02 October 20
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Naomi Klein | A Message From the Future II: The Years of Repair
Naomi Klein, The Intercept
Klein writes: "Do we even have a right to be hopeful? With political and ecological fires raging all around, is it irresponsible to imagine a future world radically better than our own? A world without prisons? Of beautiful, green public housing? Of buried border walls? Of healed ecosystems? A world where governments fear the people instead of the other way around?"
Can we imagine a better future? If we stop talking about what winning actually looks like, isn’t that the same as giving up?
These are questions we wrestled with as we conceived of a sequel to last year’s Emmy-nominated short, “A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” The first film, co-written by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple, was set in a can-do, cli-fi future: one in which bold, progressive politicians joined with grassroots movements to launch the “Decade of the Green New Deal,” battling poverty, injustice, and climate disruption all at the same time. The film touched a nerve and ended up being viewed more than 12 million times, convincing our little team of the need for more art that departs from well-worn apocalyptic scripts.
Then Covid-19 hit.
About a month into the pandemic lockdown, I started talking with my partner Avi Lewis, who co-wrote and produced the last film, about whether the utopian imagination could possibly have a role to play in this markedly less optimistic political moment.
We honestly weren’t sure. Last time, we could see a clear if narrow political path to the hopeful future Molly Crabapple illustrated. The piece was conceived shortly after the Sunrise Movement stormed the halls of power in Washington, demanding a Green New Deal. That challenge was immediately picked up by Ocasio-Cortez and then quickly echoed by several of the top contenders to lead the Democratic Party — most notably, Bernie Sanders. “A Message From the Future” was an attempt to help viewers envision what the world could look like if the Green New Deal was actually the governing framework in the largest economy on the planet. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez said in the voiceover, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
As we all know, U.S. politics is in a very different place today. Sanders lost the primaries, as did every other candidate who seemed to grasp the urgency of transformational policy. The only viable hope of unseating Donald Trump is a presidential ticket crafted to tightly hug the political center, while fending off the demands animating progressive movements, whether to defund the police, or provide free universal health care, or introduce a sweeping Green New Deal.
Beating Trump is urgent, about that I have no doubt. But while doing so is necessary to fend off naked authoritarianism in the White House, it is decidedly not enough to escape the many other intersecting crises bearing down on the country and the world: whether climate collapse, surging white supremacy, or widespread famine. These unyielding political facts makes our path to a nonapocalyptic future distinctly less clear than it was one year ago. And so the question: Is it ethical to expend energy dreaming of a another world when so many fires need extinguishing right now? On the other hand, if we stop talking about what winning actually looks like, isn’t that the same as giving up? Besides, are we so sure big wins are impossible? The coronavirus has already ushered in changes few imagined or foretold just a few months ago. Entire high-carbon, high-consumption industries are on their knees: cruise ships, airlines, fashion. The Movement for Black Lives has redrawn the political map, and nurses are local heroes. If this isn’t the time to advance a vision of the world governed by radically more humane and inclusive values, when is?
We called Molly, who had been painting portraits of essential workers and projecting them on the sides of Manhattan buildings, and started a conversation about the role of futurism in moments when so much seems lost. Tentatively, we began to brainstorm about crafting a second “Message From the Future,” one shaped by burning cities and burning forests and, of course, a highly contagious and deadly virus.
Opal Tometi, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and longtime migrant rights advocate, joined us as co-author and co-narrator. And over the months of lockdown and deadly reopenings, a picture of a possible, beautiful future slowly came into focus, along with a steep and perilous path to getting there.
We knew a few things from the start. First, that in the midst of such a transnational set of crises, the film needed to feel and sound distinctly more global than the last one, where all of the action took place in the U.S. We also knew that we needed to show more fight this time — the street battles and the general strikes that must be escalated and won before any kind of safe, humane future is even a prospect.
Finally, and relatedly, no politician, no matter how progressive, could be the protagonist of the sequel. This time, rank-and-file organizers and activists would be the stars. Given the array of corporate powers resisting change, and the bleak electoral options on offer, social movements are now the only force left with the power to grab the wheel of history and veer us off our current deadly trajectory. And not one or two movements, but an unprecedented convergence and collaboration of disparate and often divided political strains: organized labor, Black liberation, climate, Indigenous, feminist, disabled, migrant, queer, unhoused, worker cooperatives, and more. Everyone locked out of the elite Great Gorging (it’s not a Great Depression) will be needed, along with a common vision that weaves together each of these movements’ boldest and most transformational demands.
A short piece of art is not a political platform, and so it was never our goal to be comprehensive. Rather, we looked for threads of connection in the hopes that they would inspire more. In the film, Covid-19 acts as a kind of character in the drama, almost like a tough teacher instructing humanity in a series of lessons that should have been obvious long ago. Lessons about the essential labor that makes life possible and enjoyable — and yet has been so persistently discounted. Lessons about systemic racism as an assault on the human body, one that makes it more vulnerable on every front. Lessons about how community is our best technology, especially during times of crisis. Lessons about how damage done to the natural world will invariably blow back on us, whether in the form of disease or climate disruption or both.
