundreds of varieties of things on their farm. They have cages that they build to keep insects out, and they control the pollination, like putting insects in. So there are different ways. The book Seed to Seed actually has some really good techniques for that.
If you start with the easy ones, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s a really good entry point. I call them the entry drugs. You get hooked on it, and then you decide you’re willing to do the harder stuff because it’s so much fun. I think the best entry drug of all seed saving is beans. Some people say tomatoes, because there’s such tomato love in this culture, and heirloom tomatoes are so amazing. This is kind of fun. But beans are even easier, and beans are so beautiful. You grow them and you have these little brown shells that look kind of ugly out there in the fall garden. You gather them all and bring them in, and you start breaking them open, and they’re so beautiful. You can run your hands through them and then you’re hooked.
You do have to worry a little bit about pollination with beans. I just got my first bean cross this year. They do recommend separating two different beans by 10 to 15 feet at least, because you do get some crossing every once in a while.
JOHN NAVAZIO: It can be as much as 4% in some places. The ancestral homeland of beans in North and South America, crossing can be up to 10 – 12%, because the insects that co-evolved with beans are there in their ancestral homeland.
Also, as you get deeper into seed saving, learn more about the history of your crop: What kind of climate it came from, conditions. It will be a real insight into that crop and how its reproductive mechanisms work.
Even if you look at the minimum separation distances, it’s always nice to have a physical barrier between. If you want to do three or four beans because you get totally hooked on beans, then you can grow rows of corn between your beans, or three rows of corn between two bean varieties, or a row of sunflowers, things like that. That will really cut down on that outcrossing.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. And people say, “Well what’s wrong if I got a little crossing?” There isn’t anything wrong, and actually it can lead you to be a plant breeder when you start seeing some interesting crossing. When most people save seed and grow it the next year, they want it to grow true to type. But if you want to play with it, there’s no reason not to, though it’s good to save some of the seed as true to type so you’re keeping one clean variety.
The next thing I find the most problematic for small growers and gardeners is this: Consider that numbers really count in plant populations. What we’re talking about is there are certain population sizes that are recommended for really getting good quality seed. It goes back to the pollination issue, which is that plants that cross-pollinate. Why do they cross-pollinate? It’s actually a mechanism to increase vigor and overall health of the plant by getting pollen from other plants, and it increases and develops stronger plants. So when you save seeds from small populations, you’re kind of bottlenecking the genes, and narrowing the diversity and the strength of that plant.
On our chart is something called population size, number of plants, and what is recommended. We actually looked for lower numbers in some places based on experience and looking at all the books and guessing. So some of the numbers are going to be different than what John would recommend to farmers. They may be lower, based on, for example, you really can grow arugula with smaller plants than 100, but the books probably say 100. You say, “What the minimum for corn? 100 plants?” Well, they actually recommend 200 plants. We put 100 just so we would get you to do it. Or broccoli, what do we have in broccoli? It’s 40, which is also a smaller number. But that’s kind of intimidating to most home gardeners.
And so that’s where I say do it in a community scale. That’s what we did up in Sebastopol, is we realized that for the numbers it would be hard for most home gardeners to do. We set up a seed garden. All the seed that we grow there goes into our community seed bank. We grow large quantities there. We do our corn there. Every year we do one type of corn, we do 200 plants. It’s something most of us couldn’t do in our own homes, and we’re able to do those kind of population sizes that are good for increased vigor.
If you get those lower population sizes, what you get with a lot of plants is something called in-breeding depression, which means that you’re just getting too narrow of parents. You’re breeding too much your cousin.
JOHN NAVAZIO: You’re marrying your cousin.
SARAH McCAMANT: Right. You’re marrying your cousin. That’s exactly what it is. So you’re always trying to keep the family ties a little broader. You want to marry the people across the street.
MATTHEW DILLON: When you have in-breeding depression, you can save seed from 10 kale plants, and if you plant those seeds, you might not see anything at all in the next generation. So you’re like, “What are these guys talking about, 100 plants? I saved seed off 10 kale plants and everything’s fine.” If you continue to save seed off of 10 kale plants, generation after generation, you will start to see initially problems with reproductive vigor. You’ll start to see mutations in flowers, it’ll start producing less seed, you’ll have more difficulties with just getting flowers to set in different types of crops. Reproduction’s usually one of the first places that you notice in-breeding depression, which kind of makes sense. The plant’s saying, “I don’t want to keep breeding like this; it’s not working for me.” It’s the plants trying to find the solution to a bad situation.
