WORLDFIRE - Chapter 2, Part I

Gut Check

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

Before we venture any further on this journey, I need to share what drove me to trade in a stable, comfortable lifestyle and lucrative career as a wind industry consultant for the shaky, precarious existence of grassroots climate activism. Truth be told, it was not a difficult choice. What drew me to the wind industry was not the lure of comfort or money, as grateful as I was for both. What drew me was my panic at watching the accelerating destruction of our planet’s life support systems without a serious response by government, the business community or civil society.

At first glance, I am not the likeliest of candidates to devote one’s life to protecting the planet, but that’s where my path led me. I grew up the second of four children in an upper-middle-class family in the small town of Sharonville, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. I had a fairly typical Midwest upbringing (for a privileged white male), yet was different enough from my siblings that one of my uncles used to tease me that I was adopted (I wasn’t). Ours was a socially broad-minded and fiscally conservative household where the values of kindness and frugality were instilled in me at a young age, so I have never really understood the concept of racial or religious prejudice. I was taught that all people are the same and should be treated with respect. Just as I am no better than anyone else, nor am I any less than anyone else. We are all members of the same race–the human race. My young mind was no more able to make peace with injustice than my mind is today.

In one family sit-down I will never forget–I was maybe 11–my parents told my three siblings and me that they would no longer be dragging us to church on Sundays. They told us they would not be attending either because Catholicism was not what they believed. They encouraged each of us to decide for ourselves if we had a spiritual path to walk. I have never felt more respected by my parents than I did on that day. But it was their love of the outdoors that led me to discover my life’s true path. The seeds of my personal connection to the Earth were planted with the freedom of transcendent play in the woods behind my childhood home, seeds that sprouted on family camping trips, including summer excursions out West, where we explored one glorious national park after another. Our red, faux wood-paneled station wagon hauled a pop-up camper, an airy abode I enjoyed more than any house I have ever lived in (save the cabin where I’m living now). My love for the Earth was further deepened by adventurous scouting outings during my teenage years. In my early 20s, I heeded the iconic call to “Go West, young man,” rocketing to the Rocky Mountains atop a shiny black motorcycle, landing at the University of Colorado in Boulder, a community that nourished a widening of my worldview. All of these formative experiences awakened in me a deep, abiding love for our planet that has only grown stronger with time.

Have you ever stopped to think how amazing it is that out of more than 200 billion galaxies in space, our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a shimmering blue marble of a planet just far enough away from the Sun not to burn up, yet close enough not only to make life possible, but comfortable? Out of all the planets in the universe, humans are blessed to live on one that is not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Some call it the Goldilocks effect. Something I find even more amazing is to be living on a planet that is spinning on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour while flying through space at an astonishing 67,000 miles per hour. How about the fact that the only thing separating us from the cold blackness of space is a thin 4-12 mile thick band of life-giving atmosphere, of which the lower layer is fortunately made up of air? Or that the air that makes life even possible is itself made possible only by trees and other plants and organisms that absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen?

Mother Earth provides us not only with everything we need to survive. She animates our days with untold beauty that helps us thrive. For all that we receive from her, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that she be given a little respect in return. Instead, most of humanity has been anything but respectful. Instead of loving our mother, we ignore her and treat her with contempt. We take and we take and we take without giving anything back. This is not only disrespectful; it is suicidal. For if our ecological life support system crashes, humanity crashes with it. History is littered with the detritus of vanished civilizations that ignored this basic truth.

Try thinking about it this way: every breath you took today was a gift from Gaia. Every bite of food you ate today was a gift from Gaia. Every drop of water you drank today was a gift from Gaia. Absent such Gaian grace, you would cease to survive. During our innocent childhood, Mother Earth cradled humanity in her loving arms, but then we turned into rebellious teenagers–a phase we never seemed to outgrow–and have been trashing the place ever since. We have to stop hurting our mother. If humans want to keep living on this glorious living planet, we are going to have to grow up as a species and start behaving like responsible adults.

One might assume given this book’s emphasis on science and policy that I believe technology and laws alone can save us. I do not believe that, for it is not just a climate crisis we face. We face a deeper crisis of the soul, precipitated by the destructive myth of separation. Science and technology can only teach us so much in a spirit-animated world. Alone among all the species on Earth, most of us seem to have forgotten that we, too, are part of the great web of life. We seem to have forgotten that we all share a common mother. I believe it is this disconnect from our earthly home, and from our fellow planetary travelers, that is the cause of so much of humanity’s current distress. Too many of us have unplugged ourselves from the truth by buying into the lie of separation, which says we are apart from the Earth. We are not apart from the Earth. We are part of the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth. That we knew this once, and that Indigenous cultures know it still, gives me hope that humanity can find a way to mend this severed connection before the hour grows too late.

