Howdy!
I'm WarrenS, and I was very happy to be asked to contribute to Kitchen Table Kibitzing. I have a kitchen table and I wouldn't mind doing more kibitzing at it.
I'm a singer and a music teacher, which is cool. Actually, it's cooler than that. I teach Indian music, specifically the elaborate improvisational Hindustani artsong called khyal, which I've studied and performed since 1977. Being a part of this tradition has shaped my thinking in some interesting ways.
I grew up in a liberal academic household, and I've always been somewhat active politically, but it was in 2005 that I really began paying attention to climate change. My daughter was born that year, and naturally that made me start thinking about the future she was going to inherit. For the first few years I spent more time alternating between parenting and worrying, but in 2009 the late, great JohnnyRook directed me to 350.org, and I began aligning myself with their struggle to save our planet. Specifically, I put on a benefit concert in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised almost $1800 for 350.org.
Here are some images from that night:
The crowd
The Navarasa Dance Theater
Me, singing a khyal in the raga Gorakh Kalyan.
That first event was a lot of fun, so I kept it up, and now I produce
two climate concerts a year in Boston's Emmanuel Church. (If you're in Massachusetts, you should plan on coming — the music is great, and the cause couldn't be more important. The next concert is on Saturday, May 10, and it's going to feature three amazing singers.)
But.
Producing infrequent events didn't satisfy my activist itch. I needed something that I could do every day, as what my friend gmoke calls a "Practice of Conscience." So on January 1, 2010, I began writing climate letters; one a day, every day, no vacations, no exceptions. Every day, I'd find an aspect of climate change presented in some newspaper or magazine, and I'd write them a letter. I got better and better at condensing my talking points into 150-word bursts, and my hit rate improved. Some high points of my letter-writing over the past four years included: getting published in Time Magazine (mirabile dictu, a letter on media irresponsibility), USA Today, the New York Times (5 times over the past four years, IIRC), the Washington Post, the Boston Globe...and abroad in places as disparate as Greenland, Djakarta, Pakistan, Ireland, Taiwan, Malta, and the Solomon Islands. But while it was very satisfying, the Climate Letter Project took its toll.
Specifically, it sapped almost every bit of optimism I had. A self-imposed daily discipline of finding horrible news and condensing it into 150-word bursts made me horribly gloomy. I'm already gloomy (As a kid, I identified strongly with Eeyore); I don't need to be gloomier.
So I stopped at the end of 2013. Now I'm doing something else, and I invite you to come below the Orange Klein Bottle of Progressive Group-Think and find out about it, before I ask for your assistance on something immediate and urgent.
The Climate Message has a simple goal: to get musicians everywhere to speak out to their audiences, even if it's only for a minute. Like this:
See, I have come to realize that the climate crisis doesn't just threaten all life on Earth — it also threatens all of Earth's music. While I love the outdoors, I'm often content to love it at a distance — but I have spent my life being amazed, delighted, gob-smacked, and energized by the sheer effulgent variety of ways human beings have found to make music with one another.
(I was a world-music nerd long before "World Music" was a recognized marketing category; I've got lps of Maori rituals and Pygmy songs — lps with detailed transcriptions and scholarly notes.)
To me, humanity's music is something that exemplifies our species' best qualities; if planet-busting aliens wanted a good reason not to wipe us off the face of the universe, I'd offer them Ba'Aka, Bach, Beatles, Bhimsen, and everything else I could find. I'm fighting to preserve the music we've created over the span of our human evolution; that's what makes me get up and go now.
So what I'm doing now is filling up The Climate Message and the related Facebook Pagewith interesting articles and fabulous music, trying to make the connection in other folks' minds: lose on climate, and all our songs go silent.
But tonight I'm going to revisit the 1461 letters I wrote over the four years of the Climate Letter Project, and give everybody who drops in something to use when they go to Regulations.gov and make a public comment about the Keystone XL pipeline.
The next section of this diary is just going to be copies of some of the letters I've written over the past few years on the subject of the KXL and the Tar Sands, and some bullet points extracted from those letters. Please use them as source material for your own comments.