JOHN NAVAZIO: Yes, it is. And as Sarah said, it’s like my sister or my cousin doesn’t look that cute anymore. There is a continuum in all of this. Nothing is etched in granite, folks, when it comes to biological systems. There’s flux and flow in it. There’s no definitive number. If you see 40 on that sheet and you get 38, it’s okay. 42 is better. But what we’re trying to do here is show you there’s a biological continuum.
The wind-pollinated crops need a further distance. And we often say up to two miles with corn because, especially now with the GM corn, we want to make sure people don’t get GM genes in. But Chenopodiaceae or Amaranthaceae on this chart, beets, spinach, they have wind pollen that will travel several miles under certain conditions.
The other thing is when you’re isolating plants, do you ever have 100% assured isolation, where there’s not going to be any crossing? No. And this is the other thing the books lead you to believe. Oh, one mile, it’s absolutely pure, no crossing’s going to occur. It doesn’t exist. The only place you’re going to get perfect isolation is if you go to the moon and grow it on the moon in some module or something.
These are biological systems. There’s always the minimum isolation distance. You can see it grows over time. Peppers cross at a much higher rate than peas do, so we’ve moved them along the criteria. That also means that you need a higher number. The more they cross naturally, the higher number of plants you need. Why? Because of everything that Sarah very nicely just described. They’re yearning for that variation for maintaining the variation that’s in a natural population. Whereas once peas were inbred a long time ago, probably a lot of the peas died out and some of them survived.
SARAH McCAMANT: So the last two tips on this sheet: One is choose ideal plants for ideal seed. This is something that everyone has to realize as they get into seed saving, is that you actually become a plant breeder whether you want to or not. What you save seed from means that you are either saving qualities you like or qualities that you don’t like. It’s called selection. You look for plants that have the best qualities, and that are healthy. The number one thing is you don’t ever really want to save seed from plants that are unhealthy. There are some diseases that can pass from seed to seed. We don’t want to get into the specifics of those, but you can make sure you’re not doing that by never saving seed from unhealthy plants.
The other reason is, if you save seed from unhealthy plants, it means you’re saving seed from plants that are more likely to get sick, so you’re selecting for disease instead of selecting for health. That’s the thing you have to remember is every step of the way you’re selecting for some type, so you want to select for health.
We do a lot of lettuce in our seed garden, and we’re always selecting for slow to bolt. So don’t save seed from the lettuce that bolts first. “Oops, oh I guess I won’t eat that, I’ll save seed from that.” Well then you’re selecting for plants that bolt, and that’s probably the biggest thing with lettuce is you don’t want plants to go right to seed the minute it gets hot.
Te last is about saving the seed once it’s dry. Every seed you have to process differently. We’re not going to get into that. But when you have the final seed, you want to make sure it’s fully dry, and then you want to store in what’s cool, dark, and dry. There’s little ways you can tell whether it’s dry enough or cool enough.
I say glass jars are the number one way to keep moisture out. There are other ways, but it’s really better to have an even temperature than temperatures that go up and down. It would be better to have it at 65 continually than for it to be 32 and then go up to 90 and then back to 32.
Dark/light, you’re going to lessen the lifetime of that seed if it’s out in the light, both getting moist and dry, if it’s changing humidity and it’s changing temperatures.
MATTHEW DILLON: There’s a lot of variation in how long seeds last. Generally, it depends upon the oil content of the seed to some degree, but with crops like parsnips, the seed doesn’t last very long. If you can get your parsnip seed to last three or four years, you’re doing really well. Sometimes it only lasts a year or two. Whereas other crops like beans or corn, you can certainly get your seed to last for 10, 12 years. I’ve had tomato seed that’s lasted for over 10 years, easily. So it depends. Don’t feel bad if you grow a crop and the seed viability and germination drops immediately after three years. It happens.