Lessons, too, about the risks and deadly cruelty of warehousing human beings: in prisons, immigrant detention camps, and for-profit old-age homes, as well as in cavernous meatpacking plants and sprawling “fulfillment centers.” Hidden from prying eyes, so many people are packed together in these inhuman institutions — treated as if they have no inherent value whatsoever, in the case of prisons, or as if they are distinctly less valuable than the products, plants, or animal carcasses they prepare for consumption. It was in these places, already so sick, that the virus spread like wildfire.
Another Covid-19 lesson we wanted to highlight had to do with why the abuses that long predated the pandemic suddenly received so much more attention during it. It’s a lesson, perhaps, about the relationship between speed and solidarity. Because for those of us privileged enough to self-isolate, the virus forced a radical and sudden slowdown, a paring and editing down of life to its essentials that was undertaken in a bid to stop the virus’s spread. But that slowness had other, unintended effects as well. It turns out that when the deafening roar of capitalism-as-usual quiets, even a little, our capacity to notice things that were hidden in plain view may grow and expand.
For some, that awareness has expanded to encompass the cruelty of those long-ignored human warehouses. For others, it has stretched to include the previously drowned out sounds and sights of the natural world. And during this time of “terror and tenderness,” as Opal and Avi put it in the script, a great many people found new capacity to stand up for Black lives in the face of unremitting state violence.
There is no one answer or simple explanation for why we find ourselves in the throes of the deepest and most sustained public reckoning in a half-century with the evil that is white supremacy. But we cannot discount the “solidarity in vulnerability that the pandemic has generated,” as Eddie Glaude Jr. put it, while discussing his brilliant and highly relevant biography of James Baldwin, “Begin Again.” In forcing all of us to confront the porousness of our own bodies in relationship to the vast web of other bodies that sustain us and the people we love — caregivers, farmers, supermarket clerks, street cleaners, and more — the coronavirus instantly exploded the cherished, market-manufactured myth of the individual as self-made island.
Consciousness of our own vulnerability, as Glaude says, can sow solidarity. Especially when that consciousness is combined with more time. Because when we are moving at the velocity of pre-pandemic life, endlessly striving and climbing, frantically making sure that we do not fall behind, busyness can act as a deadening agent. There is no time to think about who makes our stuff or where our trash goes or what wars — domestic and international — are waged in our name. And certainly, there is no time, or so we have so often been told, to look back at the past and present terror committed against Black and Indigenous peoples — crimes so profitable that they produced the vast wealth on which contemporary capitalism rests. A system that must always move faster, and grow bigger, or else face collapse.
For all of these reasons and more, as we searched for a unifying principle that could animate a future worth fighting for, we settled on “The Years of Repair.” The call to repair a deep brokenness has roots in many radical and religious traditions. And it provides a framework expansive enough to connect the interlocking crises in our social, economic, political, informational, and ecological spheres.
Repair work speaks to the need to repair our broken infrastructures of care: the schools, hospitals, and elder care facilities serving the poor and working classes, infrastructures that failed the test of this virus again and again. It also calls on us to repair the vast damage done to the natural world, to clean up toxic sites, rehabilitate wild landscapes, invest in nonpolluting energy sources. It is also a call to begin to repair our stuff rather than endlessly replace it in an ever-accelerating cycle of planned obsolescence — what the film refers to as “the right to repair.”
As we imagine it, the work of repair is intensely concrete and civic — it is armies of Community Care Corp workers and battalions of tree planters, rehabilitating scarred and charred landscapes. But in heeding the seismic lessons of Covid-19, repair work is also intensely inward and slightly ephemeral. It is the practice of connecting, or re-pairing, those many crucial connections that our culture so systematically severs — between individuals and the communities that support them, between humans and the more-than-human world that sustains all of life. Even the broken connections between heart and mind that stand in the way of imagining these possible futures.
And running through it all, repair work is also the work of reparation. A call to keep the long-denied and delayed rendezvous with history’s most brutal crimes and to reject, once and for all, the web of flattering and dangerous lies that passes for official history in so many parts of the world. Drawing on the long-standing demands of Black and Indigenous movements, the film imagines a Truth and Reparations Commission, as well as an Indigenous Land Back program, with both of them helping to shape the priorities of how and where we repair broken ecosystems, schools, transit systems, hospitals, and more.
At its most profound level, the Years of Repair are a call to repair the broken stories — of supremacy and dominance — that brought us to this harrowing precipice. It is this work that is most vital as we confront the reality of ecological unraveling. The truth is that the amount of land fit for human habitation is going to contract, even if we do everything right. And as more and more of us are forced to migrate, inside countries and between them, committing ourselves, as never before, to the inherent value of life will be our only defense against eco-fascism.
These are revolutionary demands, but unlike some revolutionary movements, an ethos of repair reminds us that the cumulative impacts of centuries of violence and decades of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment” will not be fixed overnight. Capitalism may always be steering us toward the promise of a fresh start, clean break, or reboot. But a posture of repair, or what Rev. William Barber has termed the “Third Reconstruction,” reminds us that before we advance — in order to advance — we first need to fix what is broken. The communities left in ruins. The spirits deliberately broken. The broken stories of domination and dominion that provided the cover stories for this cruelty. This is urgent work that nonetheless cannot be rushed.
