Blue Marble

Thatcher at the UN in 1990 United Nations

The year: 1990. The venue: Palais des Nations, Geneva. The star: Margaret Thatcher, conservative icon in the final month of her prime ministership. The topic: global warming.

Thatcher went to the Second World Climate Conference to heap praise on the then-infant Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and to sound, again, the alarm over global warming. Not only that, her speech laid out a simple conservative argument for taking environmental action: "It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now," she said, "than to wait and find we have to pay much more later." Global warming was, she argued, "real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations."

The Iron Lady's speech makes for fascinating reading in the context of 2013's climate acrimony, drenched as it is in party politics. In the speech, she questioned the very meaning of human progress: booming industrial advances since the Age of Enlightenment could no longer be sustained in the context of environmental damage. We must, she argued, redress the imbalance with nature wrought by development.

"Remember our duty to nature before it is too late," she warned. "That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe."

On climate change, Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday aged 87, was characteristically steadfast, eloquent, and divisive. "The right always forget this part of her legacy," Lord Deben, a member of the House of Lords and Chairman of the United Kingdom's independent Committee on Climate Change, told Climate Desk on Monday. Lord Deben served in the Thatcher government and said she was crucial in raising the profile of climate negotiations around the world, even when it was deeply unpopular amongst her colleagues. "She was determined to take this high-profile position," he said. "She believed it was her duty as a scientist." (Thatcher studied science while at Oxford University). Barring a few members, "the rest of the cabinet were not convinced," he said.

Thatcher also played an instrumental role in bringing the topic to the United States, said Lord Deben. "It was fair to say she got George [H.W.] Bush to go to Rio," he said of Thatcher's high-profile entreaties to convince the then-US president to attend climate talks in 1992. "She saw it as her duty to blow the trumpet."

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher addresses the 44th session of the General Assembly. United Nations, New York, 8 November 1989

The Geneva appearance wasn't her only speech about the need for strong international action. It was something of a theme across the latter years of her leadership. A year before, she shocked the UN General Assembly in New York by issuing a challenge: "The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the international community, do about it?" The news story in the New York Times ran with the headline: "Thatcher Urges Pact On Climate." She called for the United Nations to ratify a treaty by…1992.

She also had a domestic plan. Thatcher told British parliament that her government would cut carbon emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2005. This was met by skepticism by the opposition at the time (female politicians of all eras might be familiar with one such quip from the opposition benches: "The Prime Minister may talk green—she may even dress green—but there are the same old blue policies underneath.") Lord Deben painted a picture to Climate Desk of cabinet discord over one of Thatcher's decisions to allow for funds to protect military operations from rising sea levels. "She didn't convince her Chancellor," he said.

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Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they've been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

On Friday morning, Inside Climate News reported that an Exxon spokesperson told reporter Lisa Song that she could be "arrested for criminal trespass" when she went to the command center to try to find representatives from the EPA and the Department of Transportation. On Friday afternoon, I spoke to the news director from the local NPR affiliate who said he, too, had been threatened with arrest while trying to cover the spill.

Michael Hibblen, who reports for the radio station KUAR, went to the spill site on Wednesday with state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. McDaniel was in the area to inspect the site and hold a news conference, and Hibblen and a small group of reporters were following him to report on the visit. Upon arrival, representatives from the county sheriff's office, which is running security at the site, directed the reporters to a boundary point 10 feet away that they should not pass. The reporters agreed to comply. But the tone shifted abruptly, Hibblen told Mother Jones on Friday:

It was less than 90 seconds before suddenly the sheriff's deputies started yelling that all the media people had to leave, that ExxonMobil had decided they don't want you here, you have to leave. They even referred to it as "Exxon Media"…Some reporters were like, "Who made this decision? Who can we talk to?" The sheriff's deputies started saying, "You have to leave. You have 10 seconds to leave or you will be arrested."

