Not Another Decade

Thoughts on the Willow Oil Project

Yesterday, I sat outside on the steps to the studio, reading articles on my phone about the upcoming superbloom, the sun bright on my face. Spring, I thought, was quickly approaching. That is, until I heard that another rainstorm is coming. And I’m a little tired of all this rain, but more particularly the winds and storms. Just the other day, driving back to the East Bay from Marin County, I found out I couldn’t drive over the Richmond Bridge seeing as multiple big rigs had tipped over, likely due to the incredibly high winds. Instead, I had to drive through San Francisco, trapped in traffic.

The rains have not ended and so today, like yesterday, I sit in the sun-filled backyard of overgrown oxalis, nasturtiums, and a stray aster, enjoying the light until next week, thankful for the flowers and crops that will grow because of these storms, but still fucking tired of the rains. I hear black phoebes, house finches, red shouldered hawks, goldfinches, and a din of unknown calls across the heavy traffic. As I am reading about Joe Biden’s approval of the Willow project run by ConocoPhilips, I hear three turkeys jump onto the roof of the house. Who knows how they made it past all these roads. They stare down at me, eventually going back where they came, maybe nervous about me, sitting outside, staring.

It’s hard to say if these rainstorms are truly an anomaly, or if it has been such a long and odd drought that I can’t remember well if the past was this rich with water. While, as the New York Times reported, it is “too soon” to say that these storms are exacerbated by climate change, it does seem likely that more and more deluges in sporadic waves will grow as the temperatures across the globe rise. 

Just another of the millions of reasons to stop drilling for oil.

Yet, a couple days ago President Biden approved the Willow oil drilling plan in Alaska that is one of the largest approved oil projects in decades, one that, put simply, throws a wrench in any promise to better the future for the climate and generations to come. It is a big flip of the bird to Biden’s campaign claim that there will be “no more drilling on federal lands, period.”

But is this really a surprise? A politician announced he would do one thing but, either due to a pathology to lie or a misunderstanding of the complications that are necessary in policy making, upends those promises to ensure political backing for his party from an influential group in the future. This is purely conjecture. But, then again, this is politics.

And while Biden has written out more legislation to benefit environmental issues than any other president, the Willow project is, as Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian, a wake up call.

“Willow is a sobering reality check,” Milman wrote, “the project will wipe out the emissions cuts provided by all renewable energy developments over the next decade, adding the equivalent of 2m[illion] new gas-guzzling cars to the roads.”

As Milman reported in The Guardian, Biden has been called America's “first climate president” with many bills aimed at reducing emissions and growing renewable energy sources in the landmark Infrastructure Bill. And yet, even with this moniker, he still has signed 100 more oil drilling leases than Donald Trump did in the same amount of time. Yet, because of one bill and his plain speaking rhetoric about the environment, we call him a climate president. 

But it is just rhetoric. That’s it. Simply put, it’s politics, without regard for the severity of the issue at stake. 

The Biden administration believes that “we’re going to need oil for at least another decade,” as he said in his State of the Union. And this could be true, but we already have plenty of oil fields. 

This situation itself reminds me of what Nathan J Robson said of Don’t Look Up, the  movie about a comet that destroys earth because of an inability to act quickly enough. In his essay explaining what most critics miss about the movie, he makes the claim that the film is not yelling at us but rather at those in power who manipulate the masses into a false perception of reality. As Robson wrote, “Their lives are destroyed not because we are idiots but because those with power choose to delay, deny, and mislead, more interested in their own short-term gain than the future of humanity—in part because these people know that the catastrophe they have wrought will not have the same consequences for them personally.”

The Biden administration, along with those in power more generally, understand that they will be able to survive whatever negative outcomes they incur on the planet. They’ll be able to blast off in their rockets like Jeff Bezos, or hide in bunkers, or live on islands far away from all other human suffering (as they already metaphorically and sometimes literally do), and not bear the consequences of the torture they caused to this earth.

The nasturtiums in my yard, along with oxalis, and the waves of wild plantain, myself, and even the turkeys on the roof will suffer the powerful's negligence for short term gains. The grasses, overgrown, and the jasmine finding its way along the fence, they will be the ones to hurt. But not Joe Biden, nor his grandchildren. They will be safe, housed by power and wealth, and made safe by an ignorant idea that things can stay as they are even, as Biden said, for another decade.

However, due to the onslaught of pushback this action has received along with a shift in spending on clean energy across the world, as Milman sees it there is still some hope for this to be the last of an era of kowtowing to fossil fuel companies seeing as spending is shifting away from oil and going in the direction of electric cars and clean energy. “With energy efficiency upgrades and ongoing drops in the cost of clean energy, society will hopefully not need to be scratching around in the wilds of the Arctic, one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, to power itself.”

I hope he’s right.

P.S. I really recommend reading Robson’s essay on Don’t Look Up. It gives a really great and detailed explanation of why the movie, and our society itself, is misled into believing that individuals should take responsibility, rather than those that are in power.