As someone who believes each of us came into this world with a specific purpose, I also believe our real job in life is to figure out what that purpose is and manifest it. My mission in this life, as I understand it thus far, is to help humanity protect our one and only home, not just for us and ours, but for all life on Earth–for all our relations. I feel deeply blessed to have known for all of my adult life why I am here and for having had so many years on this glorious planet to live that truth. Not that I pretend to have it all figured out–far from it. Like everyone, I have my nagging bouts of doubt. I have my personal blind spots and fears. Life’s a great mystery, and there is probably far more I don’t know about my personal journey than what I do, but I have always at least felt headed in the right direction. Of this much, however, I am sure: the closer I listen to my inner voice, the clearer my life path becomes.

That path took a fateful turn in early 2004. Long frustrated by the conservation movement’s failure to prioritize the climate crisis (this has since thankfully changed), I had just emerged from a year of soul searching with a newfound awareness that I needed to be doing more than just fighting problems. I needed to be promoting solutions. So I decided to trade in a world I knew for one I didn’t by migrating from the nonprofit arena to the business world, specifically the wind industry. Through its recent growth and economic competitiveness, the wind industry had shown it was ready for prime time, with the solar industry not far behind. Assuming that the wind lobby was as hungry as I was to seize market share from the coal industry and move us beyond the carbon economy, I made it my new mission in life to help the wind industry jumpstart a green industrial revolution.

My big break came in the form of a phone call from my uncle, then a top executive at a wind company called enXco. Signing on as a consultant, I started at the bottom, securing land easements for various wind projects. Before long I was helping the company build bridges with California conservation groups. Not long after that, I was helping secure government permits for wind projects in California. At the height of my industry influence, I served as Special Advisor to the president of the board of the American Wind Energy Association, but first more on the backstory.

Upon entering the industry, I remember being not only shocked, but alarmed by how much distrust and animosity existed between wind energy companies and conservation groups. Shocked because replacing polluting fossil fuels with clean renewable energy is one of the biggest levers we have to combat the climate crisis. Alarmed because litigation was more common than collaboration despite there being no bigger threat to wildlife everywhere than climate breakdown. What I discovered was poor communication, and in some cases outright hostility, between wind energy companies and green groups, which I viewed as the industry’s natural allies. In response, I persuaded enXco’s Southwest Regional Director to support my efforts to reach out to some of these green groups for input and guidance on an enXco wind project being planned in Kern County, California. This bridge building built trust between enXco and key conservation groups around a project called PdV, later praised as a model for responsible development and proactive engagement.

As expressed by Carl Zichella, then Regional Staff Director of the California Sierra Club: “I have been extremely impressed by enXco's openness and willing[ness] to engage with the environmental community early on. I also believe this openness, contrary to notions that it can create problems for projects, will pay off. Environmentalists, myself included, have been very impressed that the company has taken our concerns very seriously, and spent large sums not in ducking them, but exploring them head-on. I feel I can trust company representatives because they have hired reputable biologists who would not hesitate to highlight problems should they exist. The Sierra Club wants to recognize companies who make the effort enXco is making... We may not always agree, but… we will disagree much less and more projects will make it to the finish line thanks to the example enXco is setting.”

This caught the attention of Jim Walker, enXco’s Vice President of Asset Management, who sought my help on the highly charged Altamont Pass bird controversy. It didn’t take long for me to learn that much of the animosity from wildlife organizations stemmed from the industry’s apathetic response to decades of golden eagle deaths at Altamont Pass near San Francisco, at the time a major flashpoint in the debate over wind energy’s impacts on birds. If you have ever witnessed the glory of a golden eagle soaring, you will understand the reason for the animus. Built in 1982 before much was known about raptor/wind turbine dynamics, the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area was the first major wind area developed in the U.S. Unfortunately, wind-rich Altamont and its more than 5,000 wind turbines happened to share real estate with the highest concentration of golden eagles in North America. As a result, more than 100 of the majestic birds of prey were perishing there every year.

After decades of industry inaction and denial, the Center for Biological Diversity and other outraged conservation groups got the wind industry’s attention by dragging them into court in 2004. Thanks to those long overdue lawsuits, progress has been made in reducing bird deaths at Altamont Pass. Remedies applied by enXco and other wind companies owning Altamont wind projects as part of the court settlement included seasonal shutdowns and the removal of turbines with higher numbers of bird strikes. A more recent industry remedy showing great promise in protecting raptors is camera-based automated wind turbine curtailment.