Fortunately, we are not starting from anything near scratch. Radical anti-colonial, racial justice, and Black feminist movements have been advancing these deeper meanings of repair for nearly two centuries, teasing out what reparation and true reconstruction can and should mean. Climate justice activists, more recently, have been developing models that meet multiple reparative needs simultaneously (which is the underlying philosophy of any transformative Green New Deal).
It is this work that animates the future world we portrayed on film. A world with shuttered prisons, with far more land under Indigenous jurisdiction, with families fed by local farmers and housed in beautiful, green public housing, built to enhance community and break the barriers of isolation. A world where the resources currently spent on the sprawling infrastructures of coercion, containment, and violence are shifted to a vast infrastructure of care and repair.
But it’s not all rosy. Part of the story we tell in “Message From the Future II” involves things getting worse — more novel viruses, more ecological unraveling, more racist state violence. This preview of worse times to come is not based on any accelerationist longings on our part but rather on clear-eyed readings of climate models, market bubbles, and who has the guns. Many future shocks are already locked in.
We didn’t, however, expect our forecasts to come true quite so soon. In fact, we were already far enough along that storyboards were complete when huge swaths of the Western United States were devoured by September’s historic wildfires. When photographs began circulating of an eerie Mars-like sky over Oregon, I had to Signal Molly Crabapple to make sure she had seen that it precisely matched the color palette she had chosen for the opening of our film.
In truth, predicting a future that looks like our present, only worse, is dead easy. Some version of that future has been the plotline of countless cli-fi books, films, and television series — many of them very good. Gael García Bernal, one of our film’s narrators, has been cast in an upcoming miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s prophetic, pandemic-themed novel, “Station Eleven.” And Emma Thompson, another of our narrators, co-stars in my favorite recent dystopian offering, HBO’s “Years and Years.” She is terrifying as a distinctly Trumpian U.K. Prime Minister, promising to bring back British glory even as she constructs an archipelago of refugee black sites.
The authors of these bleak narratives are trying to warn us. The catch may be this: If the only portrayals of the future we ever see are of some mix-and-match of fascism and ecological collapse, the forecasts can start to feel inevitable — less like warnings and more like prophecy.
Moreover, given the powerful positions occupied by Christian nationalists in the Trump administration (and perhaps soon, the Supreme Court), it is always worth remembering that the most hardwired apocalyptic storyline in our culture is that of the Rapture, when a small group of believers are lifted up to a kingdom in the sky while nonbelievers are swallowed up in the hell they (we) deserve. Seen through this lens, the conflagration of crises we are currently living through — the diseases, the droughts, the floods, the extinctions, the hunger, the political mayhem — are not warning signs at all. On the contrary, they are salutory items on a preordained Rapture checklist — proof positive that the exciting end is nigh, so pray harder to make sure you are among the saved.
Apocalyptic fantasies, in other words, are part of what landed us here. So as difficult as it may be right now to imagine a future that is genuinely better than our present, we have to keep trying. However, for futurism to be more than wild-eyed fantasy, there has to be a credible path to get there from here.
Which is why, once we had the script and the storyboards, Avi, Opal, and I started reaching out to groups whose organizing and theorizing shape the future portrayed in the film. So today, as we send the film into the world, we are also able to announce a powerful launch coalition of groups and networks that have united to push it out and use it in their organizing. This growing alliance includes: the Movement for Black Lives, Greenpeace International, Public Services International (with its more than 700 member unions representing 30 million workers worldwide), La Vía Campesina (representing some 200 million small farmers), NDN Collective (organizing around a comprehensive vision of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination), Global Nurses United (representing so many front-line health workers), Amazon Watch, One Billion Rising (a global movement to end violence against women and girls), the Sunrise Movement, Dream Defenders, as well as the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long been advancing many of these ideas), and the organization Avi and I co-founded, The Leap.
For us, the beauty of “Message From the Future II: The Years of Repair” flows from the magic of Molly Crabapple’s paint brushes, as well as from directors Jim Batt and Kim Boekbinder’s expert editing and sound design. But the true power and possibility of this project is not onscreen. That resides in the movement of movements that is fighting for this vision of radical repair every day.
If any of us still have the right to be hopeful, it is because of them.
This video was produced in partnership with The Leap.
ALSO SEE: Trump Was Still Downplaying COVID Right Up to Thursday Night
Donald Trump Tests Positive for COVID-19
Justin Sink, Bloomberg
Sink writes: "Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis has dramatically altered the closing weeks of the U.S. presidential campaign, with the president now facing not only an unprecedented health challenge but also logistical and staffing chaos about a month before Election Day."
Trump’s illness prompted the White House to cancel political events on Friday, including a rally planned outside Orlando, Florida. Campaign and fundraising trips planned for the coming days -- including visits to key battlegrounds including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada -- are expected to be scrapped as the president remains quarantined at the White House.