Hibblen says he didn't really have time to deal with getting arrested, since he needed to file his report on the visit for both the local affiliate and national NPR. (You can hear his piece on the AG's visit here.) KUAR has also reported on Exxon blocking reporters' access to the spill site.

Since the spill happened a week ago, cleanup crews have collected 19,000 barrels of oil and water.

Hibblen says county officials seem to be deferring to Exxon when it comes to reporters. "This gets back to who's really in charge, and it seems like ExxonMobil," he said. "When you throw the media out, that's when the media really get their tentacles up."

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This is your energy on communism.

Bill Seitz, a Republican state senator from Ohio, recently told the Wall Street Journal that his state's renewable energy and energy efficiency standards are reminiscent of "Joseph Stalin's five-year plan."

Seitz, who is also on the board of the shadowy corporate-government allegiance known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), made this charmingly ahistorical claim just a week after inviting the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute to testify against the standard before the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee. He has taken it upon himself to determine whether Ohio should amend or repeal its clean energy law, which requires utilities to institute energy efficiency measures and to draw at least 12.5 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2025.

The Ohio legislature approved its clean energy standard almost unanimously in 2008. Since then, wind and solar companies have created 8,000 new jobs, and efficiency programs have netted rate payers $1 billion in savings, according to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. But in late February, Seitz introduced legislation that aims to overhaul the law.

Seitz maintains that he has launched the review because the current policies were based on the assumption that wind and solar prices would go down faster than they have over the past five years. He says the state has already deployed the "low-hanging fruit" energy-saving measures, and utilities and their industrial customers are reticent to implement the more expensive technologies that might be necessary to reach the goals set in 2008. "Nobody is for more carbon emissions than you need to have, but at the same time the question is, well, what does it cost?" Seitz told Mother Jones in an interview.

The senator's record and alliances are probably some indication of the direction he'll take his review process. In 2011, Seitz cosponsored a bill to repeal the renewable energy requirement entirely. He also sits on the board of ALEC, a public policy group that brings together corporate interests and conservative lawmakers to push industry-friendly bills in state legislatures, and coauthored the group's model renewable energy standard repeal bill known as the "Electricity Freedom Act." Another ALEC member, the Ohio-based American Electric Power Company Inc. (which stands to lose money due to the law's efficiency standards), was the third largest donor to his 2012 campaign, according to campaign finance data. Other big utilities, including FirstEnergy Corp. and Duke Energy, have been consistent supporters of Seitz.

Renewable energy advocates are not optimistic about Seitz's "review" of the renewable energy standard. "For Senator Seitz to create an appearance of a fair process given his close alliance with ALEC and its powerful interests is disingenuous," said Steve Frenkel, the Midwestern director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Seitz, on the other hand, doesn't think his campaign donations have any influence on his decision-making. "I'm term-limited. I could give a damn," he said, noting that he's "done" when his term ends in 2016.

Despite Seitz's allusions to Soviet centralized planning, recent polling shows that more than 65 percent of Ohio voters support the renewable energy benchmarks, and a majority of respondents said they would be willing to pay more for power from clean sources. "Ohioans know that their economy and their environment are benefiting from investing in clean energy technologies," Frenkel said. "And Senator Seitz is just out of step with the people of Ohio in recognizing the important clean energy transition that the state's already making."

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Rena Schild/Shutterstock

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Mark Kitchell didn't want to make your standard here's-a-really-important-issue, be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world, bleeding-heart environmental documentary. Kitchell, best known for his award-winning documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, doesn't even consider himself an environmentalist. But the story of the environmental movement was too much for him to resist.

"It doesn't get any bigger than this, in terms of a social movement," he says. "Especially when you think about what's at stake and the kind of transformation of society that needs to take place."

What Kitchell ended up producing was a kind of greatest hits of the environmental movement from its early days fighting over the building of dams in the West, to Love Canal, the first Earth Day, and the birth of Greenpeace, to the mother of all environmental issues—and maybe all issues, period—climate change. A Fierce Green Fire is now rolling out at a series of film festivals and theaters across the country.

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