Fortunately, Altamont Pass was an industry anomaly. While any bird deaths are heartbreaking to those of us who love birds, it is important to put the number of avian mortalities caused by the wind industry, including those at Altamont, into perspective. Few human activities have zero impacts on wildlife, and overall, wind turbines cause relatively few bird deaths nationwide. As estimated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the top human-caused threats to birds (averaged annually) are:

• Cats: 2,400,000,000 deaths

• Building Glass: 599,000,000 deaths

• Vehicles: 214,500,000 deaths

• Poison: 72,000,000 deaths

• Electrical Lines: 25,500,000 deaths

• Communication Towers: 6,600,000 deaths

• Electrocutions: 5,600,000 deaths

• Oil Pits: 750,000 deaths

• Land-Based Wind Turbines: 234,012 deaths

With the recent growth in wind power, those fatality numbers are almost certainly higher today, but wind power nevertheless represents a tiny fraction of bird deaths overall. Regardless of how the Altamont challenge is ultimately resolved, I knew it was a self-inflicted black eye the industry could ill afford to repeat. To help ensure that did not happen, I proposed to the Executive Director of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) a bridge-building effort to national green groups to build upon the productive relationship the trade association already enjoyed with one such group, the Union of Concerned Scientists. When Randy Swisher responded that AWEA already had too much on its plate, I proposed to enXco’s Jim Walker that we tackle it ourselves. Jim–widely respected in the industry for his knowledge and outside-the-box thinking–ran it up the company flagpole, and in a testament to enXco’s enlightened corporate culture, we were given the green light to proceed.

Armed with enXco’s backing, I began dialing up my contacts in the conservation community to open up lines of communication in search of common ground. Over the course of a year, Jim and I traveled to Washington, DC and New York to meet with the directors and high-level staff of prominent national conservation groups. In 2005, we briefed the leadership of 11 different conservation groups on the state of the industry and on efforts being undertaken to resolve the Altamont challenge, while also exploring possible avenues of collaboration to responsibly ramp up wind power to address the climate crisis. The following year, we met with the leadership of ten more green groups, where I noticed a heightened focus on the urgency of the climate emergency from our meetings of just the year before. Topics discussed included the need for wind companies to proactively get out ahead of the wind/wildlife conflict curve; a recognition that wind power has a key role to play in combating the climate crisis; and the need for conservation groups to embrace climate solutions like wind power. To our delight, this shuttle diplomacy unearthed a lot of common ground and a genuine desire to engage. It also laid the foundation for future collaborations between the wind industry and some of these groups. Another organization we briefed on the state of the industry was the CNA Military Advisory Board, an elite group of retired generals and admirals from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps that view projected changes to the climate as a “threat multiplier” and as “a serious threat to America’s national security.”

Around this same time, I began advising Jim in his capacity as Chair of AWEA’s Siting Committee, while the Committee’s Vice Chair, Wayne Walker (no relation to Jim), was busy drafting a strategy document proposing the creation of an organization to help guide wind power development in a way that would minimize impacts to wildlife and wildlife habitat. That fall, the three of us sequestered ourselves for two days on Wayne’s family ranch in Round Top, Texas to take the first cut at a PowerPoint presentation laying out the vision. To his great credit, when Randy Swisher saw the progress we were making, he went to bat for us with AWEA’s board of directors, and in a nod to the initiative’s promise, tapped AWEA’s Manager of Siting Policy to provide us with feedback and advice. Over the ensuing two years, our team created a series of increasingly detailed concept presentations, which Jim used to keep AWEA’s board appraised of our progress. In 2007, the organizational concept was collectively fleshed out by key industry representatives, top conservation leaders, and high-level federal agency staff at a series of scoping sessions held in Washington, DC, facilitated by wildlife policy expert Ron Helinski. At the last of these sessions, Randy Swisher made the key recommendation that the group’s board be divided equally between conservation and wind industry representatives, after which AWEA’s board unanimously recommended that the group be developed as a stand-alone organization.

