Nick Caleb on fighting the fossil fuel industry, using the law, and organizing locally
"We have to be pretty opportunistic about the way that we intervene in certain places and recruit and build."
Nick (he/him) serves as a Staff Attorney at Breach Collective, providing legal and strategic support to grassroots partners around the country. Nick has significant experience in climate, energy, and air quality law and policy. He has a unique knowledge of municipal level strategies for restricting the activities of the fossil fuel industry, having been deeply involved in efforts to prohibit fossil fuel infrastructure in Portland and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Nick is also a member of Portland DSA and has been active in local movements to raise the minimum wage, establish new protections for renters, and secure greater accountability for the police.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
MH: Given the urgency of ecological crises, we really need to not have any new fossil fuel infrastructure and phase out what exists as soon as possible. And, at the same time, building new renewable energy; sometimes people take for granted that that's the same thing. So how can we stop the fossil fuel industry? What are strategies to do that?
NC: The way I think about it is to turn the logic that the fossil fuel industry wants people to internalize on its head. Most of these projects—especially a new pipeline project or a new terminal project—the burdens are actually all on the company to go get all these permits that they have to get and, historically speaking, they feel like they're rubber-stamped. So I think people get beat down and scared looking into the face of that. We can't win, we don't have the resources, they have all the resources, of course they're going to get these permits. But it only takes one, sometimes, of those permits to not be granted for a project to not be allowed. So pairing that logic with a will to fight, those two things are integral for any campaign. If you can get that far, then you've got a fighting shot. I've seen this repeatedly in my activist and professional life: we're not supposed to win, we're super overmatched, we're even sometimes late to the process, they've already gotten 80 or 90% of the things they need for the project, most people in the “big greens” have just given up or moved their resources elsewhere. And we've intervened and used the organizing techniques that we've developed over time and learned from our organizing forefathers and mothers and all the rest. It works.
What are some good examples that come to mind?
My favorite campaign that I've ever been involved in was actually in Memphis. In 2020, right as Breach Collective was getting started, we met these folks, the Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, who decided that they were going to stop a crude oil pipeline from going through a historically Black neighborhood in southwest Memphis. The pipeline company already had state permits granted and Army Corps nationwide permit 12 granted, and so they were late to it in that way.
We ended up getting to meet these fabulous community advocates in southwest Memphis who mobilized basically from zero to defeating a multibillion dollar pipeline within six or seven months with really, really good grassroots community building and working at city and state government, basically leveraging every possible advantage that they had toward the defeat of this pipeline. The story is incredible; it's been covered a bunch of times now. There's a podcast called The Sum of Us that just put out an episode that did a really good job.
It's one of the most environmentally burdened communities I've ever seen, because there's also legacies of industrial pollution nearby, people's life-spans are much shorter, there's high poverty. Just sheer willpower and organizing creativity busted up this oil company in seven months, and it's the only example that I've ever been personally involved in where the company voluntarily withdrew its application for the project and didn't have to be defeated.
What strategies or tactics do you feel were really successful in that fight?
I think geographical and political power mapping was really important. Whenever I do campaigning, whether it's on the policy side or opposing a project, the first thing that I do is really intensive research into every law that's available, every process that I can imagine, and just listing all that. So that was step number one, getting a really good understanding of what the lay of the land was. And then, along with that, seeing what permissions have already been granted, what state agencies have already given their assent to something, what needs still to be granted, where are the local or state governing bodies or utilities or anything that can be used as a leverage point if you could exercise sufficient pressure on them.
Then once you've mapped that, you start looking at individuals that are in those institutions. Where can you exercise pressure on those people? What are your tools? And then once you've done a pretty comprehensive map, you figure out how many resources you have, how many resources you need, and you start. You just go, and you start ranking your level of importance of who you have to move and when. So pretty involved campaign strategy thinking upfront. After that, it's a lot of will and energy and just talking to people basically.
Given the flawed nature of the system, what role do you think using the law can play in these sorts of fights and building a more just and sustainable world?
I think the combination of a science education and a legal education has been really good for me in thinking in terms of systems. I have a little bit more exposure to the legal piece of it, usually to be like, “Wow, this won't work in the long term [laughs]. But we should still devote energy because maybe it grants us some months or years in terms of delaying a thing.” But most of the things that I think work the best come through the practice of trying to do local organizing. Even though I consider myself to be a socialist, I learned a lot of organizing techniques in the Occupy movement from a bunch of anarchists: street activism, doing really solid media work, all these folks that were associated with Rising Tide North America. I didn't do any activism before I went to grad school, all of it was on the back end of that. So it was for me like a professional education number two.