Trump leans on his in-person political events to raise cash and create enthusiasm among supporters as he tries to make up ground against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who leads in polls and fundraising in no small part due to the president’s response to the virus now afflicting him.
Trump had hoped to turn the focus of the final weeks of the campaign away from the pandemic and toward his Supreme Court nominee, the economic recovery and civil unrest -- issues where he believes he holds an advantage. But the lack of his signature rallies and the shift in focus away from the very issues that most excite his voters are likely to make it harder to close the gap with Biden, who has held a steady lead of about 7 percentage points in national polls for some time.
Now, the weeks ahead are sure to be dominated by constant discussion of Trump’s health, turning attention back to a pandemic most Americans think he’s mishandled.
His political concerns are only compounded by the immediate risk of the virus to Trump, a 74-year-old now fighting a disease that has killed more than 200,000 Americans since February. Even if the president remains asymptomatic, he’ll be challenged to keep both the public and financial markets calm as he tries to wage his come-from-behind campaign while sequestered in the White House residence.
U.S. stock futures were down about 1% early Friday after Trump said he and his wife had tested positive. The announcement came hours after a Bloomberg News report that Hope Hicks, one of the president’s closest aides, had fallen ill with the virus.
The implications of the president’s diagnosis are also likely to impact his Democratic challenger, beyond inserting a major new variable into an already unpredictable campaign.
Biden will need to decide whether he too should quarantine, after sharing a debate stage with the president just 72 hours before his positive test. While Biden’s campaign didn’t immediately comment on Trump’s infection, they have said Biden is tested regularly and that they would announce if he contracted the virus.
The former vice president is scheduled to travel to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday to deliver remarks on his economic agenda and then participate in a voter mobilization event. His campaign didn’t respond to a question about whether that trip is still on.
Even if Biden and his team avoided exposure at the first debate, they face the challenge of navigating the historic development as voters across the nation begin to cast ballots. The Democratic nominee will need to strike the right tone, making sure not to appear to revel in his opponent’s illness while continuing to assail the president’s attitude and policies toward the virus.
Nearly 2,000 DOJ Alumni Sign Letter With Dire Warning: Bill Barr Is Working to Rig 2020 Election for Trump
Colin Kalmbacher, Law & Crime
Kalmbacher writes: "Nearly 2,000 former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys warned of possible election interference committed by Attorney General Bill Barr in an open letter published late Thursday."
READ MORE
Far-Right Activists Charged Over Robocalls That Allegedly Targeted Minority Voters
Sam Gringlas, NPR
Gringlas writes: "Michigan's attorney general filed felony charges Thursday against two far-right activists who allegedly coordinated a series of racist robocalls that discouraged voters in Detroit and other cities from participating in the November election."
Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl are each being charged with four felony counts, including intimidating voters and conspiracy to commit an election law violation.
The robocalls came from a nonexistent group called the "1599 project" and falsely warned recipients that voting by mail would result in being "finessed into giving your private information to the man."
Burkman and Wohl are known far-right conspiracy theorists who promote disinformation online and have made attempts to frame public figures such as Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris and Dr. Anthony Fauci for various made-up scandals.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a press release that the calls were made in August to almost 12,000 residents with phone numbers from the 313 area code that covers Detroit. An investigation found that attorneys general in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois received complaints about similar phone calls being placed to cities with large minority populations.
"Any effort to interfere with, intimidate or intentionally mislead Michigan voters will be met with swift and severe consequences," Nessel wrote in a statement. "This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election."
In the calls, the robocaller told recipients to "beware of vote by mail" and falsely said that doing so would feed personal information into a database accessible to the police pursuing warrants, credit card companies collecting debts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aiming to track people for mandatory vaccines.
All of these claims are false, and the caller provides no evidence to back them. There is no evidence of widespread fraud associated with voting by mail.
Still, President Trump continues to sow doubts about voting by mail, without evidence.
Democrats are concerned about voter intimidation amid Republican efforts to dispatch tens of thousands of poll watchers across the country.
Until 2018, the Republican National Committee had been under a 1980s-era consent decree after a federal judge found Republicans had stationed off-duty police officers in some minority precincts and sent targeted mailings to minority voters warning about penalties for violating election laws.
That consent decree has now expired, allowing Republicans to organize poll watching and other "ballot-security" efforts.
Neither Burkman nor Wohl's attorney immediately responded to NPR's request for comment.
Texas Governor Limits Election Drop Boxes to One Per County in Sprawling State
Nicole Via y Rada, NBC News
Via y Rada writes: "Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, ordered counties to stop accepting hand-delivered absentee ballots at more than one location, issuing a proclamation that could make it harder for residents to vote early."
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Since the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Cruelty of Saudi Arabia's Ruler Has Only Grown
The Washington Post Editorial Board
Excerpt: "It has been two years since Jamal Khashoggi, a renowned Saudi journalist who contributed columns to The Post, was murdered and butchered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul."
During all that time, two facts have remained unchanged: There has been no justice for those who ordered and orchestrated his killing; and Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, has sustained the brutal repression that has made his regime the cruelest and most criminal in the country’s modern history.