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The very first time I wrote about the Keystone XL was in 2011, a few days before I left to go to India, where I was visiting family and giving concerts. And that first letter wasn't to a newspaper or magazine, but to President Obama:
Dear President Obama,
In a sane universe, the notion of opening the Canadian tar sands to exploitation would never have arisen. The consequences of bringing this extraordinarily dirty form of energy into circulation would be catastrophic for North America and for our planet.
It would also, of course, pretty much doom any chance you would have to be remembered as an environmentally-conscious president. All the other advances you and your administration have made thus far would be nullified by the grotesque effects of the tar sands.
Tar sands will impede our progress to a sustainable future on many levels. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the greenhouse emissions from the tar sands oil is almost twice that of the average crude refined here in the USA. The yearly emissions from the Keystone XL project would be “roughly equivalent to annual CO2 emissions of seven coal-fired plants.”
It’s not just that tar sands oil is dirty at the point of extraction. The Keystone project necessitates significant deforestation, with an enormous loss of carbon sequestration function from the destroyed forests. Pipelines are highly vulnerable; leaks can have devastating effects on local ecosystems.
Climatologist James Hansen has warned us in very direct terms that putting the tar sands’ carbon into the atmosphere would be an irreversible tipping point to a runaway greenhouse effect. President Obama, your legacy should not include pulling this trigger on the planet. Please stop the tar sands pipeline.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Here's a KXL letter I wrote only a few days after I got
back from India that year. This one is full of possible bullet-points, so I'll put them in a list below the letter itself:
While Nebraska Governor Heineman specifically cited issues of aquifer contamination and the potential for oil spills in his letter to President Obama, there are so many other arguments against the tar sands oil project it’s mind-boggling: the destruction of vast areas of Canadian forest along with its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide; the devastating environmental impact of the extraction processes; the long-term consequences for Earth’s climate (Dr. James Hansen has stated flatly that the pipeline’s impact would be irreversible and catastrophic); America’s urgent need to end its addiction to fossil fuels; the oil industry’s long history of malfeasance, incompetence and venality (why trust a proven liar?) — the list goes on and on. On the other hand, there’s exactly one argument for the pipeline: money. It’s going to make a few extremely wealthy people even richer.
Warren Senders
It's a veritable wish list of horrible things — when you're
making a public comment, just select one, and build on it.
1. issues of aquifer contamination and the potential for oil spills;
2. the destruction of vast areas of Canadian forest along with its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide;
3. the devastating environmental impact of the extraction processes;
4. the long-term consequences for Earth’s climate (Dr. James Hansen has stated flatly that the pipeline’s impact would be irreversible and catastrophic);
5. America’s urgent need to end its addiction to fossil fuels;
6. the oil industry’s long history of malfeasance, incompetence and venality.
Can you tell I don't like these people? Here are a few more from the early days when the project was just surfacing.
Careful scrutiny of the claims made by advocates of the Keystone XL pipeline is revealing. For example, saying that “the project would decrease American reliance on Middle-Eastern oil” doesn’t make it so — according to a recent study from Oil Change International, the tar sands oil is destined almost entirely for overseas markets. Without stringent enforcement mechanisms, the pipeline builders’ “57 provisions beyond federal environmental law that will enhance environmental protections” is a meaningless cosmetic gesture. The oil industry’s history is chock-full of legal malfeasance, bad intentions and simple incompetence — why would any sane person trust their bland assertions that the pipeline will be completely safe? And then there is the statement, offered without qualification, that “America needs the oil.” Yeah, we need that oil — and an addictive smoker needs that cigarette. But what America (and the rest of the world) really needs is to kick the habit entirely.
Warren Senders
There's one thing that environmentalists are fond of saying that really sticks in my craw. That's James Hansen's
"game over for the climate" meme. I know why he says it, and I know why people on the planet's side of the argument repeat it — but I think it's wrong. Here's why:
James Hansen’s assertion that burning the oil of the Canadian tar sands would mean “game over” for Earth’s climate is profoundly wrong.
