CHAPTER 3 Role Models for the Rooftop Revolution

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.

—HENRY MOORE

THE WORLD ENERGY COUNCIL 17TH CONGRESS, IN HOUSTON, Texas, 1998: We were on a mission. Our first goal was to highlight the evils that Big Oil wrought on frontier areas like the Amazon; the second was to let all the international bigwigs attending what was until then the largest gathering of petroleum giants that the days of easy oil were over.

Just after 3 a.m. on September 16, 1998, five of us crouched down at a section of the fence that protected what was to become Enron Field, just opposite the George R. Brown Convention Center, where all the official meetings were being held. We rolled under the fence while two others kept an eye out for the roaming security guards who took turns patrolling the perimeter. My backpack, with the stuffed koala I’d had since I was a kid sewn into a side pocket, hardly fit through the hole because it was so jammed with ropes, harnesses, and other climbing gear. We worked quickly, our bodies humming with adrenaline. Once on the other side, we raced toward the enormous idle crane in the middle of the field, mud sucking at our boots. When we reached the crane’s ladder, we ascended it in the order we’d planned—I went last because one of my tasks was to install a steering-wheel lock on the hatch at the first landing, to slow down anybody who tried to catch us. This precaution proved unnecessary, as nobody pursued us, at least not then. By the time the sun rose with a lambent glow over the Houston skyline, we had tied our anchors, rappelled into place, and unfurled what was then the biggest banner (more than 1,500 square feet!) ever used in an American act of civil disobedience:

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. STOP NEW OIL EXPLORATION.

The attendees of the World Energy Congress were there to make deals, and the oil companies were there to strike new finance arrangements and negotiate concessions with governments to open up some of the new fields then becoming “hot,” like West Africa and parts of Latin America. It was an infamous, rare gathering of oil executives, pipeline proponents, and coal chiefs to plot with politicians and bureaucrats of various kinds. Our organization, Project Underground, and the Rainforest Action Network were there to release Drilling to the Ends of the Earth, a report we’d been working on for a year, on the ecological, social, and climate imperative for ending new petroleum exploration.

“The energy industry needs to supply energy—not oil,” one of my colleagues said in the report’s news release. “If oil companies invested serious capital in developing sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, the quality of life on this planet would increase for everyone.”

My friend Oronto Douglas was in town. He’d been a lawyer for the great, nonviolent Nigerian organizer Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose cause of ending oil exploitation in his native Ogoni land I’d supported as an activist in Australia. In 1995 Ken was tried for a murder he couldn’t have committed and was convicted in a Nigerian kangaroo court and then executed—all at the behest of Big Oil by his country’s dictatorship, an act for which the country was suspended from the Commonwealth.

Oronto had watched while Ken was hanged. Ken’s family sued Shell for ordering his death, and in 2009 Shell settled out of court for $15 million. So for us in Houston, trying to tell the world the terrible things that happen in the places our oil comes from, Oronto was a first-person witness to the calamities brought to indigenous people around the world at the cutting edge of oil and gas industry development.

The whole country has been affected by the wars for control of oil in the Niger Delta, even though the people there have been polluted and poisoned by it since it was first discovered by Shell in the 1950s. To this day Oronto struggles with the consequences of oil in his homeland and seeks justice for the victims. He’s now a special adviser to the democratically elected president, Goodluck Jonathan.

Back then in Houston, Oronto endorsed what we said to the media, with firsthand knowledge of the resource curse Nigeria and many other places suffer because of oil. Our statements back then—and I think that they stand today—came down to this: when the climate is in danger of global meltdown, and when irreplaceable natural areas are being destroyed, and the indigenous people who live there are being displaced, it makes absolutely no sense to continue exploring for more oil. The carbon logic was clear: burning the coal, oil, and gas reserves we already knew we had in 1998 would risk runaway climate change. Looking for more petroleum, and spending precious time and money on the pursuit, was a waste, and we wanted the world to know.

Our efforts had the desired effect. We got the attention of thousands of commuters on the Eastex Freeway as they wound into the city; we drew media choppers and reporters, along with their cameras; and we raised the ire of the sheiks, energy ministers, and oil executives exiting their limos on their way into the conference. We swung gloriously in the wind like a big spinnaker crew on the front of a yacht. We even felt heroic as we were taken to the ground by big ladder trucks from the fire department, and we were almost exhilarated as we were dragged off to the police station.

It was a triumphant day! That is, until we hit the county jail and were told we were being charged with multiple felonies—such as the serious offense of conspiracy to commit property damage—instead of the misdemeanor trespassing charge we’d expected. Apparently, an energy exec or someone equally high up had persuaded the burghers of Houston to take a “Don’t Mess with Texas (or Big Oil)” stance against us, and if the charges stuck, we’d be in jail for years, if not decades. Our bond was 10 times that of a typical alleged murderer’s, and I was held for three days in a cell with 22 other inmates, some of them drug runners from Colombia who actually befriended me, sympathizing with our campaign to stop frontier oil development in places like Nigeria and the Amazon.

With gratitude and relief, we accepted the offer of legal counsel from a bulldog of a lawyer named Mike DeGeurin—the “Johnnie Cochran of Texas”—who obtained for us massive media exposure on a national scale and even interest from the likes of Court TV and Oprah Winfrey. Ironically, the more our persecutors came after us, the more our plight interested the media, which clamored to hear our side of the story.

My favorite moment was doing a news conference while still locked up—still dressed in the jail’s orange jumpsuit, my hands cuffed and ankles shackled. I was taken to a briefing room, where we got to justify our stance and blast Big Oil and Dirty Energy at the same time. Local TV broadcast the appearance live, so I was greeted by cheers when I arrived back at my cell. These guys inside and many more outside got to hear the reasons for our protest, and most of them agreed with our side. Realizing this, the city dropped the most serious charges against us. We pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and were released.

While I sat waiting with my fellow jailbirds for all of that to transpire, two of our colleagues from Greenpeace were back at the convention center, using other methods to change minds. These friends—Iain MacGill (who became a prominent academic promoting clean energy in Australia) and Gary Cook (who went on to force Facebook to unfriend coal in a great 2011 campaign)—were pushing DVDs on any conference delegate who would take them, hoping that the package would inspire a change of heart in these energy-industry diehards. The video package contained plans on how British Petroleum (now BP), one of the world’s largest and most dastardly oil corporations, could become the world’s most profitable energy company by scaling solar manufacturing and making it affordable enough to displace conventional electricity.

On hearing about these friends’ efforts, I was facing a fork in the road, and knew I’d need to choose. Was it better to risk life and limb swinging off cranes and getting arrested, or was it more effective to go inside the system? If we really wanted to force accountability and action, was the best path through continued acts of protest, or was it through the equally subversive, but less felonious, approach of trying to make friends with our adversaries? Protest without solution can be quixotic and weak, but solutions without some sense of justice in their design can actually perpetuate problems. Simple technical fixes just aren’t sufficient to redress the power imbalances in our society. I pretty quickly decided that both approaches are necessary and can be powerful in their own way, but at the end of the day I realized that whichever tack we might choose, our energy and attitude must remain positive.