It can also be not just the way you stored it, but it could be something that happened during the actual growth and maturation and development of the seed, something you didn’t see or you couldn’t control.
What are the roles of educational institutions in the era of climate change? Dr. Anthony Cortese, Co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Crane Institute of Sustainability and the Intentional Endowments Network, is a groundbreaking leader in transforming higher education, will survey some of the most promising developments in education, and what still needs to happen. Founder of Second Nature, supporting senior college and university leaders in making healthy, just and sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education, he’s a principal organizer of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, as well as co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, Ph.D. is an award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist committed to ethnographic rescue and the conservation of vanishing indigenous knowledge and tradition. Indigenous science and TEK have a key role to play in planetary restoration. The first female National Geographic Fellow and a descendant of Hawaiian chiefs, English seafarers and Chinese merchants, she was raised by Hawaiian elders who prophesied her role as a steward of ancestral wisdom. She will describe her 2010 186-day expedition by amphibian seaplane to access some of the world’s most fragile environmental and cultural regions, and present her findings about the interrelatedness of poverty, education, cultural survival, biodiversity and health.
This speech was presented at the 2010 Bioneers National Conference.
Introduced by Bryony Schwan, former Executive Director of the Biomimicry Institute.
This leading figure in the global green architecture movement challenges us to imagine and demand buildings that operate as elegantly and efficiently as the living structures nature creates. as Ceo of Cascadia Green building Council, author of the living building challenge and co-creator of pharos (the most advanced building material rating system in North America), he shows breathtaking examples from the worldwide challenge underway to design buildings that meet or exceed nature’s ecosystem services.
This speech was presented at the 2009 Bioneers National Conference.
This inspiring Brower youth award winner and national campus campaign coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative describes how the Youth Climate movement is creating a more unified and inclusive environmental movement for the 21st century.
This speech was presented at the 2009 Bioneers National Conference.
Over the past three decades, there have been a litany of efforts to address and tackle global climate change. These include a host of keep-it-in-the-ground campaigns, tactics and strategies to try to keep oil, gas and coal in the ground, as well as grass roots activist campaigns against carbon majors: ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, among others.
More recently, however, environmental groups have started to look in another direction to address this global dilemma: the courts. These efforts are using litigation to address climate change and the devastating effects it’s caused and continues to wreak on our planet and humankind. During this fascinating panel from the 2018 Bioneers Conference, attorney Kate Sears, Marin County, CA, elected supervisor and chair of Marin Clean Energy, Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice, and Coreal Riday-White, community engagement manager for the environmental nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, joined Sierra editor-in-chief Jason Mark to outline and discuss the innovative and promising litigation taking place at local, state and national levels right now.
JASON MARK: Kate, let’s talk about this lawsuit filed by Marin County and San Mateo County, and a bunch of other jurisdictions against some of the major carbon polluters seeking to recover damages from climate change-related effects. Why did you and the other members of the board of supervisors make the decision to sue ExxonMobil and Chevron?
Kate Sears
KATE SEARS: In July 2017, the County of Marin, the County of San Mateo, and the City of Imperial Beach were the first three jurisdictions to file lawsuits against members of the oil, coal, and gas industries. Focusing on Marin, as I represent Southern Marin, I’ve been very engaged as a country supervisor in addressing sea level rise. We are already very well aware of the impacts of sea level rise here in Marin. In one of our areas, a little north of Sausalito as you would go north on 101 to go into Mill Valley, there’s a park and ride. It’s one of only two ways into our largest town in Southern Marin. It now floods over 30 times a year from king tides. This is not even storms. This is blue sky flooding.
We have the advantage, really, of having our feet wet, and knowing that climate change and sea level rise are a reality, but we wanted to learn more. So a couple of years ago we started doing a sea level rise vulnerability assessment for our entire county. It was a collaboration between our county and our city and our towns, to really look at different scenarios going forward of the anticipated impact of sea level rise in our county. And it’s tremendous.
We have an analysis of coastal Marin with water on both sides. Sea level rise is a really serious issue for us. We looked at all of the assets that are impacted, and will be even more impacted as we go forward in time with different scenarios, and realized that we have serious trouble ahead.