Though the international backlash that followed Khashoggi’s killing made him a pariah, the crown prince did not alter his behavior. At the height of the blowback in October 2018, according to a lawsuit filed in August, MBS, as he is often called, dispatched another hit team to Canada in an abortive attempt to kill an exiled former intelligence official, Saad Aljabri. Since March of this year, the regime arrested two of Mr. Aljabri’s children and one of his brothers, and is holding them as de facto hostages in an attempt to force his return to the kingdom.
MBS has continued to lock up princes, businessmen and activists he considers threatening, usually without bothering to bring charges against them. None of the more than two dozen women’s rights activists who have been arrested since 2018 have been fully freed; they remain in prison or in home detention, without ever having been convicted of a crime. The senior MBS aide who orchestrated the Khashoggi killing and the arrest and torture of the women, Saud al-Qahtani, has never been punished. Nor has MBS himself accepted responsibility for ordering those crimes, even though the CIA and a U.N. investigation both concluded he was culpable.
The crown prince’s tyrannical conduct is what drove Khashoggi, at the age of 58, into exile in the United States after a career spent working as a journalist for mainstream Saudi newspapers and as a spokesman in the Saudi embassies in London and Washington. He did not see himself as a political dissident, but as advocate of peaceful reforms inside the system, including free speech and rights for women. He welcomed the social liberalizations MBS introduced, such as opening cinemas and allowing women to drive, but questioned why the very people who had advocated for them were being persecuted. Why, he asked in one Post column, must Saudis “choose between movie theaters and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?”
“We are being asked to abandon any hope of political freedom, and to keep quiet about arrests and travel bans that impact not only the critics but also their families,” he wrote. “We are expected to vigorously applaud social reforms and heap praise on the crown prince while avoiding any reference to the pioneering Saudis who dared to address these issues decades ago.”
The crown prince could have given credibility to his modernization initiative, “Saudi Vision 2030,” by embracing writers like Khashoggi and activists like the imprisoned Loujain al-Hathloul, who demanded women’s right to drive. Instead, he has pushed away the foreign investors his program depends on with his reckless behavior and shocking savagery. His recent attempts to brush up his image with token gestures have been pathetically weak.
Last month, for example, the regime announced the sentencing of eight low-level operatives to prison terms of seven to 20 years for Khashoggi’s murder. It was, as U.N. investigator Agnes Callamard put it, a “parody of justice”; the trial was held in secret, and those convicted were not even named. To this day, Saudi authorities have not explained what happened to Khashoggi’s remains after he was carved up with a bone saw, or provided them to his family.
The crown prince is nevertheless hoping that he will be rehabilitated by world leaders participating in a Group of 20 summit meeting currently scheduled for Riyadh in November. Though the continuing covid-19 pandemic has forced the Saudis to hold a virtual summit, they will still be the hosts, allowing MBS to pose as a world leader in good standing alongside Britain’s Boris Johnson, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, among others. That’s not to mention President Trump, who excused MBS’s crime against Khashoggi weeks after it occurred, then bragged to The Post’s Bob Woodward that he had “saved his ass.”
If the G-20 meeting goes forward, even online, it ought to be known as the Impunity Summit. Its only meaningful result will be to prompt MBS to conclude he is free to murder other journalists and torture more women’s rights activists without consequence. Democratic leaders have been talking about the need to shore up and defend liberal values that are under assault from China, Russia and other autocracies. An excellent way to start would be to condition their participation in the G-20 summit on MBS’s release of political prisoners and full acceptance of responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder.
Oil refinery. (photo: Getty)
Exxon Touts Carbon Capture as a Climate Fix, but Uses It to Maximize Profit and Keep Oil Flowing
Nicholas Kusnetz, InsideClimate News
Kusnetz writes: "Sprawled across the arid expanse of southwestern Wyoming is one of the world's largest carbon capture plants, a hulking jumble of pipes, compressors and exhaust flues operated by ExxonMobil."
The oil giant has long promoted its investments in carbon capture technology—a method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—as evidence that it is addressing climate change, but it rarely discusses what happens to the carbon captured at the Shute Creek Treating Facility.
The plant's main function is to process natural gas from a nearby deposit. But in order to purify and sell the gas, Exxon must first strip out carbon dioxide, which comprises about two-thirds of the mix of gases extracted from nearby wells.
The company found a revenue stream for this otherwise useless, climate-warming byproduct: It began capturing the CO2 and selling it to other companies, which injected it into depleted oil fields to help produce more oil.
In 2008, when concerns about climate change led Congress to pass a tax credit meant to encourage companies to capture and store carbon dioxide, Exxon was presented with another way to make money from the technology. The massive amounts of carbon dioxide captured at its Wyoming facility put the oil and gas giant in a position to claim more credits under the tax break than any other company.
In the ensuing years, Exxon may have claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits, according to estimates based on publicly available data from the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a global think tank that tracks the technology.
Meanwhile, the company, through its lobbyists, has fought relentlessly to do away with a requirement that companies claiming the credit submit monitoring plans to the Environmental Protection Agency, oversight meant to ensure that the captured carbon dioxide does not escape into the atmosphere.