The fruit of all of our labor was the American Wind Wildlife Institute (AWWI), a first of its kind nonprofit organization co-founded by Jim, Wayne, and me. Officially launched in 2008 with a powerhouse team of conservation and industry leaders, AWWI grew to represent 12 conservation groups and 12 wind energy companies working together to facilitate the timely and responsible development of wind energy projects while protecting wildlife and wildlife habitat. In the words of the head of one of those groups, Defenders of Wildlife’s Jamie Rappaport Clark: ”I firmly believe that we can achieve both our wind development and our wildlife conservation goals. Americans should not and do not have to choose between reducing our carbon footprint and protecting our country's precious wildlife and natural resources; we can have both if we plan smart from the start.” AWWI is not the end game. It is just the beginning. But this unique collaboration shows a proactive industry that is willing to hold itself to a higher standard than fossilized energy industries. Knowing that solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy technologies can also negatively impact wildlife, my expressed dream was for AWWI to one day become the American Renewables Wildlife Institute to help renewable projects of all kinds be developed responsibly–a dream that came true 12 years later when AWWI became the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute (REWI).

But it was not just conflict and litigiousness that surprised me as a wind industry newcomer. What threw me even more was this: the industry I viewed as the tip of the spear in combatting the climate crisis had an internal goal of providing a paltry six percent of America’s electricity needs. Baffled by the smallness of this vision, I used every available opportunity to prod AWEA’s leadership to raise this goal to 20 percent by 2020. Veteran wind visionaries like Paul Gipe were agitating for the industry to do even more. And we were far from alone. A focus group survey performed for AWEA in 2006 found that “consumers are not impressed and are impatient with the projection that only 6% of the nation’s electric supply will come from wind power by 2020.” But we might as well have been talking to ourselves.

You will never guess who finally convinced AWEA to raise its sights. President George W. Bush opined in 2006 that wind energy could possibly provide up to 20 percent of America’s electricity by the year 2030. Soon after that, AWEA embraced this benchmark as its new goal. Yes, you read that right. It took a Texas oilman to convince the nation’s largest wind energy trade association to begin calling for 20 percent wind power for the United States.

This next one may also surprise you. Because we have all seen their deceptive television ads, we know the oil, coal, and gas lobbies spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on tax deductible ads promoting their industries on TV (you might remember BP’s failed attempt to try to rebrand itself as “Beyond Petroleum”). But not the wind lobby. I hoped this might change when at an AWEA Awards Banquet speech in 2006, AWEA board president Edward Zaelke called for a national visibility campaign: “[I]f we want those public policy decision makers to support what we do, we cannot be invisible to them and we cannot continue to be invisible to mainstream America. In order to win acceptance in the mainstream, two things must happen. First, mainstream America must view the issues that wind energy helps address–global warming and independence from foreign fuels–to be of top importance on the national agenda. And I mean important as numbers 1 and 2 on the list, not 16th and 17th. Second, the American mainstream must be [made] aware of the benefits and potential that wind energy provides to address those concerns.” Zaelke’s speech was music to my ears. But instead of ponying up the necessary resources to plant the wind industry’s flag on Main Street, AWEA waited for another Texas oilman, T. Boone Pickens, to spend $58 million of his own money on a 2008 TV ad blitz to popularize wind power in America. The same T. Boone Pickens who contributed $2 million to the “Swift Boat” smear campaign that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid and who not long after betting big on wind doubled down on the methane gas fracking boom. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

For those not familiar with fracking, filmmaker Josh Fox of Gasland fame explains how climate-destroying so-called natural gas is extracted through hydraulic fracturing: “Once a well is drilled, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected, under high pressure, into a well. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well.” What proprietary chemicals, you might ask? “Fracking fluid is a toxic brew that consists of multiple chemicals. Industry can pick from a menu of up to 600 different kinds… we don't even know all the chemicals being used… But many of the ones we do know about are well-documented for causing cancer, birth defects, and disorders of the nervous system,” Fox shares. This chemical mystery soup is poisoning communities all across America by contaminating local groundwater supplies. Trying to squeeze every last drop of fossil fuels out of the Earth is not only climate madness. It’s a public health emergency.

Whoever coined the term “natural gas” did a masterful job of branding. Intentional or not, adding the comforting word “natural” to gas makes the fuel sound benign, even healthy. Of course, it is neither of those things. Because the primary component of natural gas is methane, I will be referring to “natural gas” as “methane” in the remainder of this book, since that is what it primarily is. Burning methane gas may emit less carbon pollution than coal, but leakage in its production and transportation makes its climate impact comparable to coal. Long promoted by industry as a “bridge fuel” from dirty energy to clean energy, methane gas is actually a bridge to nowhere. Like a physical bridge to nowhere that ends precipitously, industrial fracking for methane gas is leading us off the climate cliff.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.