Collision With Reality

James Wells develops systems that support energy efficiency incentive programs. He spends his spare time encouraging people to actively participate in the decision about the Gateway Pacific coal terminal.

It’s all just fine, until the moment that it’s not: rock rips through steel, oil pours into the water, and all prior plans are out the window. The event was allegedly unlikely moments before, but now it’s a certainty, because it has just occurred.

Before the occurrence of disaster, we had a collection of glossy pamphlets explaining why this would not occur. Now we have – The Safety Manuals.

These binders full of plans, impressively thick and technical-looking in their accustomed role as shelf-ware, are now expected to provide all of the answers in dealing with the situation.

This was described in a pointed two-minute comment provided by concerned citizen Kate Bowers at one of the recent coal terminal public hearings. “Bring on the Safety Manuals!” as she said at the Mount Vernon hearing, creates in five words an irrepressible image of how future terminal or bulker ship operators will face their moment of disaster at some time in the future.

Dire prediction? Nope, just inference from many similar occurrences. Kate provides background: “My fifth grade school field trip was a ferry boat ride on the Cuyahoga River as it burned!” And while the petroleum and related industries may not light rivers on fire near population centers any more, the never-ending procession of releases, spills, collisions, and blowouts tell us that the next disaster is a statistical certainty.

Clashing Realities

Statements like Kate’s expose the collision between some kind of Official Reality, as shown by glossy diagrams, and the Actual Reality on the ground, or in the sea.

While much of our attention in this area has recently been focused on the coal terminal scheme, that is just one part of plans to expand shipments of fossil fuels through our area. There are plans to ship Bakken shale oil out through Pacific ports like Grey’s Harbor, as well as tar sands oil export plans. When an oil-filled ship sinks in the Salish Sea, as someday it will, it won’t matter whether the nominal cargo is coal or some other fossil fuel.

With extractive industry, we often hear official-sounding pronouncements about how, this time, it will all be fine. Usually the paper-over job will hold together long enough for them to get their permits. By that point, of course, it’s generally too late to do anything about it, even when the reality of how they operate doesn’t match the glossies. Once the money is spent and the facility is launched, the only negotiation that’s allowed is the location and orientation of the deck chairs.

So when people raise concerns about large increases in ship traffic in our region, the message exists on two levels simultaneously. On one level, we’re pointing to the facts of the specific matter, such as the considerable risk of massive bulkers blundering through the china shop of the Salish Sea. On another level, the really important message is: “Don’t Trust the Glossies!”

This draws our attention directly to the ugly seam between what big carbon promotes, and how these extractive industries actually work.

Cracking Open The Brochure

For many members of the community, the first time they ever really understood the realities of coal terminal operations was the moment they first saw an image of a coal terminal, taken by photographer Paul Anderson (www.paulkanderson.com). For others, their first clear understanding of some likely consequences came from art by John Ritter, commissioned by Coal Train Facts (www.coaltrainfacts.org).

For still others, it was at one of the coal port public hearings, where people from all walks of life described their concerns about impacts, whether chronic or suddenly catastrophic. In one notable case, an attendee who had been recruited to speak in favor of the coal terminal, after hearing from other community members about their concerns, spent her two minutes apologizing in tears for ever supporting such an idea.

The official battle is of detailed fact versus detailed fact, deep in the documents of the permit process. The larger battle, in the arena of public understanding, is centered on endlessly-creative efforts to reveal underlying truths in the face of denial and bland assurances.

We’ve heard it all before: Don’t you worry your pretty little head. Never mind Exxon Valdez and other spills. Air pollution or global warming? Meh — it’s not our concern what the recipients of the coal do with it once they buy it.

What causes us to even consider accepting the assurances of a group of industries that has burned us so many times?

“Put Your Trust In Us”

There is something else at work, beyond their large advertising budgets, political contributions to office-holders, and other big-dollar efforts to control the discourse.