Putting those things together and having a really holistic understanding of power from these different fields, that's where I think I've been useful to be able to see this full spectrum: Nine out of 10 opportunities are closed at any given time, but this is the one, and here's all of these ways that we can maximize this one little piece. But environmental law doesn't really imagine mobilizing your city council to say no to an oil pipeline. They don't teach it in school, but I've seen it work countless times over.
Can you say more about how you think law and organizing can work synergistically or in tandem?
I try to be what I call pragmatic and as un-ideological as possible when I do my campaign planning, to take things that exist as real and that you have to take them seriously. I believe that there is a thing called law that exists in the world and that people have to follow it to some degree, and it sets some rules and a game that we all have to play. So I don't think you can ignore that; I think you have to take that as a given and figure out how to best intervene. At the same time, I also believe that there's institutions that can be transformed, that there's agency in the world, and that these are also real things that you can use to persuade a whole bunch of people to not follow a rule, and that those things coexist at the same time.
It's like a big soup; you’ve got to put the recipe in in the right way for what you're trying to cook up. And in any campaign, it could be a different combination of all those elements that leads you to a similar end. But I try to be as non-ideological as I can possibly be while maintaining a trajectory. In different terminology, diversity of tactics or something like that. You decide that you're going to win, and then you figure out what those tools are going to be to get you to where you need to go.
That's a great way to think about it. So what are you working on right now?
A lot of my work is still around fossil fuel infrastructure. There's an oil terminal in my city that we're trying to stop from operating. They switched a facility that was an asphalt facility to an oil terminal. We've got them on the ropes with some creative local advocacy. We found an unacknowledged area of state air quality law that allows local governments to withhold permission for certain types of facilities for certain reasons, and use this one little tiny hook that nobody ever used before to basically hold up their air permit. We're in court litigating if you're allowed to do that still, and we're winning for the most part. So it's a bit of an administrative exercise at present, but the only reason we're there is because we did a lot of grassroots organizing over a 10 year period and there's just a really, really deep network of people who are involved in the fossil fuel infrastructure fights and will actually care enough about something obscure like that to be able to mobilize and get involved. So a lot of trust that we built up between different sorts of actors over time.
That's one project that's kind of like a trench war against an oil terminal [laughs]. And the long term vision that I see in my community around that stuff is if we can actually beat some of these fossil fuel terminals and stop them from expanding, prevent new ones, then we can actually begin to imagine what a managed decline of that infrastructure would look like. That's where I want to go, intentionally either fully deindustrializing that sector or transitioning it to something better that would be good economically for the community or use that land for another resource that the city would want.
Over the last couple years, I’ve been starting to get more involved in fights against gas utilities, which is something that I hadn't previously done. So there's a local gas utility called Northwest Natural that has a service territory that includes Portland and Eugene, Oregon, some other places, and so we're pretty heavily involved with a campaign to try to rapidly get off of gas.
What's the terrain in Portland like right now, and how are you thinking about it?
Portland is an interesting place because of its history and how the observed reality matches up against branding efforts. We're in Oregon, which was basically a resource colony before it became a state. And then, when it was created as a state, it wasn't a Confederate state, but it was a whites-only state. They had all these exclusionary laws, so there's a really deep exclusionary current in Oregon—white exclusionary, white nationalism current—sort of a mix of Confederate and Jeffersonian democracy thinking, but only for white people.
That's the history. And then Portland was kind of a Victorian city as it grew up. My understanding is that people of different genders couldn't meet in a park until the 70s, legally. I think what happened is a lot of people like hippies moved to Oregon after the 60s, and a lot of people from California moved in as well. You just had different populations of people that came and created these different cultures that became identified as the stuff that they’re parodying on the Portlandia show.
But that was always a minority current. People came and they were able to do that, it was a cheap city, but none of those problems really ever went away. So you have a city and a state that are pretty libertarian in terms of tax rules. The only way that we're really not that libertarian is in terms of land use; we have really, really comprehensive land use planning stuff, which is nice. Then you have spot progressive policies that come, and then those become the things that are part of the brand.
Now we're a deep blue state and we have a supermajority of Democrats. I think all that stuff in people's minds is this is a liberal mecca; it does not turn out to be true. We have the lowest business tax rates in the country. Nike exerts enormous influence over city council and state government. There was a government emergency that was declared eight years ago because Nike fraudulently threatened that they were going to leave the state if they didn't get these frozen tax rates forever, and the state impaneled a legislative emergency to grant them a 30 year tax freeze. That's the reality; as a leftist, that's how I see Portland. There are a lot of people here that care, so there's a lot to mobilize with. But structurally speaking, we've got a Jim Crow-style city council still. And a lot of the things that are progressive are just because we're a branding city, too. This is where Wyden+Kennedy exists, the Nike PR people.
