Dinosaur Dreaming. Gail Collins-Ranadive
my modern monastic cell as it carried me across the Northern Rockies to and from my chaplaincy training summer in Billings, Montana. After graduation, I drove clear across the country for my parish ministry internship in Massachusetts. I was finally back to where I’d started from as a child, and, wanting the chance to spend time with my family of origin as my parents aged, I took a part-time ministry position in a small church south of Boston. Columba was terrific in the traffic congestion while trying to get through the city to my ailing father’s bedside in the late 1990s, and then to conduct his funeral.
CO2 levels were steadily climbing towards 370 ppm and I was still oblivious of this growing problem that I was perpetuating! How could that possibly be? In 1998 the American Petroleum Institute wrote a proposal intended to recruit scientists to convince politicians, the media, and the public that climate science was too uncertain to be taken seriously. This proposal included a five million dollar multi-point strategy to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours upon Congress, the media, and other key audiences.” Their goal was to raise questions and undercut prevailing scientific wisdom.
By the beginning of the 2000s, the efforts by climate change denial groups were recognized as an organized campaign. Taking a page from the tobacco campaign, these propagandists began receiving funding from oil companies. ExxonMobil led in corporate donations to these think tanks, and between 1998 and 2014 gave nearly 31 million dollars to groups that would deliberately spread climate misinformation.
The ideologically conservative Koch brothers, with their massive petrochemical business interests, donated more than $100 million from 1997 onward to 84 groups promulgating climate denial, all shielded from public scrutiny through financial vehicles known as Donors’ Trusts.
As the money flowed through this dubious network over the decades, its misinformation strategies passed like a baton to a shifting array of coalitions and initiatives that protected fossil fuel interests in the climate debate. Some groups produced reports that cast doubt on the accumulating evidence of manmade climate change, and others amplified the alternative findings. Think tanks in the network held conferences, sponsored panels, wrote op-eds and letters, and created an echo chamber loud enough to command equal time in the mainstream media.
In 2000, environmentally aware and climate savvy Vice President Al Gore ran for president. When the Supreme Court ruled on the contested election results and handed the presidency to oilman George W. Bush, I was in the middle of an interim ministry year in Las Vegas, Nevada.
With my little church back in New England barely able to pay me for part-time work, and aching to do full-time ministry, I had put my name into the interim ministry pool, a group of ministers who undergo special training to serve congregations “in transition” between ministers. But I was surprised and shocked to find myself “banished” to the desert, where brown replaced familiar, comforting green, and trees were scarce.
Because I stay grounded by bonding with my natural surroundings, I had to learn to see and appreciate the desert’s gifts. By mid-year I was smitten, so said yes to the religion reporter from the local paper that wanted to interview me about religion and environmental awareness. Apparently, she had struck out with other local congregations, but my faith tradition includes Emerson and the other Transcendentalists for whom nature is a primary scripture, so I had the theological backing for what the reporter was looking for.
When the article appeared, complete with photos shot during a worship service, the other half of it included an interview with Josh Abbey, representing the Jewish tradition. He stated that his infamous father would have written off Las Vegas long ago for its ecological transgressions. It was at that moment in time that I consciously moved from being a nature lover into becoming an environmental activist.
When a congregant connected with the Sierra Club asked me to do a workshop with the local members who were feeling totally defeated by what was happening in D.C. I said yes. Two months after George W. Bush was sworn in, he renounced the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty which extended the 1992 UN Framework on Climate Change that committed state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Then, under Vice President Cheney, our national energy policy was rewritten behind closed doors to include the Halliburton loophole, thus exempting his old company from clean water regulations, and kick-starting the hydraulic fracturing frenzy to ensure access to the “bottom of the barrel” fossil fuels that would emit even more CO2, plus release methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas. With CO2 emissions climbing through 370s ppm, we were clearly going in the wrong direction!
By 2002, I’d begun to be concerned about my own carbon emissions. If I were going to do interims for my ministry career, I would be driving back and forth across the continent over the next several years. My sweet Saturn was fuel-efficient, but I had heard that the company was developing a hybrid vehicle that would run on battery as well as gasoline.
As I eagerly waited for this option, I did not know that its parent company, General Motors, had developed, produced, and leased electric vehicles (the EV1) between 1996 and 1999. It was the first mass-produced electric car in the modern era by a major automaker, and the only electric passenger car to be marketed under the GM brand name. The decision to mass-produce an electric car came on the heels of a mandate by the California Air Resources Board that required the sale of zero-emissions vehicles from the seven major automakers if they were to continue to sell their vehicles in California.
These EV1s were made available via lease-only agreements to residents in selected western cities and could be serviced only at designated dealerships. Consumer reaction to the electric cars was so positive that GM grew worried that these cars wouldn’t prove profitable enough. After all, without gas motors there is little need for maintenance, or demand for gasoline. They rounded up the leased cars, refused to sell them to the lessees who wanted to purchase them outright, and crushed them.
Meanwhile, the car manufacturers litigated the CARB requirement for the wiggle room to make and sell super low emission vehicles and hybrids instead of going the all-electric route. When the EV1 program was discontinued in 2002, the oil companies, along with the oil-drenched executive branch of the federal government, had played a huge role.
By 2002 I was in my third interim ministry, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I’d spent my second interim year with a congregation in Vermont that was steeped in environmental awareness: I went there because I had so much to learn! But before that year barely started, 9/11 happened.
Our national response to the horror was to bomb Afghanistan; that it is an oil, gas, and coal-rich country was probably just coincidental in our determination to punish someone for our national tragedy. Yet the decision to bomb Iraq in the spring of 2003 was different. It was widely suspected that we were after their oil, and demonstrations were held worldwide, including in the community where I was living.
Months before that unpopular invasion, I had given up on waiting for Saturn to market its hybrid, suspecting but not knowing for sure that GM had opted for making the more profitable Hummer instead.
Wading through the grief of giving up my faithful companion, I traded Columba in for a Toyota Prius that wanted to be named Gaia. She was the soft aqua shade of earth and water and sky combined, and promised to get 50 mpg in town, somewhat less on the highway, with super-low CO2 emissions. The reverse of gas burning cars, the hybrid gets better mileage when constant braking at stoplights recharges its lithium battery. This takes some getting used to: whenever I stopped at a light, and the engine went silent, I worried it had shut down completely.
I’d checked out the Honda hybrid as well, but it didn’t have the super low emissions rating that Toyota’s did. The early Prius I owned still had the Corolla body, not the unique one seen on our roads today. I would have preferred buying American had there been any way to do so. Only U.S. dealerships whose mechanics had received special training in Japan were allowed to carry the Prius. I came to feel like a pioneer, as glitches worked themselves out—or not. But these annoyances were worth it to me to be doing the right thing. I was a minister, after all!
My commitment was unexpectedly confirmed