As an elected official, I think about what we’re going to do about that, and who’s going to pay for it. We got the opportunity with pro-bono representation from a fabulous firm to bring this lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry in state court. It’s basically established legal claims of nuisance and liability, and strict liability, product design, and trespass.
Marin County faces serious danger if sea levels continue to rise.
There are reasons that I, as a former lawyer and a litigator, liked this opportunity. One is the state of the science and how much it’s developed, and our ability to attribute the amount of greenhouse gas emissions to each of these defendants. Mind you, these 24 defendants taken together, their impact is about 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. So that was important to me, really having a strong scientific basis for the lawsuit.
Here’s a quote from an Exxon study from 1979: “The present trend of fossil fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” Another report from 1982 said once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible, and little could be done to correct the situation in the short term. These industries have very sophisticated engineers. They have experts that are doing these reports and advising them.
So what did the industry do? In some instances they took steps to improve the adaptability and the sustainability of their own oil-drilling platforms in anticipation of the impact of sea level rise. Did they go public with this information? Did they go to any elected official and share this information? No, they didn’t. Instead what they did was spend millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign.
We feel that these are a group of defendants that knowingly created damage in our community, and they should have to pay for what they’ve done. This lawsuit is about getting damages for the harm caused by the conduct of these oil, gas, and coal companies. We’re not trying to legislate climate change. This is an old-fashioned kind of case that seeks damages, so we have a fund of money to protect our residents and do what we need to do to plan for our future in a responsible way.
JASON: And to put this in some broader context, there are also lawsuits from cities and counties in Colorado, King County, WA, the State of Rhode Island, the City of Baltimore….
KATE: Thank you for raising that. As I mentioned, the three of us were the first that went out there in our group, also represented by our same group of lawyers. We now have the City of Richmond, the City and County of Santa Cruz, the City of Baltimore, and the State of Rhode Island. And then there are the lawsuits that were filed by other entities, like King County.
JASON: Abby, I’d love to ask you while still keeping it accessible for a lay audience, if you can put this in context of a First Nation’s community in Alaska—Kivalina. They filed a case against Murphy Oil, an offshore drilling company in the Gulf of Mexico after hurricane Katrina. Is there anything to your mind that makes this litigation different or perhaps increases the chance of success? Has anything changed since that first round of climate litigation about 10 years ago was filed?
Abigail Dillen
ABIGAIL DILLEN: I would say that one of the biggest differences between the litigations that are going forward now as opposed to Kivalina and some of the first efforts is that the science has advanced so much. It’s possible now to do what climate scientists are calling a sort of a “forensic analysis.” When you look at the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, or you look at the flooding in Louisiana or the impacts of hurricane Sandy, you can determine and you can meet a legal standard that this is more likely the result of climate change than not. In fact, we know by a factor of 100 that this incident was made more likely by climate change.
That gets to the legal issue of causation. If you can prove that the emissions of a large group of what we’re calling the “carbon majors”—essentially oil, gas, and coal companies—have contributed a large share of global emissions, and then you can link those emissions to actual damage, you can quantify that damage in dollars. Then you start having something that looks like a much more conventional tort suit, holding actors accountable for behaviors that have caused damage that’s quantifiable.
The real question is really a philosophical question in my view. Are the courts ready to look at the behavior of the carbon majors as culpable? What Judge Alsup, the federal district court judge in the San Francisco case, and the judge in New York were asking for was briefing on the whole history of industrialization, and asking a question fundamentally: Who’s culpable for this damage? I think their sense is that we’ve all participated in the benefits of a fossil fuel economy and that the court is not the right place to determine who should pay for the negative consequences.
In my view, what that misses is the affirmative choice by these fossil fuel companies to hide the ball, to create a disinformation campaign. No other country is debating the existence of climate change, only the United States. And that alone is having significant impacts on us.
Exxon has adapted its infrastructure to weather the effects of climate change, but should the company have to pay for the damage caused by its public misinformation?
These cases are really pushing the envelope. Win or lose, they are properly in the courts, and they draw on fundamental principles that our society agrees upon. They are putting climate science on trial, and it’s a place where facts can be heard, where facts matter.