Big carbon extractive industry plays into a deeply-ingrained assumption in our culture: we believe in the diligence of others.

If you didn’t believe that people and organizations are, in large measure, reasonably diligent, then you couldn’t live in today’s world. You couldn’t drive a car, especially on any road that has any traffic, or be a passenger. You couldn’t get into an elevator, let alone an airplane. The entire fabric of our modern society is based on a huge number of interlocking parts that all have to work reliably.

We have this belief in the diligence of others because, most of the time, it is warranted. The other drivers really do stay on their side of the road. When a large failure-event occurs, especially of a consumer product, investigation and action is demanded. When Tylenol medicines were tampered with, resulting in seven deaths, industry and regulators took immediate action so the event would not recur. When an airplane goes down, the NTSB crawls over the wreckage for months or years, adding to their store of information about how to make airplanes safer, and requiring that improvements be implemented.

So it’s natural to be trusting when people propose a new business activity and promise that it will be done well. The glossy ads for big carbon deliberately leverage on this instinct to trust. You see people who look like you and me, ready and eager to work. It’s emotionally difficult to imagine that such people would be any less diligent than the people who bring us food or medicine, or who operate planes.

Glossing Over the Problem

While the fossil fuel industry asks to be granted the benefit of the doubt yet again, they also do everything they can to reduce their exposure in the event of an accident.

The nonsensical Citizens United reading aside, corporations are life forms, of sorts. They come into being, they grow, they spawn. Corporations evolve in a manner that reflects their environment, in a combination of Darwinian and Lamarckian forces. So it is broadly true that for-profit corporations will expand into the space provided by opportunities, including opportunities presented by the ability to avoid responsibility.

As corporations, singly or acting in concert, have developed the power to change their environment, their original tendencies are magnified. Where an industry has thrived in an environment of reduced accountability, then an obvious way to increase their competitive advantage is to change the rules to create even less accountability. And so it has occurred with big carbon.

Examination of any big carbon extraction and shipping enterprise reveals a carefully-constructed web of irresponsibility that has not only taken full advantage of all available rules, but has modified the rules for the enterprise’s purposes. That ship careening through the Salish Sea — who owns it? Who is responsible? The only certainty is that when catastrophe strikes, responsible parties will be difficult to find. Surprise, surprise—those who have made the most money will magically not be those who have to pay.

Even the idea of paying for a tragedy such as a major oil spill is another version of official reality that ignores actual reality. Let’s say that, in such an event, we do pry loose some buckets of money from the culpable parties. What then?

Money Changes Everything?

Within the transactional cocoons of our daily lives, we imagine that money solves problems. If the problem at hand is your ability to procure dinner for tonight, then that’s generally so. But there are many problems that no amount of money can touch.

We have already seen the limits of money to address big issues, and this will become even more clear in the years to come. Today it may be an oil spill, where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not be able to prevent vast quantities of marine life from dying. In the not-too-distant future, we will discover that no amount of imagined wealth in some collection of equity accounts will be enough to grow food on land where it no longer rains or rains too much, to bring the dead coral reefs back to life, or to get back the climate that nourished our world when we were kids.

Our mission, and I implore you to accept it, is to find as many ways as possible to pull back the curtain of Official Reality, so that our friends and neighbors can get a clear view of the Actual Reality that we all face. It’s more than the facts. It’s art. It’s humor. Images. Poetry. Music. Narrative. And, of course, even more facts.

All carrying a vital message for our community: Don’t Trust the Glossies!

End Notes

We may be done with EIS scoping public comments, but the issue of Gateway Pacific Terminal is not going away. See www.coaltrainfacts.org for the latest updates. Featured public comments are at http://www.coaltrainfacts.org/scoping/featured-scoping-comments

To see and hear Kate Bowers’ public comment that shreds the curtain of Official Reality into tiny pieces, go to Youtube.com and enter search-terms “Kate Bowers EIS.” Thanks to Kate for the review, quotes, and her public comment.