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Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America’s energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the “task force” meetings. All we’ve known for sure is who wasn’t invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America’s dependence on fossil fuels.

We’ve long suspected that Cheney’s special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of “Big Oil” over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney’s energy task force.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn’t conspire together, they did have one thing in common: their power was funded by our dependence on their oil. But even as Saddam’s show trial begins, televisions are watching America’s new national security enemies: Katrina and Wilma. Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks and the Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were “powered by” oil industry fortunes and short-sighted global energy policies, the same policies now bringing us global warming and monster storms.

Before making landfall in Mexico’s Yucatan and pounding Florida, Hurricane Wilma was declared the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in history. That we got to a W-name itself is cause for concern: the first tropical storm of the year gets a name starting with “A” and so forth through the alphabet. This summer has been the most active hurricane season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We’ve seen so many storms that weather officials have now run through the alphabet: meteorologists are now having to track Tropical Storm (now Depression) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, five devastating hurricanes ripped across Florida, each one coming so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pounding Western Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the country. And of course Katrina devasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.

Global climate change is here. After decades of political hemming and hawing, only the most slimy of oil industry apologists (and Presidents) could argue that global warming hasn’t arrived. We’ve built a national culture built on inefficient burning of fossil fuels. Developers put more and more people on unprotected sandbars built, maintained and insured by tax dollars. Someday is here and our weather is only going to be getting worse. We could be preparing for the inevitable adjustments. We could be investing in conservation, in renewable energies. We could change our tax codes to encourage sustainable housing: not just getting new development off beaches but also building urban and semi-urban communities that reduce automobile dependence.

Instead we spend billions of dollars on our oil addictions. We’re now waiting for the announcement of the 2,000th U.S. military casualty in iraq. Administration officials used Katrina to rollback environmental protection regulations in Louisiana. The arctic ice cap is rapidly melting away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil industry officials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there.

How many Katrina bin Laden’s and Saddam Wilma’s does it take before we get the news.

One of the reasons I like “nonviolence” as a catch-all organizing principle is that it let you range across to some of the root issues that need to be addressed. One of these is the climatic effects that humans are having upon the Earth. The New Yorker has been running some articles: check out part one of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Climate of Man (part two is here).

One of the more useful set of links and discussions I’ve read lately comes from a post titled Climate Change Activism on a blog called The Public Quaker. It’s not enough to know that the climate is going to hell in a handbasket and shouting the warnings out from the rooftops is often ineffective. The PQ talks about how we can help get a movement together that motivates people to build the world we want. Cool stuff and she has links to the work of others as well.

The “Indymedia” movement of independent media centers has been one of the most hopeful initiatives for democracy over the past few years. The Indymedia sites post stories from amateur reporters, in print, video and audio formats. The regional Independent Media Centers have been particularly active during large scale protests, covering them with a range and detail seen nowhere else.

Now there’s disturbing news that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized Indymedia’s computers in Britain. Details are lacking, but it certainly looks like yet another chilling violation of free speech in the name of “homeland security.” Here’s another article, from a local Indymedia Center. More as this frightening story develops. As we get information we will participate in any and all protests of this seizure. You can also check out thread on the Nonviolence.org Board (though much of it lame name-calling, sigh…)

One way to publicize grassroots political action is to give a trendy new name to your work. This is the strategy of the fellow who calls himself the “Freeway Blogger”:
http://www.freewayblogger.com/. Rather than post to the internet he posts signs on the side of the road with clever statements like “War President? My Pet Goat”; “Rumsfailed”; and “Nobody Died When Clinton Lied.”

There’s nothing really twenty-first century about the Freeway Blogger’s media. Activists have put paint on old bedsheets since time immemorial and the messages have gone up along the nation’s highways just as long. One can imagine the first patriots scrawling “Go Home Brits” onto an old cloth hung in a tree outside Concord. Yours truly has modified a few highway signs in his day and wheatepaste political messages in what we might call “sensitive” places (the less said the better).

But what is new is the Freeway Blogger’s use of the internet to highlight his work and organize it into a campaign. A sign on your local interstate isn’t as exciting as a campaign of signs or a movement of sign-makers. So the Freeway Blogger has called for a National Freeway Free Speech Day on October 13. It’s a day for all of us to grap our paint, posterboard, photocopies (and yes: bedsheets) in an coordinated effort to reach America’s drivers. The Freeway Blogger does have a website and has gotten 770 people in 190 cities across 45 states to join him in “freeway blogging” on October 13.

Here’s a great site I’ve recently found: “NonviolenceHelp”. There’s a lot of great material in here, I highly recommend for those wanting to learn more about the history and practice of nonviolence.

This site draws together some of the available on-line resources on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence. It is both an introduction to nonviolent social change and a resource for trainers and activists.”

Update: December 2004: This site has now been retired; much of it’s content can now be found in the Resources section of the Nonviolence Training Project