JASON: I do want to point out, the federal district court of San Francisco also was asking the plaintiffs and the defendants to balance new harms against benefits. And that’s the tough thing: grappling, for lots of the public, with how we all get benefits out of fossil fuels.
KATE: Judge Alsup clearly hadn’t been paying attention to climate change because he did do a whole workshop to get himself informed—good for him—but he was looking at the wrong question. We’ve had products and litigation in the past. Think of asbestos. Think of tobacco. We’ve had products that the manufacturers knew were damaging. We have a court system that can deal with tort liability, that can deal with impacts that are the result of these products. The question really is different, and you layer on top of that, like tobacco, the intentional misinformation and misrepresentation, and spreading of doubt.
We were glad that we had Chhabria, US District Judge for the Northern District of California, who said this is about damages that are created by a company and by their conduct, and this is an issue that can be adjudicated by the courts, and it belongs back in state court. But it creates challenges for lawyers and judges and lay people in remembering which conversation is the most appropriate to what’s in front of you at the time.
JASON: So these cases are suing the carbon majors, but Coreal, your case is much different. Let’s talk about Our Children’s Trust and the claims being made by your 21 young plaintiffs.
Coreal Riday-White
COREAL RIDAY-WHITE: In a lot of ways, it’s kind of the flip side of the cases against the carbon majors. Whereas those are seeking damages and focusing on adaptation to damage that’s already happened and we know is going to happen, our case is not seeking damages. It’s focused on remediation. Our case is about trying to slow the emission of greenhouse gases and sequester the CO2 that’s already up there, that’s making for this climate chaos we’re starting to see. The fundamental basis behind it is that the government, as the sovereign authority that has control over the essential natural resources we all need to live and that are protected under the Public Trust Doctrine, like our air and our water and our seas, they have a duty to make sure that those essential natural resources are not so depleted that the next generation can’t have them.
On top of that in the Juliana case, what’s also at issue is the plaintiffs have brought a claim under the Fifth Amendment, saying that they have a right to life, liberty, and property without undue influence or loss. The government cannot come in and take away your life or your freedom or your land without getting due process of the law. These plaintiffs are claiming that their government, through all the actions they’ve taken over the last 70 years, have caused a crisis that is now taking away their freedom, eating away at their property and building on the land, and will for future generations threaten their lives. The government has a duty to not violate those fundamental rights. That’s another difference in terms of the cases. Corporations might not owe you that duty, but the government does.
Some of the similarities, though, are about knowledge. We have documents that show that well before we had an EPA, the executive branch of this government had their scientists going out and researching what this burning of fossil fuels, what this CO2 culmination in the atmosphere, was going to mean for the future. In a 1965 report, commissioned by President Johnson, the scientists came back and said at this rate, if we keep on burning fossil fuels the way we are, there will be 25% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the year 2000. And if that happens, we’ll see marked changes in the atmosphere and the weather that we cannot control from the local level. With the benefit of hindsight, we can go back and look at what the CO2 levels were in the atmosphere in 1965 and what they were in 2000, and they were almost exactly 25% more. The scientists knew what they were talking about.
In 1969, a report said that sea levels will rise by 8 to 10 feet by the year 2100 at this rate. A 1970 report said that the issue of the atmosphere and climate “may well determine whether man perishes or survives.” That’s the White House scientists. It’s not us.
JASON: And Lyndon Johnson mentioned it in the State of the Union address in ’65 or ’66, right?
COREAL: Yeah. They read these reports. They knew it. And yet they still continue to base our energy system on the burning of fossil fuels. They continue to permit the expansion of a fossil fuel-based system. They continue to subsidize the industry, give tax breaks to the industry, lease our publicly owned land to the excavation and development of fossil fuels, including off the seashore. Each one of those takes the government saying yes, let’s do that. That’s an action—that’s not an inaction.
The United States is responsible for a full one-quarter of all the CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. We’ve done more to cause this crisis than any other country, and we’re still emitting a lot. Maybe we’re not number one anymore, but we’re one of the very top emitters, even still. And clearly with the current administration, those policies are only regressing.
