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Today's Top News
Climate Change and Disaster in Montana
"We're a disaster area," Alexis Bonogofsky told me, "and it's going to take a long time to get over it."
Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, were all over the news earlier this month, telling the world about how Montana's Exxon Mobil pipeline spill has fouled their goat ranch and is threatening the health of their animals.
But my conversation with Bonogofsky was four full days before the pipeline began pouring oil into the Yellowstone River. And no, it's not that she's psychic; she was talking about this year's historic flooding.
"It's unbelievable," she said. "It's like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. It destroyed houses; people died; crops didn't get in the fields…. We barely were able to get our hay crop in."
Everyone agrees that the two disasters — the flooding of the Yellowstone River and the oil spill in the riverbed — are connected. According to Exxon officials, the high and fast-moving river has four times its usual flow this year, which has hampered cleanup and prevented their workers from reaching the exact source of the spill. Also thanks to the flooding, the oiled water has breached the riverbanks, inundating farmland, endangering animals, killing crops and contaminating surface water. And the rush of water appears to be carrying the oil toward North Dakota.
Government and company officials have also speculated that the flooding may even have caused the spill in the first place. Recent testing showed the pipeline was buried five to eight feet under the riverbed, but officials suspect that raging water may have exposed the pipe, leaving it vulnerable to fast-moving debris.
So the flooding may have caused the pipeline spill. But here is the really uncomfortable question: Did the pipeline cause the flooding? Not this one particular pipeline, of course, but all the pipelines, and all the coal trains, and all the refineries and the power plants they supply? Was the flooding that has made the oil spill so much worse caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels? Put bluntly, do these dual disasters have the same root?
This is an unanswerable question, since no one weather event can be traced to climate change. Still, in Montana, it's hard to deny that global warming is happening. The state is home to Glacier National Park, which had 150 large glaciers in 1850 and now has just 25, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
And we do know that Montana's flooding was caused by record rainfall and by runoff from heavy snowfall. Though climate deniers (some of them funded by Exxon) love to point to freak snowstorms as "proof" that the planet isn't warming, the opposite is often true: In some places, the warmer the air, the more water vapor accumulates in the atmosphere and the more moisture comes down in the form of rain or snow.
As Scott put it to me, "We went from drought to rain forest in just a few months. The weather has just been bizarre."
Despite all this, Montana is in the midst of a fossil fuel frenzy. The state's governor may be shaking his fist at Exxon now, but he has championed virtually every fossil fuel project that has crossed his desk, from a vast new coal mine near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, to new rail lines that would help ship Montana's coal to China, to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta's tar sands to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Bonogofsky and Scott are at the forefront of the fight against this carbon-centric vision of Montana's future. When they aren't growing food or taking care of their herd of goats, both are full-time environmental activists: she with the National Wildlife Federation, he with the Sierra Club. But they don't just fight the coal and oil companies; they also work hard to show their fellow Montanans that there are other ways to get energy and create jobs besides drilling and mining, ones that don't turn vast swaths of the state into sacrifice zones.
That is precisely what Bonogofsky was doing when the spill happened. She had arranged for 25 people on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to learn how to install solar air heaters in their homes as part of the EPA's "climate showcase communities" program. She and Scott have also tried to live their beliefs on their farm, which just a few days ago was still a peaceful oasis circled by Billings' three oil refineries and one coal-fired power plant.
"We're trying to be self-sufficient," she told me. "We want to grow all our own food and grow food for other people, not be dependent on fossil fuels."
Now their oasis is choking in oil, carried onto their land by floods very likely linked to the burning of that very same black muck.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllGreat list of articles today here on commondreams.org
Several on climate change. Also the rule of law. And civil disobedience. And the military.
Many of the problems facing our country and the world show up today. You know, the ones we have been ignoring.
I was a freshman in 1960 and my English term paper was on overpopulation. I was horrified. Now 51 years later, the population problem has gotten worse and along with this many other problems.
A philosophy and business professor at UC Berkeley, C. West Churchman, starting about 1980 said the problems of the world were M P cubed. M is militarism. P cubed is three Ps. Population, Poverty and Pollution. He founded the peace studies department there
I would add "Consumerism" to the list for those of us in the "developed" world, although I think they are all interrelated.