Environmental advocates say Exxon's actions offer a prime example of how petroleum companies have used their adoption of carbon capture to deflect demands for more far-reaching action to combat climate change—like reducing fossil fuel production—while at the same time exploiting the technology for maximum profit. Such examples, they say, highlight the risks of relying on the carbon removal method to play a significant role in curbing global warming.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the rarest of policy breeds: a climate change solution with bipartisan support. Republicans promote the technology as a central piece of any GOP climate plan. Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, has endorsed it, too.
But the most significant policy support for the technology is the tax credit, known as 45Q, for capturing emissions. The emissions, in almost all cases, are then used to increase oil production. Now, as the Trump administration is finalizing rules for an expanded version of the credit, advocates say the administration has capitulated to industry lobbying led by Exxon that would weaken oversight of the process. In June, the IRS proposed that companies be allowed to avoid being regulated by the EPA, a step that could also allow companies to avoid publicly disclosing details of their carbon capture operations.
Environmental advocates say there is good reason to require rigorous oversight: One depleted oil field that has received carbon dioxide from Exxon's Wyoming facility, for example, repeatedly spewed unknown volumes of the gas to the surface, most likely through old oil wells. In 2016, a nearby school was forced to close after carbon dioxide was detected at dangerous levels inside the school.
Supporters of the carbon capture credit, including some environmental groups, say it will help the technology gain widespread commercial support. But critics say the credit amounts to a subsidy for oil companies masquerading as climate policy, throwing a lifeline to an industry struggling amid a historic crash in oil prices that only leads to producing more oil.
"This is how the oil industry continues to win," said John Noël, a senior climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA who has been following the credit for years. "They get in the weeds, they have access and influence that the normal public doesn't, and they're able to manipulate the tax process and the regulatory process and manipulate it in their favor. And that's been happening since the first oil well."
Exxon spokesman Casey Norton would not say whether the company had made claims under the carbon capture credit or answer other questions about the tax incentive. He pointed to various research efforts the company is involved in, adding that "ExxonMobil is the world-leader in carbon capture, sequestering more carbon in the last 20 years than any other company."
Because the IRS does not disclose the names of companies that claim the credit, it is impossible to know whether Exxon has claimed it or how much it may have claimed. But Noël, as well as other advocates and Congressional staff members, said they believed that Exxon had claimed a large share, perhaps the largest, of the $1 billion awarded under the credit over the past decade. In April, the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration said that nearly $900 million worth of those credits did not comply with EPA requirements, because the companies failed to submit monitoring plans.
Alex Doukas, who leads the Stop Funding Fossils program with Oil Change International, an advocacy group, estimated that Exxon may have claimed at least $190 million through 2014, and possibly much more. He based the figure on publicly available data about the amount of carbon dioxide that existing facilities can capture, compiled by the Global CCS Institute, and compared that with the total amount of carbon dioxide that companies claimed to capture under the credit, using figures published by the IRS. The estimate is likely to be conservative, because it assumed that most plants were operating at full capacity.
Data from one of the CCS plants came from an SEC filing and was not available beyond 2014. But InsideClimate News, in replicating Doukas' analysis, found additional public data for 2015, which added about $50 million to the estimate of how much Exxon may have claimed over the seven-year period. Operating at full capacity, the Exxon plant could capture enough carbon dioxide to claim up to $70 million a year.
Doukas noted that Wyoming, where the Exxon plant is located, already requires the company to capture as much carbon dioxide as it can sell, a rule intended to maximize oil production in the state. So if Exxon claims the credit, it is benefiting financially for something it is already required to do. "You've got the state saying you have to do this one thing, and you have Exxon saying, 'Well, we already have to do it so we might as well skim off the top with this federal gravy," he said, "and that to me is scandalous."
Solution or Excuse?
The story of carbon capture and storage begins with oil and gas. Oil companies pioneered a process decades ago to isolate CO2 from plumes of mixed gases. Separately, in an effort to squeeze more oil out of the ground, the industry had been injecting CO2 into porous subsurface rock. When pumped into old oil formations under high pressure, CO2 mixes with the hydrocarbon and forces it to the surface through a process called enhanced oil recovery. Some of the gas stays behind in the rock, while the rest can be removed from the oil and pumped back underground. The two technologies were first joined in commercial matrimony in 1972 by Chevron, in the scrublands of West Texas.
In the 2000s, the coal industry and some environmentalists began promoting carbon capture as a means of lowering emissions from coal-fired power plants. But so far, most of the world's 21 large-scale carbon capture plants are attached to natural gas processing facilities, like Exxon's, or ethanol or fertilizer plants. These facilities generally produce exhaust plumes with higher concentrations of CO2 than a coal plant, making it cheaper to capture the greenhouse gas.
As Congress started considering climate legislation, and activists began ratcheting up pressure on the industry to address emissions, Exxon started promoting carbon capture as a climate-friendly move. In 2008, after a congregation of Dominican Sisters pressed the company to adopt greenhouse gas reduction goals by filing a shareholder resolution, Exxon's board of directors asked stockholders to vote against the measure, saying the company was already addressing emissions through carbon capture and storage, among other practices.