Not because his science is faulty; if there’s anyone equipped to prognosticate about our planet’s future it’s the NASA climatologist, a man of enormous personal and intellectual integrity.
No — it’s because the future of Earthly life for the next million years is not “only a game.” There’s no replay button; we cannot shuffle and deal a second time. If anyone knows this, it’s Hansen; I’m sure he’s just trying to tell our political and media figures the scary truth in language that’s easier to grasp. While his words make the facts more accessible, they also deceive us into believing our species will get another chance to get it right. The scariest thing about this “game” is that humanity’s not going to get a mulligan: losing is forever.
Warren Senders
...and a variation on this theme:
James Hansen is an exceptional public figure — a scientist of recognized integrity and towering intellectual achievement, and an unimpeachable sense of ethics and responsibility. But his recent statement that burning the oil of the Canadian tar sands would be “game over” for Earth’s climate is profoundly wrong.
Why?
Because a game can be replayed if the outcome is unsatisfactory, while a shattered climatic equilibrium will require recovery times on the order of tens of thousands of years. Dr. Hansen’s words are perhaps an attempt to convey a terrifying truth in language that’s easier for our politicians and media figures to grasp — and for that he is to be commended; America’s ADD-formed political culture is ill-equipped to deal with long-term threats. But if Earth’s future is a “game,” then our lives and those of countless generations to come are at stake — and our opponents are cheating.
Warren Senders
One of the most important aspects of the KXL Project is that it has enormous destructive impact at all levels of scale. All levels of
geographical scale, from local effects on individual areas everywhere from the point of extraction to the time of consumption — and all levels of
temporal scale, from the immediate to the distant future. This is hard to get into 150 words...but one day I was writing to a paper with a larger word limit, and I was able to let myself go a bit:
The Keystone XL pipeline is much, much more than just a disaster waiting to happen. This ill-begotten project has potential for short-term environmental impacts (spills, leaks, aquifer contamination, habitat destruction), medium-term damage (deforestation and loss of carbon sequestration capability), and devastating long-term consequences (climatologist James Hansen puts it simply, saying that burning the oil in the Alberta tar sands would be “game over” for the climate). In other words, the pipeline offers us a chance to trigger catastrophes on multiple time scales, ruining lives and ecologies for years, decades, centuries and millennia.
Gosh. We must really need that oil if we’re willing to risk so many levels of destruction. Well, actually, it turns out TransCanada isn’t planning to sell that oil on the American market; a recent study from Oil Change International shows conclusively that it’s headed for overseas markets, leaving America nothing but irreversible environmental damage.
On the other hand, a few extremely wealthy oil-industry magnates are going to get even richer. Perhaps they’ll let some of that wealth trickle down on the rest of us. What could possibly go wrong?
Warren Senders
Sometimes the letters were just expressions of my own inner fury: fun to write, albeit less likely to see print:
The planetary environment is already well on its way down the tubes, thanks to the past century’s worth of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. From that perspective, the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline’s contribution to our civilization’s ongoing climaticide is all but irrelevant. Why deny a comforting cigarette to a terminal-stage lung cancer patient?
But Bill McKibben and other environmental activists aren’t prepared to accept the inevitability of doom. From their perspective, it is absolutely crucial that, having recognized we are in a deep and inhospitable hole, we stop digging as quickly as possible.
The pro-pipeline rationale is (rather like the tar sands oil itself) a toxic mix of ingredients. Part petro-boosterism, part profit-mongering, and part “hippie-punching,” the arguments of Keystone XL proponents embody both moral and imaginative failures. Our long-term energy economy must be sustainable if our species is to survive the coming centuries.
Warren Senders
This next one was very satisfying to write:
As a former smoker, President Obama should know how hard it is to overcome a powerful addiction. He is also undoubtedly familiar with the countless rationalizations smokers use to avoid coming to terms with their dependency. “One more won’t hurt,” “my grandfather smoked and he lived to be 97,” “it helps me relax,” and “I don’t have time to quit right now” — all these and more have analogical equivalents in the arguments currently being presented for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Our nation’s addiction to oil and coal is profoundly damaging to our planet’s health; the State Department’s risible dismissal of the pipeline’s climate change impact sounds remarkably like a carton-a-day smoker’s raspy contempt for the oncologist’s warning. The dirty crude of the Canadian tar sands needs to stay in the ground for the same reason that countless smokers have finally overcome their dependency: because life is preferable to the alternative.
