Category: Economics

Matters of money

Is the Leap Manifesto at risk of easy reversal?

Today, Toronto350.org hosted a teach-in in preparation for the climate change consultations which the Trudeau government has asked MPs to hold.

Avi Lewis — co-creator of the Leap Manifesto — was on the panel. The question which I submitted through the commendable system of written cards (to avoid tedious speeches from the self-important audience members) wasn’t posed to the panel, but I did ask Mr. Lewis about it after.

Specifically, I raised the issue of progressive climate change policies being adopted by one government and removed or reversed by the next. How can we enact policies that can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and avoid being reversed when new governments take power, especially right-wing ones?

Mr. Lewis said that the climate movement doesn’t have an answer to this question.

He began by describing how the right wing in North America has been effective at creating mechanisms to lock in its own policies. Specifically, he cited the network of right-wing think tanks and multilateral trade agreements that constrain the policy options of future left-leaning governments. To this could be added some of Sylvia Bashevkin’s analysis of how centre-left governments like those of Clinton and Chretien adopted much of the thought of their right-wing predecessors.

I went on to contrast two potential approaches to success, the hope that a coalition of leftist forces can work together to achieve all of their objectives (which seemed the underlying logic of today’s event, and much other climate change organizing) and the approach embodied by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), in which they are strictly non-partisan and seek to become a trusted source of climate information for members of all political parties and adherents to all mainstream ideologies.

Mr. Lewis said that he saw little point in the CCL approach, in part because parties like the Republicans in the U.S. are so unreceptive. He also thought this approach has been tried unsuccessfully by the climate movement already, whereas major pressure from a left-wing coalition was novel and might be able to drive change in a government like Trudeau’s.

I remain skeptical about the idea that a coalition of the centre-to-far-left can achieve durable success on climate change. These are critical years in terms of blocking big new infrastructure projects, but solving climate change will ultimately require decades of belt-tightening and sacrifice. Conservatives need to be on board if we’re going to succeed, and tying climate change mitigation too tightly to other elements of the left-wing agenda could impede that. Hence my anxiety about non-strategic linkages with laudable but not critically connected causes, from LGBTQ rights to minimum wage policy to the conduct of police forces.

The big exception in my view is solidarity with indigenous peoples. Around the world, they are absolutely central to the process of shutting down fossil fuel development. In Canada, where the Trudeau government remains either clueless or in denial, they may also be the only ones with the legal power to stop the construction of fossil fuel production and transportation infrastructure that we will all regret.

Summer TA work at U of T

In each year of my PhD, I have applied for all the summer teaching assistant (TA) positions offered in the Department of Political Science (and, after second year, in the School of the Environment too). I never heard anything back as the result of my applications, including for frequently-advertised ’emergency’ positions and jobs in statistics courses which I expected to be less popular.

Today I had a brief conversation with a prof who I worked for in a fall and winter term and learned that virtually all summer TA jobs go to people who are beyond the 5-6 year span where U of T provides funding. Apparently, summer TA jobs all go to people who are in their 8th or 9th year, or otherwise well beyond the “funded cohort” and seniority is the overwhelming criterion used to select them.

It’s reflective of how U of T generally under-funds its graduate students, as well as how the quality of teaching provided to undergrads is clearly not a university priority.

“Rickover and Rolls Royce” or “How England Got Nuclear Submarines”

This remarkable interview with Robert Hill, Former Chief Naval Engineer Officer of the Royal Navy, discusses the peculiarities of Hyman Rickover, including some very revealing stories, as well as Rickover’s role in developing the civilian reactor at Shippingport. The description of Rickover’s interaction with the chairman of Rolls Royce is quite amusing, though it also highlights the absurd degree of capricious control one unpopular admiral had over the proliferation of military nuclear technologies.

It also makes me want to find this 1962 paper “Submarine Propulsion in the Royal Navy”.

Part of the same set of interviews is another remarkable one with Stanley Orman, Former Deputy Director of the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. He seems to clearly provide classified nuclear weapon information, for instance on the details of uranium oxidation in oxygen and nitrogen; plutonium-tritium interactions and how to inhibit them; long-term plastic and rubber degradation as major issues in maintaining weapon functioning; and details on systems to prevent unauthorized nuclear detonations.

White on the (constructive) failure of Occupy Wall Street

I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed undelying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but rather in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

White, Michah. The End of Protest. p. 27 (paperback)

Related:

University of Ottawa to divest

This evening, the following motion was passed at the University of Ottawa:

The board should ask the finance and treasury committee to do the following:

  • Develop a strategy to shift Ottawa fossil fuel related investments towards investments and enterprises, especially those in Canada, involved in creating and selling technologies of the future, including renewable energy and other clean technology solutions.
  • Determine a reasonable time period within which that shift can occur
  • Report to the board annually starting in the fall of 2017 on its progress seeking further direction as it may require

    The exec committee further recommends the board reassess this strategy to determine whether market conditions or any other factors require a change in this strategy.