Yes. More flooding happens because the warmer air causes more to water to evaporate and warmer air holds more moisture from a larger distance and then it rains like in one place like from a drain of a big bathtub and floods some areas and then other places get less rain because more of it is dumped in one area and they have drought. The climate are changed. There's lots of feedback cycles like this. Like permafrost melting releasing more methane. Is it better if it were spilled or burned? Neither. It is better if it stayed in the ground were it was for millions of years because it wasn't needed then and isn't now. Every drop has disconnected us from our planet and ourselves. My climate change rap song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTX3FJDSFjo
> My climate change rap song
Now I know I'm in hell.
How sad that their farm is surrounded by refineries. I grew up a rancher's daughter in a California town similarly situated. The family ranch was just across the highway from a Colliers (oil) coke plant. Many moms (and a few dads) in my neighborhood died young of cancer, including my aunt, who lived at the ranch. I'm 46, have lived a healthy, holistic life (far from my hometown)...and just had a double mastectomy, due to breast cancer.
The oil spill is just another smelly, dirty layer of toxic garbage atop the invisible layers that those young ranchers and their animals coexist with every day.
Toxic air/land/water = toxic food = sick people
But Naomi is Canadian.
Which makes her chances of being elected no worse than they already are.
Hell, I'm voting for Bradley Manning. With Tim DeChristopher as his VP.
Annex Canada in honor of the War of 1812 bicentennial!
CD just gets better and better. Great articles indeed! This country's hunger for more and more coal, oil, natural gas,etc., is killing this nations great natural treasures as well as it's peoples way of life. Our greed for more of everything will kill this nation. A downfall befitting that of ancient Rome.
In a not to distant future, most of the US will be a desertified wasteland, with the occasional stub of a deserted city poking up out of the dirt. Small bands of militants will roam from place to place ala ''Mad Max' in a desperate, losing search for more gas for their ragtag cars, and ammo for their precious guns.
There will be the occasional oasis of civility, where people who paid attention to the changing world prepared, and now farm and live very close the ground, trading with each other for the little they do not produce locally.
In a few very exclusive enclaves, the Elite will crouch behind their walls and mercenaries, terrified of any who approach, any whom they do not literally own.
Some Americans will have attempted the long trek north, to Canada, where food could still be grown in appreciable quantities. And some oil would still be extracted and processed. But almost everything that was grown and produced would be earmarked for local use, and the Americans would become landless refugees, living in shanty-towns and slums.
Fantasy?
Maybe not. This year's heat wave is an early indicator of what is to come. The US is also on the steep downslope of resource depletion. And in all likelihood, is facing a catastrophic default on it's economic commitments in as little as a week. Early indications are pointing at an economic slump more severe than that of 2008, as many banks are already starting to abandon US T Bills and other instruments.
Get your house in order, learn how to garden, and have a useful skill that will allow you to contribute to the much smaller economy.
Don't worry - capitalism will make everything all right if we just do away with all regulations.
Good to see Naomi here. I'm a Canadian (Calgary), and I guess I do like to see a fellow(ess) Canadian so active in the pursuit of a better world.
I like to think it's possible.
Manysummits
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A fellow fifth columnist, you mean! Well, back off, Frenchy, and hand over your food, tar sands and ice -- cubed. And stop trying to impose Canuck law, eh? We live by the law of the jungle down here.
Nothing will get done until names with faces are exposed and where they live. These sociopaths haven't an ounce of concern for others, as sociopaths aways do, just like how they just brush off the laws and regulations to let them get on with their crooked ways. That, and I would expect others to eventually understand, that they are true criminals and the need to be treated as such where they are a threat to other's lives. And threats to people's lives are just like diseases that require radically treatment to vanquish the problem(s). Otherwise, accept living under their imperial monarchy thumb just like in '1984'.
National activists are calling for a People’s Congress to be held on the Mall in Washington D.C. in the late spring of 2012. James Hansen has already expressed interest in participating as a keynote speaker, and we are hoping for dozens more.
If you recognize as we have that the system is utterly incapable of seriously addressing the threats associated with climate change, and you really would like to do something about it, this is a wonderful opportunity to do something powerful.
Forming a National Assembly may sound a bit radical at first, but the prospects of loosing the battle against climate change are far more radical an alternative than is claiming our constitutional right to govern.
Please lend your voice and leadership to this very well planned event. We all need to stand up Tim, Bradley, and our planet now.
Hhttp://peoplescongress.org