Warren Senders
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Now, get ready to submit a comment about the Keystone XL.
Here are some bullet-points. Just copy & paste; paraphrase if you like. The more the better. Don't wait.
• The inevitable leaks will contaminate one of the nation’s most important aquifers with carcinogens.
• Extracting tar sands oil is going to devastate huge expanses of forest, leaving a moonscape behind and eliminating a critical carbon sink.
• Putting all that CO2 into the atmosphere will kick global warming into overdrive, pushing the Earth down the path to an ever-bleaker future.
• NIMBY is an inadequate response to the Keystone XL. We need to say NOMP — “Not On My Planet!”
• An economy in which corporate profits outrank the long-term survival and prosperity of our species is profoundly immoral.
• If Barack Obama addresses the needs of the coming centuries rather than those of the fossil-fuel industry, he’ll recognize that the Keystone XL pipeline is a multi-generational disaster in the making.
• The oil industry has a long and ugly record of ignoring its own protocols, stonewalling investigations, manipulating evidence, and using its financial resources to corrupt the government agencies responsible for enforcing compliance with environmental regulations.
• Wise economic policy recognizes that wealth is derived from the sustainable stewardship of Earth’s natural resources. This self-evident truth is ignored by those whose self-interest depends on maximizing short-term profits.
• Yes, the Keystone XL will generate jobs: cleanup specialists, leak stoppage crews, oncologists, and (eventually) undertakers.
• Conservatives arguing that action on global warming is too expensive operate from a stance of multiple denial: they reject the climate science substantiating the greenhouse effect’s dangerous consequences, they reject the economic evidence that investment in clean energy and sound environmental practices are net positives for job creation, and they reject the fact that a significant majority of Americans recognize that climate change is a problem with huge repercussions for our nation and the world. It’s no accident that these same fact-rejecting politicians are the ones advocating strongly for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose likely contribution to climate change could well tip the balance from disastrous to catastrophic.
• Keystone is catastrophic on multiple levels of scale. The destruction of millions of acres of boreal forest in order to exploit Canada’s tar sands is already an environmental blunder of huge proportions. Transporting the filthy oil across the US offers the potential for hundreds of local and regional disasters from leaks and contaminated aquifers — and, or course, burning all that oil will send the greenhouse effect into a drastic runaway zone from which recovery may be impossible. If President Obama allows the pipeline project to proceed, we will know that his commitment to the fight against global warming is inadequate to the magnitude of the crisis.
• Perhaps we should ask the residents of Mayflower, Arkansas what they think about running a pipeline full of toxic crude across the continental US. Leaks and spills are inevitable; rather than acceding to a business strategy that derives profits from despoiling the land, perhaps we’d be better off just leaving that dirty crude in the ground, and finding ways to conserve, reduce, and eventually eliminate our use of fossil fuels.
• Claims that the KXL project would create 40,000 jobs are simply false — unless we include the thousands of cleanup specialists, public-health experts, class action lawyers, insurance adjusters, water purification experts, oncologists, and funeral directors whose employment security will be guaranteed for decades to come if this disaster-in-the-making finds its way across American soil.
• The powerful corporate interests who stand to profit from Keystone are happy to promise impossibilities to all Americans. They promise the pipeline won’t leak, and if it does leak, they promise to clean it up. They promise that climate change won’t be impacted by extracting and burning the tar sands — and they also promise that climate change won’t damage the pipeline. They promise that the project will bring economic well-being to the US, and end our dependence on foreign oil. Given their dismal track record on all these issues, and the essentially nonexistent penalties for failing to deliver, the fossil fuel industry could promise even more. Approve the pipeline, and everybody gets a pony!
