Victory for Beyond Extreme Energy at FERC

By Ted Glick

“The people gonna rise like the waters,
Gonna calm this crisis down.
I hear the voice of my great granddaughter
Saying shut FERC down right now.”

Who would have thought it? On Friday morning, November 7th, for 2 ½
hours, the determined and courageous nonviolent activists of Beyond
Extreme Energy shut down the DC headquarters of the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, FERC.
All three entrances to the building were successfully blockaded, and
virtually no one was getting in.

By 9 am there were about 150 FERC employees massed on the sidewalks in
front of FERC, waiting for the police to clear away five fracking
fighters who had successfully locked down at 7 am with lock boxes
across the driveway into the FERC parking garage. The driveway had
been the route used by police to funnel FERC employees into the
building for the four days previous when BXE activists had
successfully blockaded the two pedestrian entrances.

For short periods of time during those four days, no more than for
maybe 20 minutes at a time, we had been able to prevent pedestrian use
of that driveway (we prevented car use for the entire week). We did so
by forming a long enough line of people to prevent anyone getting
through, until the cops moved in and made arrests after their required
three warnings. About 70 people were arrested over the course of the
week.

But Friday morning was different. And because of the successful lock
box action and total blockade, it was different in a way none of the
BXE organizers had even thought about.

Friday was the day for additional fracktivists and extractivists from
the severely fracked-up state of Pennsylvania to join BXE. So as those
150 FERC employees waited to get into the building, we organized a
teach-in on the front sidewalk, right in the midst of the employees.
For fifteen or twenty minutes people like Maggie Henry and Veronica
Coptis spoke from the heart, shedding tears but fighting through them,
to let the silent and listening FERC employees know the human toll
that their support of the gas rush has caused. There were no catcalls,
no boos, no one publicly questioning the truth of what was being said.

It was a very special moment.

We had been talking with and distributing material to FERC employees
and others passing by all week. The leaflet we distributed to FERC
employees said, in part:

“We apologize for any disruption to your work day, but that’s what
we’re here for—to disrupt the workings of FERC, which continues to
approve gas infrastructure projects that threaten the health and
quality of life for millions of Americans and the whole planet through
increased greenhouse gas emissions.

“Many of you work at FERC because you think it does a good job of
balancing the needs of industry and economic development with the
health and environmental challenges of impacted communities. But the
Obama Administration’s ‘all of the above’ strategy is condemning us to
runaway climate chaos while condemning families in fracking’s path to
a hellish existence. FERC should be prioritizing the emergence of
renewable energy as a growing sources of our electrical power.”

We found surprisingly little hostility from the close to 2,000 people
we distributed our flyers to. We even found, to our surprise,
indications of support from some of the Federal Protective Services
and DC Metro police who were doing their best to keep FERC open
despite our blockading. Going into the week, our lawyer had said to us
that he expected that they would get more aggressive as the week went
by, but that turned out, in general and with exceptions, not to be the
case.

Exceptions included a couple of people tasered on Friday after we
heard talk of it earlier in the week, several people falsely charged
with “assault” for standing their nonviolent ground as part of a
blockade and some police assistance to a small number of aggressive
FERC employees who tried to push through us.

Central to the success of this action were the sisters and brothers
from the Great March for Climate Action who were there for all, or
most, of the week. The decision to do this action during election week
had a lot to do with the plan of the Great March to arrive in DC on
November 1, ending on that day their eight month walk across the
United States. Many of us not part of that march were impressed by the
depth of commitment and soulful strength and organizing smarts they
collectively brought to the November 1-7 week.

We received more than a little bit of criticism about our decision to
do this week during election week, and we understood why. We were not
doing this to make a statement about how messed up our electoral
system is and that people should forget voting—not at all. In our call
to action we said, right up at the top, “vote we must, but we must
also do more.” If the Great March had not been arriving on November 1
we probably would have moved things back a week or two.

But as it turns out, it was very timely that Beyond Extreme Energy did
happen during election week, during a week when the Republicans took
back the Senate and Democrats generally did pretty badly—in large part
because of the willingness of far too many, once again, to be
Republicans-lite.

It is time, in 2015 and 2016, for many, many more of us to “vote” with
our whole lives through massive, serious, strategic nonviolent direct
action campaigns that are as coordinated as we can make them.
Investors in the fossil fuel industry, Democrats and others who want
our votes, members of the mass media and the American people generally
need to get it that the climate justice movement, increasingly aligned
with other movements for progressive social change, refuses to accept
“all of the above” and “business as usual.” We know what time it
is—there is little time left—and we are the leaders we have been
waiting for. Now must be, has to be, our time to rise up in large
numbers and with a spirit of love, a nonviolent discipline and a
willingness to sacrifice that cannot be ignored.

Ted Glick was one of the organizers of Beyond Extreme Energy,
representing the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. Past writings and
other information can be found at http://tedglick.com, and at twitter
at http://twitter.com/jtglick.