Scientists in the U.S. have been predicting the climate catastrophe we’re facing today since the 1960s.
But this case is not in response to the current administration. The named defendants originally were President Barack Obama and the heads of his certain agencies, the EPA, Department of Energy, Transportation, Defense. Trump and his administration just inherited it when they came into power. So in that sense it is not political. Most importantly, what it’s asking for is just the court to order the executive branch to create and implement what we call a climate recovery plan, a plan based on what the scientists say we need to do to get back on track, to get climate stability by the end of this century.
JASON: Why is it important for you all to enlist and to work with young people as your plaintiffs?
COREAL: Levi was 8 when we filed. He’s 11 now, and he’s so money! Sometimes our detractors will say that we’re just using these kids, or there’s kind of a front. And let me tell you, we are not. These kids know what’s at stake. They’ve done the least to cause this crisis, and they’re the ones that are going to be affected by it the most.
One of the claims that they brought is an equal protection claim under the Fifth Amendment, wherein it says that all of our laws should be applied equally to all citizens. Their claim is these current policies and laws you have are not being applied equally when you guys are the ones benefiting from them and we’re the ones that are going to have to pay for them.
JASON: Abby, when the case was first filed, a lot of attorneys thought it was quixotic and that it was a pretty big pass to make these claims under equal protection and invoke the Public Trust Doctrine. What has been your sense of it?
ABIGAIL: Well, there were many skeptics of the novel ways that this case pushes the law, and people wondered about how a remedy could be fashioned. I think it was a brilliant stroke to make this a case on behalf of young people, even putting aside the international equal protection claims. Even the skeptics recognized the moral force of the case, and recognized its place as a tool to elevate and educate, and to give these young people voice. Regardless of how people may have felt about the ultimate merits and chances in court, I think overwhelmingly the feeling has been that this is an amazing act of courage, and who can’t be with these young people with their incredibly righteous cause?
I will say that reading Federal Oregon magistrate Judge Aiken’s initial decision rejecting the first motions to dismiss, the government was the most skeptical of all. I think they viewed this case as one that they could easily get dismissed. And so this Magistrate Judge’s opinion was very closely awaited and watched, and the day it came out, we were having a meeting of our trustees, and it’s not our case, and I had just a talk to give to our litigation committee, and I was going to talk about all of our work, but I felt that her decision was so astonishing and consequential in its recognition of a federal trust, a due process claim. It was so incredible to have a judge really internalize the stakes and to say, I’m not going to leave this to the other branches; I think these kids are properly before the court. And so it was a stunning decision.
Earthjustice has been a little bit involved on the edges as this case has moved toward trial and discovery. You can imagine the federal government’s reaction—it’s been like a disbelief. They have made Hail Mary moves to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court to stay this case. So far they’ve been unsuccessful. They have another such bid before the Supreme Court now. We’ll see. The composition of the court has changed since their last unsuccessful effort.
To be fair to the skeptics, this is the kind of case that is likely to command the Supreme Court’s attention. It’s likely to command the attention of Congress to the extent it’s successful. And so I think the ultimate outcomes are subjected to tough politics.
JASON: So Coreal, you’re scheduled to start trial on October 29, 2018. So what is the latest? [Editor’s note: this trial is currently scheduled to begin in summer of 2019.]
COREAL: As Abby said, the defendants really don’t want to go to trial. Our lead attorney Julia Olson, who’s the founder and chief legal counsel of Our Children’s Trust, had a great line at the March for Science this year: “We’re giving science its day in court, where facts are facts and alternative facts are perjury.” Again, legal, reasonable legal minds could probably differ on a lot of that stuff, but I really do believe they just don’t want the testimony. We have some of the world’s most recognized experts that are working pro bono for these youth plaintiffs, including Dr. James Hansen and Nobel prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz, an oceanographer, people from mental and physical health fields. These experts are going to lay out what’s happening and what’s going to happen in such clarity. And the evidence we have about government knowledge is not something I think they want to see the light of day.
JASON: So we got into the particulars of these case(s), but let’s step back and see the forest for the trees: How do these cases help in the larger effort for climate justice for a stable, global atmosphere?