• The “dilbit” (diluted bitumen oil) from the Alberta tar sands needs both higher pressure and temperature to flow through pipelines — factors linked to increased corrosion and rupture. Pipelines in the Midwest that move this sort of heavy crude have spilled almost four times more per pipeline mile than the U.S. average. Dilbit is terrible stuff, and the only way to keep it safe is to leave it in the ground.
• If another nation dropped a bomb on Canadian forest land, exterminating everything within a 42-hectare space, it would rightly be condemned as egregious aggression; an act of war. If a sectarian group did the same thing it would justifiably be called terrorism. Why is it that when the same damage is committed by a multinational corporation, it’s simply part of the cost of doing business? Who’s the terrorist in this picture?
• The pipeline’s claims of minimal environmental impact have been revealed as risible, the loudly-touted job creation claims have been substantially debunked, the authors of the State Department’s study of the project are case studies in conflict of interest, and the world’s leading climatologists are unified in their assessment of the tar sands’ potential to trigger devastating and geocidal destabilization of Earth’s climate. What’s left? The Keystone XL is about profits, and nothing more.
Now, all of us can go to:
Notice of 30 Day Public Comment Period Regarding the National Interest Determination for TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, L.P.’s Presidential Permit Application
Click on "Comment Now" and off you go. Cut and paste whatever you like from the compilation of letters and bullet-points above. Comment more than once. Get your friends to comment. Get your mother to comment. Get your kids to comment. If you're a teacher, get your students to comment. If you play in a band, get your bandmates to comment. If you have a website, get your readers to comment. We're aiming for a million...and as I'm writing this we don't even have 2,000 yet.
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Whew. It was exhausting reading all those letters again.
Many progressives think of climate as "just another issue," as in "everybody's got their pet issues."
All the work that any human beings have ever done toward the creation of a more just, more equal, more peaceable society is under threat. Progressive ideals — such advances as widespread literacy, the gradual elimination of slavery, the radical idea that women are people, the notion that children have rights, the idea that a society has a duty to help its citizens — will find it hard to survive in a society that has unraveled in the aftermath of climate catastrophe.
And, of course, so will music.
We'll still be singing, of course. But we'll be singing work songs and survival songs and funeral songs and songs to console the living. Those are honorable songs, no doubt. But I want my daughter to sing more than that.
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If you're a performer, please join us in the First Climate Message Video Festival. Here's how that works:
Between now and Earth Day 2014, let's bring every musician and performer we know into The Climate Message, with a short, simple video. Just one minute of personal testimony can make a difference in the fight against climate change. Use your smartphone, computer, or video camera, and make this 3-part video:
1. You (or your friends, your group, your colleagues, etc.) playing/singing — (20 seconds);
2. Speak to the camera (in any language you like) and say your name, where you're from, and some version of the words, "It's time for the world to take action against climate change" (20 seconds);
3. More music (20 seconds).
Send your videos with your name & contact information (website URL, etc.) to theclimatemessage@gmail.com. They'll become part of our wall of Climate Messengers, representing musicians and styles of music from all over the world.
And...most importantly: forward this to your friends and colleagues and get them involved, too. The climate crisis makes this an "all hands on deck" moment for humanity, and we musicians have a crucial part to play.
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Finally, dear ones, if you have an hour or so, please enjoy this recording of a concert I gave last August at Bandra, Mumbai. It is a four-part khyal in the night raga Malkauns — beginning with an unaccompanied invocation, called alap, then moving to a traditional song in slow tempo, the vilambit, before concluding with two faster pieces. This was a special night of music and I sang very well despite having a sore throat. If you have any questions about what I'm singing, I'll try to answer them.
The music I've given my life to stretches back in time for hundreds of years.
"Peer na jaanire," the slow song in the performance above, is several centuries old — but it's been sung differently every time. To study, to perform, and above all to teach this music is to think just as far into the future.
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We just lost Pete two weeks ago. His song "Quite Early Morning" says it best:
So though it's darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
If we want singing tomorrows for all the human generations to come, we
need to
block that pipeline!
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Thank you for all that you are, and all that you do.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate.
Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.