It's a weird soup of libertarianism, progressive ideals, but also structural inequalities that are very, very, very deep in some bizarre exclusionary policies. So it's generally not favorable terrain when you're going up against companies. We've figured out ways of winning on some types of policies, especially in the climate world. But we had these huge police accountability protests that were the most that anybody has ever gotten involved in local politics to try to break the police union a little bit and get better contracts that would protect people. And we won nothing. We passed, overwhelmingly, reform stuff on the ballot, and two years later, the police are doing a slowdown strike and they still are getting money and hiring. So it's like nothing came out of that. The structures of government were extremely resilient to this huge push of progressive energy.
Police power, not just in Portland, but everywhere, seems so hard to move. So what victories have you seen locally, or what seems promising right now?
The things that I think are most notable and potentially could serve as inspiration for other folks around the country are how we structure our anti-fossil fuel coalitions. I think those are things that can be modeled elsewhere, including places in the deep south that are facing a ton of petrochemical exploration all the time. And then the other thing that I really think is amazing is the Portland Clean Energy Fund. It is really starting to come online; it took a couple of years to get everything organized. It's a tax on gross receipts of basically big box stores in Portland, and then that goes into this insulated fund that has a really aggressive, frontline community focus for how to spend dollars, and it's sitting on over $100 million now. For a medium-sized city like Portland to have a fund for an energy transition of that size is going to be a game-changer. It's not possible in every state because of red legislatures that preempt stuff like that or make it really hard to raise revenue off of companies, but in a lot of places it is a copyable program. That's a piece of infrastructure that I could totally see in a big environmental justice transition that’s directly redistributing corporate wealth toward community projects.
More broadly, how are you thinking about the present conditions and how to organize, build power, and make positive change towards a socialist horizon?
Since the pandemic, I've spent less time thinking about the big picture because I feel far less grounded in how things work than I used to. I may have been wrong, but I feel like I used to have some feel of a trajectory of where energy was moving in the country, and I'm more and more surprised at events happening that I just don't expect. I’m probably not the only one. So setting up our institutions to be pretty resilient and adaptive and not get too wedded, especially because we don't have the power to dictate things as it stands. We have to be pretty opportunistic about the way that we intervene in certain places and recruit and build.
I find it somewhat interesting that, even under the Biden administration, they've opened up ground that I didn't think would be opened up under this administration with this politics. Even though there's a lot to be critiqued about the Inflation Reduction Act, I also am going through it and mapping out all these different subsidies that are available for energy transition, and these green banks that are being created that can finance things at local governments. And I'm like, wow, this is the type of federal financing tool that would be integral to building out a socialist future. These are the nibblings of the bigger pie that we could be getting out of this type of thinking. So I'm trying to learn as much about that stuff as possible, and then imagine supercharging these types of programs and making them work so that then we can go back and get more of it in the future.
At a local level, I feel like where socialists and leftists of many stripes can get together is preparing to do local resiliency. I know people are allergic to different ways of framing stuff; I don't personally think mutual aid is a political program. But I also think if you're doing community assistance and building off of helping people, that's likely to improve people's perceptions of you [laughs] and make them actually want to join. I'm feeling the sewer socialism model: get deeply embedded in institutions and structures that already exist, caucus with your people so that you're staying accountable and you're moving on a trajectory that makes sense that your locals are working on. Basically, if we want to do majoritarian politics, we want to be seen as active, helpful members of the community. That's how we should be seen first, and then build our socialist politics out of that. Maybe it's also just an age thing, but I care less about the top-level branding and more about getting deep in the interstices of how things work and exercising collective pressure there.
So especially local government, or did you have other institutions in mind?
Yeah, local government. I still consider that to be the only area in American government that sort of approaches democracy [laughs]. Even in a blue state, if you want to do state-level politics, you're going to be caucusing with a ton of different people, you're going to have to be playing a very, very different game. It's a long-term game; you have to have a lot of willingness to stick it out in those circles. I think we should absolutely be doing that kind of work, but it's just a different game. The federal game is wildly different than that, tinkering around in the center of capitalist empire. And everybody cares about federal government, too, so it's hard. It's really, really hard work to do advocacy.
And local government, it's kind of overlooked. There's police unions, and there's your local business people and the developers that care a lot and NIMBYs and all those people. But they're not super organized all the time. There's a lot of openings, and if you just learn how these systems and structures work, you'll be like one of 50 people in your entire community that knows how the local government works. That's a lot of power. Oftentimes, you don't need to win as many seats to get majorities and things like that. I'm a big adherent of getting really, really stuck in on those types of local campaigns and learning how power works.