KATE: Litigation is something that’s important because we want to get money to help address the needs and the safety of our communities. But public education, getting everyone involved, and making sure that we’re talking and we’re educated about climate change, and we’re changing our practices and we’re doing everything we can to push others, and companies and businesses to change their practices is hugely important—doing that both on the adaptation and the mitigation side.
We need to be doing everything that we can in any possible way we can think about it, because as we all know, change is happening much more quickly than we anticipated. We have to be engaged in all different ways. There will never be enough money to solve or to really address the adaptation needs that we have to address the impacts of sea level rise and climate change. Our lawsuit is about sea level rise, but as we all know, that’s only one aspect of climate change, and for those of you who are Californians, you know about the intense fires that we’ve had. We’re seeing climate change impacts all over the country—all over the world. We have so much to deal with to try to make our society and our culture and our communities truly adaptable. But the urgency is palpable now.
JASON: Don’t these cases serve as public education vehicles?
ABIGAIL: For sure. I think that’s perhaps most important when it comes to deceit. The New York Attorney General’s office has thought about this litigation and the powers they have under New York statute to force companies to disclose what they’re up to. What they are doing with the kind of discovery of information that’s helped with the Exxon Knew campaign is to erode the social capital of companies like Exxon and Shell and Chevron.
When I was growing up, my association with Exxon was that they sponsored Masterpiece Theatre. The myth in our country is that these are the biggest contributors to American prosperity in history. This administration would like to bring that narrative back.
The other thing I would say is that investors are getting awfully nervous. It’s making the whole fossil fuels sector so nervous that you’re starting to see, in my view, very premature deals floated on the Hill, saying, “Sure. We would love to pay a carbon fee, but we want to be insulated for any liability for anything we’ve ever done in the history of the world.”
KATE: We have a lot of really tremendous activists in our community who have really done great work of trying to get carbon fees and really do a bipartisan effort. The problem is the Republicans are on board with that because one of the things that they want is a waiver of liability. You really need to pay attention to this, because it’s being sold as, “Well, the carbon tax is going to solve the problems, so you don’t need the litigation anyway.” That’s as far from the truth as you can possibly get.
JASON: Coreal, I want to just come back to this question about your case as a public education vehicle, but also an organizing vehicle. You guys have sparked a lot of media and grassroots attention. I know that before this administrative stay was announced, the Sierra Club student coalition is having solidarity rallies at federal courthouses across the country.
COREAL: Both of these cases really allow us all to grapple with the many issues that are at play. There’s of course the intergenerational issue. There’s the reframing of how we see industry and how we see government, and how each decision they make—and even kind of more broadly than that—how each decision all of us makes has an impact, one way or another. Either we’re making a decision that’s taking a destructive action or a corrective action. And I think that this case helps us reframe that in a way.
I think it’s also a chance to really engage civically for everybody, but especially for youth, saying this is what I want my future to look like. That’s pretty cool. And then the idea of like what is a fundamental right, and what is it that we hold dear as a nation? Starting to reframe the issue in a way that helps us look at all the small things but also think about the bigger things in a moral context and a legal context is powerful.
JASON: So we’ve talked about these sort of marquee cases, but there’s lots of other stuff happening. There’s just enforcement of the Clean Water Act, enforcement of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act. When Earthjustice is in the case of, say, fighting the Mountain Valley pipeline or the Atlantic Coast pipeline, those are not always necessarily explicitly climate action cases, but they are advancing the interests of climate justice, right?
ABIGAIL: Yeah. In close partnership with the Sierra Club, we have been using all of the laws we have on the books—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, our federal waste statutes—to force our coal-fired power sector to clean up and stop making money off all of the pollution that it has imposed upon us.
As climate-change-related disasters, such as wildfires, become more prevalent and predictable, insurance companies may pull back on coverage.
When we started this work in the early 2000s, our major utilities were set to build a whole new generation of coal-fired power plants. We knew that we had to stop that if we were going to have any chance of combating climate change because they were the biggest polluters in the country. They still are the biggest polluters in the world. And we were successful in stopping a rush to build new coal-fired power plants—and then we realized we had to get to the existing coal fleet. And at that point, it was a little like Our Children’s Trust in the beginning, the sense that the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and others could do anything about coal in this country just seemed crazy to most people.
