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| July 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
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| July 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
Gas Pains
What does it take to get a little attention around here? How about hanging up a banner?
The Bank of America Tower (formerly the Unocal Tower) near the Bay Bridge in San Francisco is a cherished landmark, sort of a digital Big Ben. It's usually got a cherished corporate logo on it, but it's currently between logos, so on May 2nd, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network scaled the tower and thoughtfully displayed the PacBell logo for all to see. It was on a banner that proclaimed "PAC BELL DESTROYS B.C.'s RAIN FORESTS."
This is a pretty good location for a banner: the billboard companies estimate that over 200,000 people a day drive their cars along this stretch. In addition, daily papers all over the Bay Area printed photos of the banner, and it even made it onto the teevee news!
The occasion was the shareholders' meeting of Pac Bell's parent company, Pacific Telesis, where a vote was being taken that day on a shareholder resolution to stop buying paper for phonebooks from MacMillan Bloedel, which gets its pulp from old-growth forests. The resolution failed, with 9% of the shareholders voting in favor of it (not a bad showing for the home team, a but a bit short of the majority needed).
Alas, the daily papers didn't provide a lot of information along with the photos. The San Francisco Chronicle did the most in-depth piece on the matter back on April 10, but that was a brief item that quoted MacBlo describing itself as an "ecologically sound industry leader." The May 3 San Francisco Examiner quoted an unnamed Pac Bell spokeswoman's claim that "the company does not use paper harvested from the Canadian forests."
It's not as if these papers didn't have any evidence to the contrary available. RAN's press release on the banner-hanging included the following quotes in the Vancouver Sun from MacBlo spokesman Dennis Fitzgerald: "[A]ll pulp and paper from B.C.'s coasts is made from old-growth trees," and "85 per cent of trees MacMillan Bloedel cuts are old growth."
Ah, but the dailies had more important concerns. In a May 4 editorial under the title, "An Anti-Environment Act," the Chronicle fumed about the banner-hanging: "Idling cars guzzled gas and sputtered extra emissions into the sparkling spring-morning air. ... Traffic slowed to a crawl -- if that -- as rubberneckers craned to see the tom foolery." I haven't known the San Francisco spring-morning air to sparkle very much during rush hour, but perhaps the Chronicle's editors are inhaling different stuff. The auto commuters I've polled didn't find the traffic any worse than on a typical morning, though perhaps that's the point: I expect to see an anti-billboard editorial in the Chron forthwith.
If the shareholders won't do anything about the phonebooks, it's up to the customers. You could start by not using Pac Bell for local phone calls if your long-distance provider can carry the calls instead. You just need to dial a five-digit prefix, which you can get from your provider. And you can write to the big cheese at Pacific Telesis to let them know that you're doing this and why, at:
Phil Quigley, CEO
Pacific Telesis
140 New Montgomery Street, 18th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
Pacific Telesis was recently swallowed by another company, so you can write to their big cheese, too:
Edward Whitacre, Jr., CEO
SBC Communications, Inc.
175 East Houston, Suite 1300
San Antonia, TX 78205.
Other motorist travails have been in the news lately, due to an increase in the price of gasoline. A small increase was expected, to cover the cost of a new, cleaner-burning formula, but instead the increase turned out to be a very sharp one.
There were plenty of tales of anger and frustration, and even a granny robbing a gas station (albeit for cash, not gas). One politician opined that something must be done before people begin blowing up gas stations and starting fires at refineries. Actually, the oil companies pretty much have that last part covered (see last month's Funny Papers). Comparisons were made to the long lines at the gas stations in the 1970s -- one is tempted to drive up to the pump with a car stereo blaring the soundtrack to Dazed and Confused, just as soon as one can find that soundtrack in 8-track format.
Of all the tales of human suffering in the wake of this tragedy, though, the most touching was the May 5 San Jose Mercury News story about the Los Altos couple with an agonizing dilemma: "They may take one vehicle -- not the usual two -- to their Lake Tahoe vacation home this summer."
Note to the Los Altos couple: We at Terrain feel your pain. Our editorial board was able to take vehicles to Pyramid Lake this month, but only by pooling the financial resources of six humans and a dog.
With lots of readers in the sprawling South Bay, the Mercury News devoted a lot of space to this issue. An April 20 article explained the price hike as a combination of depleted supply from a cold winter back east and a few refinery fires, and heavy demand from all the Californians driving minivans and "sport utility" vehicles. And just in case we missed it, they explained it all over again in an article on April 25.
Oil industry execs weighed in with much the same argument. A vice president for Arco is quoted in the April 26 Examiner: "The bottom line is prices are dictated by supply and demand. We suggest you allow the marketplace to correct itself." It's simply a coincidence that this correction's going to involve a sharp increase in their profits.
On April 9, the Mercury News came up with a new theory. Apparently, because the cleaner-burning gas is sold only in California and mostly made here, it's a "separate market." Which is to say, it's utterly different from the old gas market in California, in which almost -- but not entirely -- all the gas sold here was made here. And by the way, there wasn't any shortage of supply due to harsh weather in the east (that's the old market, after all), just a "perceived shortage" (in this new market).
I hope that's clear, or at least as clear as the sparkling spring-morning air over San Francisco's freeways.
An eighth grade science class at San Francisco's Horace Mann Middle School sampled the air quality at and around the school, and found out that it wasn't in very good shape. Indoor air quality suffered from dust, mold, asbestos and a high level of lead. You'd think these alarming findings would be front-page stuff, but none of the daily papers found it even newsworthy. The only mention I could find was in the May 1996 New Mission News, a neighborhood newspaper.
Similarly, when construction work at the Bernal Heights Recreation Center uncovered and released even more lead, the daily papers couldn't be bothered with the news. I found the story in the San Francisco's April 30 Independent, a free weekly.
Perhaps the eighth-graders and park workers should climb up a tower and hang a banner. Maybe that would get the dailies to notice ...
There were a number of news services feeding the local papers stories about the gas prices. One of these, from the Associated Press, centered on Arco's shareholders meeting. One of the issues at the meeting reported in the AP story was that company's natural gas exploration deal with the military junta of Burma. This junta is infamous for its genocidal treatment of rainforest peoples (and, of course, their habitat).
Most of the local papers were printing anything and everything with the word "Arco" in it, and getting quotes and info from the AP for the gas price stories. Most of them didn't think the Burma story was worth printing; but the Alameda Newspapers Group printed this story in its entirety. Bravo!
Another human rights story was in the ANG's Fremont paper, The Argus, on May 7. Fremont Assemblywoman Liz Figueroa is sponsoring a bill to ban the state from purchasing goods made with slave labor. Harry Wu, a former Chinese political prisoner now living in Milpitas, is a supporter of the bill. Many goods are purchased from China, and are made under forced labor conditions with little regard for the enviroment or health of the workers. Wu was imprisoned for investigating these conditions.
Unfortunately, I didn't see this story in the ANG's Oakland Tribune. Surely a human rights story is worthy of print even if there isn't a local angle?
If you want to read press releases about the banner-hanging, complete with photographs, there are two of them online: RAN's and Greenpeace's. There's a RealAudio interview there, as well.
Also appearing in this issue of Terrain was Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn's ``Nature and Politics'' column, which sheds even more light on the gas price hike.
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