In recent years, Exxon has continued to promote its investments in the technology to justify rebuffing demands from investors and the public that the company do more to reduce emissions. The calls for change have only increased as the oil industry faces huge losses and financial pressure from the collapse in energy demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and an accelerating global transition away from oil. European energy companies have cut the value of their assets by tens of billions of dollars. Exxon has reported more than $1 billion in losses this year, and last month it was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index because the company's value had plummeted.
With the pressure to address climate change increasing, all the major oil companies say that carbon capture will play a prominent role in their efforts, and that's no surprise: If oil and gas companies are able to capture large amounts of CO2, they may be able to continue selling their products for longer, even as governments limit emissions.
Chevron, for example, recently launched an advertising campaign promoting its investments in carbon capture and storage. The company operates a new CCS plant in Australia, in which Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell are partners.
But the industry's spending on the technology has lagged far behind the ambitious goals and projections it promotes. The oil industry invested less than $1.85 billion in large scale CCS projects from 2015 through 2018, according to the International Energy Agency, less than 40 percent of total global investment in the technology over that period.
Much of that investment also directly enables more fossil fuel production, rather than limiting emissions that may be hard to avoid. Nearly all the carbon dioxide Exxon has captured has been at the Wyoming facility, and has therefore allowed the company to produce large volumes of natural gas. The joint venture in Australia has a similar purpose, removing CO2 from a natural gas deposit.
Many climate advocates are skeptical that oil companies are truly invested in deploying CCS to limit global emissions in line with what climate scientists say is necessary. Instead, they say, the industry uses the technology to argue that the world can continue burning its products.
Norton, the Exxon spokesman, pointed to the company's sustained research into the technology, adding that "ExxonMobil is working to make carbon capture and storage technology more economic." This year, the company filed an application for a $263 million expansion of its Wyoming facility that would include a well that would be capable of receiving carbon dioxide for storage; the company said in the filing that it would either sell or inject the additional CO2 it captures through the expansion.
Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota who has championed the CCS tax credit, defended Exxon's efforts, saying the company is committed to developing the technology.
But Kurt Waltzer, managing director of the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group that supports CCS and has worked closely with some oil companies, expressed doubts about Exxon's commitment.
"Throughout the history of CCS as a technology, there have been parts of industry that have genuinely supported its development and commercialization, and there have been parts of industry who want to use it as an excuse for inaction," he said. "There are some in the oil industry, like Occidental and Shell, that are working to develop this technology. And it isn't clear to me that Exxon is working aggressively to make carbon capture and storage a solution to address the climate."
An Interesting Marriage
The technology behind carbon capture has been proven to work, but the economics have not. The original 45Q tax credit, enacted in 2008, turned out to be too low to spur much new investment. Most of the 21 large-scale CCS plants operating globally are in the United States and Canada, and all but five of them sell or send the CO2 to bolster oil production, according to the Global CCS Institute.
Many scientists and policy experts say that number has to increase dramatically if the worst effects of global warming are to be staved off. The International Energy Agency said recently that carbon capture capacity must soar to 840 million metric tons by 2030, up from about 40 million today. But the experts add that CCS can play an important role in capturing emissions from industrial processes like manufacturing cement and steel, which account for a significant portion of global emissions.
Attaching the technology to power plants burning fossil fuels is more controversial, because renewable sources have in many cases become a cheaper, emissions-free alternative. There are only two commercial-scale examples, and one of them, a coal plant in Texas, halted its capture of emissions earlier this year as oil prices tanked, because it could not earn enough from CO2 sales to support the plant's operation.
Advocates say CCS needs the type of sustained government support that helped drive down the costs of renewable energy, and about five years ago, lawmakers in Washington began assembling an unlikely bipartisan coalition to do just that, by expanding the existing tax credit.
"This was the interesting marriage of people who tend to think about what is the future of the coal industry, or the future of the oil and gas industry, and how can we continue to utilize those resources but do it in a way that meets clean energy standards," said Heitkamp, the North Dakota Democrat.
With support from fossil fuel industries, Heitkamp signed on co-sponsors for a bill expanding the tax credit, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and climate hawk, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader from Kentucky who is a staunch defender of the energy industry.
But as Heitkamp's effort gained steam, Exxon and Denbury Resources, a smaller oil company that specializes in enhanced oil recovery and purchases CO2 from Exxon for use in its wells, began pressing a parallel track. The original tax credit required any company that claimed it to gain EPA approval of a rigorous monitoring plan, to be filed publicly. The companies objected to the requirement, and in 2016, soon after Heitkamp introduced her bill, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) introduced legislation that would have eliminated the monitoring requirement.
The bill failed, but it has been reintroduced in each session since. Two oil companies have lobbied on the legislation, according to Congressional records: Exxon and Denbury, which recently filed for bankruptcy.