We had existing clean air health-driven regulation to try to start getting these standards for air, water, and waste. And we had some consent decrees that the Obama administration forced them to finally institute for the most polluting industry in our country. What that created was a set of obligations to clean up on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars that finally put the choice to big utilities like Duke and Southern Company, and AMP and First Energy: Are you going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in this old polluting facility or are you finally going to shut it down?
What we’re seeing is a wave of retirements of coal plants, except in states where the utility says, “Yes, I want to pay $100 million because I can put those costs onto captive rate payers, and I’ll get a rate of return on that investment.” That’s the case in much of the Midwest. That’s where lawyers have come in again, where we can go into public utility commissions. We don’t have a national energy policy. We have a state-by-state policy that is defined in these public utility commissions that operate like courts of law where you and I, as people who pay electricity bills, have the right to intervene as parties. Once we’re there, we can depose utility executives about what the basis for their assumption that an investment in coal or gas in California, for instance, is better than an investment in renewables. We can make motions.
What we’re able to do as lawyers is go in and say, We’re going to bust up this clubby show. We’re going to present our experts. We’re going to show you that clean energy is actually cheaper than retrofitting that old coal plant. Clean energy’s actually cheaper now than investing in a new gas plant. And we’re having success in places like Indiana and Kentucky, in making that case for clean energy.
As we’re using all of that work to shift the profile of our energy mix toward cleaner energy, that’s when we can start saying, Okay, let’s start electrifying transportation because we’re on track to cleaning up the power sector. Let’s get gas out of our buildings and start electrifying the buildings too.
Audience member: Do insurance companies pay out to those affected by disasters caused by climate change, and are they working on any strategies to be part of a solution?
KATE: As part of being a county supervisor, I also serve on the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. We’ve been looking at sea level rise issues for the San Francisco Bay for the last five years. One of the subcommittees we have is Financing the Future, and it’s been an exercise in frustration. But one of the industries that we’ve met with several times is the insurance industry.
They have said to us in meetings that they never insure what they know will happen. So as these megastorms happen more often, as the science and the predictions get better, that’s actually going to provide tools for the insurance industry to not provide insurance where we might want to see it. There are some people who are more hopeful than I and will say that the industry will be in transition and create new products and try to figure out ways to fund this problem—but I’m not seeing the kinds of development there that are positive for what we want to achieve. I think the securities markets are much more interesting, actually, and there are international re-insurance companies, some of the majors, who have been looking at climate change issues for quite a while now and are working on trying to develop new products to create funding streams for climate change adaptation.
JASON: I heard a good line the other day. I had an interview with Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senator for Rhode Island who’s been a leader on climate. He said climate change is going to get real for the financial markets when sea level rise intrudes on the horizon of a 30-year mortgage. In some places that’s going to be like next year. When it doesn’t make sense to get a mortgage on a home because you can’t get any insurance for it, that is really going to get people’s attention….
Audience member: What can we do in our own communities to prevent fossil fuel companies from expanding or emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
ABIGAIL: I’m thinking about the legal strategies you may have. In all of our states, we have under-enforcement of our laws, and if there is a facility that’s really going rogue in terms of the pollution it’s imposing on neighboring communities, it’s vulnerable to a lawsuit.
KATE: I think acting to stop pollution and finding out where there is pollution is tremendously important. But also trying to find allies and really develop renewable energy production and create these alternatives so people aren’t stuck just going to a utility that is getting power from a dirty energy provider, and that there is in fact that choice in your community can have an incredible impact.
COREAL: I’ll just add, remember that you can work with the law too. We support youth that sue their governments, but we also support youth that work with their governments at a local level to shape their own city ordinances. We call it the Youth Climate Action Now campaign, and it’s been great. Several cities in Oregon have tried it. They’ve actually gotten their city code to change to mandate reductions in fossil fuel use. So it starts by going to city council meetings and testifying, and it’s scary at first but it’s crazy empowering. Then you start to get one-on-one meetings with your city councilors and you start to talk about the policies. You put a face to it, and you tell a story, and then they get invested in it.
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