Exxon's political action committee gave $10,000 to Hoeven in the 2016 election cycle, as well as $10,000 to then-Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and $9,000 to then-Rep Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), each of whom eventually introduced versions of the bill in the House. Denbury contributed $2,500 to Hoeven in 2016, $5,000 to Cramer in the 2018 cycle, and $4,500 to Zinke's campaigns from 2014-2016, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
While Hoeven's bill never gained traction, Exxon and its allies found a new avenue for their lobbying once Donald Trump signed Heitkamp's expansion of 45Q into law, in February 2018, nearly two years after she first introduced the legislation. The expansion raised the credit to $50 per metric ton of CO2 that is sequestered underground, from the previous level of $20 per metric ton, and to $35 per metric ton used for oil production or other purposes, such as making synthetic fuels, up from $10 per metric ton.
Within weeks, a new industry group called the Energy Advance Center registered to lobby on CCS policy, representing companies that would include Exxon, Denbury and several other oil companies. With the focus shifting from Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, which would write regulations to implement the expanded credit, Cramer and Hoeven pressed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to adopt the changes they had pushed in their bill eliminating EPA oversight.
Hoeven's office did not respond to requests for comment. Jake Wilkins, a spokesman for Cramer, who is now a Republican senator from North Dakota, declined to answer questions, pointing instead to comments Cramer issued last year that his bill would "provide much-needed clarity and consistency for North Dakota's energy stakeholders."
Exxon did not answer a question about its involvement in the legislation, and referred questions about the tax credit to the Energy Advance Center. That group has said the oversight required by the EPA presents legal challenges associated with oil leases and is "unnecessarily burdensome and expensive."
But environmental advocates and experts say the rigorous oversight that Exxon has sought to eliminate is necessary to prevent and detect CO2 leaks. George Peridas, a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, pointed to the series of leaks from the Wyoming oil field that received carbon dioxide from Exxon's plant as an example of what can go wrong without adequate regulation.
It is not the only example. Denbury has been fined at least twice in Mississippi after CO2 leaked from oil fields it operated there. In one of those incidents, a well blowout in Yazoo County released so much carbon dioxide that the gas settled into hollows and suffocated deer and other animals, according to the Mississippi Business Journal. Little is known about how much CO2 may have leaked from enhanced oil recovery operations over the years, in large part because there's little monitoring by regulators.
Exxon may have another motivation for lobbying to reduce the monitoring required to claim the tax credit. In April, the Treasury Department's inspector general said in a memo that the IRS had been conducting audits of a handful of companies that had claimed nearly all the credits so far. Out of the nearly $900 million that had been claimed without the submission of monitoring plans, the memo said, the IRS had "disallowed" credits worth $531 million claimed by four taxpayers, and had audits open on another three companies.
Exxon did not submit an EPA monitoring plan until 2018, and even then, the plan covered only a small portion of the CO2 it captured at the Wyoming facility. Waltzer, of the Clean Air Task Force, speculated that the lobbying by Exxon may be driven by an effort to bolster a legal argument to hold on to any credits the company may have already claimed.
"I would say that effort is more about immediate balance sheets than anything else," he said.
Norton, the Exxon spokesman, directed questions about the company's lobbying to the Energy Advance Center, which has argued that guidance the IRS issued in 2009 indicated that companies would not have to submit monitoring plans to the EPA, an interpretation at odds with that of the Treasury Department inspector general.
A Partial Victory for Industry
As officials at the Treasury Department and the IRS finished a proposed rule for the expanded tax credit this year, the oil and gas industry launched a final lobbying push. Nearly all the major oil companies, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, have lobbied on the tax credit over the last year. And as the rule went through the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the last step before a rule is finalized, officials from that office and the Treasury Department met with lobbyists for ExxonMobil, Denbury, BP America, Occidental Petroleum, Shell, Kinder Morgan and Baker Hughes, who made last ditch efforts to shape the regulation.
Exxon and Denbury more than other companies, however, have pushed to roll back oversight, according to Congressional staffers, advocates and lobbyists. BP and Chevron left the Energy Advance Center this year, while Occidental and Shell, which were never members, have advocated for a more moderate rule change that would maintain transparency and a similar level of monitoring, but would allow companies to have third-party contractors approve the monitoring plans.
The proposed rule appears to be at least a partial victory for oil industry lobbyists. Companies will be required to meet certain standards, but they won't have to submit to EPA oversight—they can instead hire a contractor to approve their monitoring plans. And they can keep those plans hidden from public view.
Whitehouse, one of the original sponsors of the bill creating the tax credit, said in a statement to InsideClimate News that despite Exxon's lobbying, "we ended up with sensible rules."
Several environmental groups, however, have been more critical. The Environmental Defense Fund, which supports the tax credit, said the proposed rule is a step in the right direction, but that it fails to ensure "integrity and compliance" for carbon dioxide captured for enhanced oil recovery.
Meanwhile, Exxon is lobbying for more concessions in the final rule, which is expected later this year or next: The Energy Advance Center has requested that companies be able to, in effect, self-certify their ongoing compliance, after having a contractor sign off on the initial monitoring plan.
For skeptics of carbon capture and storage, the lobbying battle highlights the risks of devoting government resources to propping up the technology.
"Using public money to subsidize carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery doesn't seem like a climate solution from where I'm sitting," said Doukas, of Oil Change International. "By doing that, we're enriching the industry that's done the most to delay climate action. And Exxon is the perfect example."
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