Obviously the team there deserves huge congratulations for their success. Every institution that takes action makes it easier for campaigns elsewhere to succeed, and harder for opponents to argue that taking action is too risky or not necessary.

That being said, this motion is arguably similarly vague to what U of T decided (although they are admittedly not putting UTAM in charge of implementation). The U of T campaign could have taken a radically different approach to the decision here and portrayed it as a partial success building toward something adequate. Such a response would have had to be agreed in advance, however, and given the mood of the U of T group may not have been possible. Even suggesting it may have exacerbated the deep disagreements about what sort of tactics and messaging are desirable and how success should be measured.

Explaining Trump

The often disturbing spectacle of the rise of Donald Trump as a leading Republican contendor in the presidential race prompts many emotional and analytical responses: about the long decline of America as a superpower since 1945, about the dysfunctional features of party politics and American politics in particular, and about the chasm between quality information on one side and public policy and (especially) public opinion on the other.

Many interpret the Trump phenomenon in terms of disaffected voters, as this passage from The Economist describes:

The reason evangelicals vote for Mr Trump has little to do with faith or specifics of policy. It is more a question of attitude. A study by the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, has found that the most reliable way to tell whether a Republican voter was going to support Mr Trump was whether he agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have any say about what government does.” Trump voters feel voiceless, and whatever attributes Mr Trump lacks, he has a voice. He lends it to them, to express their grievances and their aspirations for greatness, and they love it.

All this at a time when people are prosperous and governments are making easy choices, at least compared with what is likely in coming decades because of our criminal unwillingness to stop burning fossil fuels.

We had better hope that worsening global conditions eventually have a rallying effect, rather than prompting a scramble of every state, region, and ideology for itself.

Divestment discussed by the Governing Council

U of T: the President and the Governing Council

U of T President Meric Gertler’s decision to reject fossil fuel divestment in favour of ESG screening was formally presented to the Governing Council today.

UofT350.org held a rally outside, and Gertler’s remarks were followed both by questions from governors and a five minute presentation from Graham Henry, a second-year law student who has been deeply involved in the divestment campaign and spoke against the president’s choice.

In the questions (which came before Graham’s remarks), most of those who spoke commended the decision. One even thanked the president on behalf of steelworkers in the fossil fuel industry. A couple had limited questions about timelines, and one spoke out clearly in favour of divestment.

I was disappointed that what I see as the central issue never came up: the implications of further investment in long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure. Many people mentioned the 1.5 ˚C warming limit from the Paris Agreement, but nobody drew the contrast with the billions of dollars the fossil fuel industry continues to invest in projects that only make sense if we intend to warm the planet by much, much more. The issue, therefore, is less that the conduct of the fossil fuel industry in the past has been severely injurious to people all over the world (though it has) and more that their future plans are catastrophic for people everywhere, ecosystems, and all the life we know about in the universe.

President Gertler criticized divestment as empty symbolism, less meaningful than having U of T’s secretive and unaccountable financial managers in the U of T Asset Management Corporation adopt some new screening criteria. The symbolism with the potential to be highly meaningful would have been pointing out the reality that the fossil fuel industry has no long-term future, or at least none compatible with planetary safety.

If U of T had come out to say that investors everywhere are behaving dangerously and irrationally by continuing to fund fossil fuel development, it could have had a positive impact all over the world. By saying instead that climate change creates some minor financial and ethical issues which can be addressed through existing processes, U of T is fuelling our collective complacency in the face of a slowly-unfolding but nearly unstoppable catastrophe.

U of T’s investments are burning up the futures of their students, but with this decision such conduct has become just one of many minor factors to be considered by financial experts behind closed doors.

UofT350.org

From the perspective of UofT350.org, the group needs to decide what the most plausible strategy is for reversing this decision and what tactics would support that outcome. It also needs to do some deeper thinking about what the group is for, now that divestment has become an even more unlikely prospect. People have very different ideas — for instance, about ‘intersectionality’ as a strategy for success versus a rabbit hole of distraction (this connects to a broader debate about climate change as a leftist versus a pan-ideological issue). There’s also the question of what can be accomplished via protest tactics, particularly when confronting a conservative institution with strong constituencies favouring the status quo and skilled at using cover from superficial actions to placate those who care slightly.

Working on climate change activism generally requires experiencing failure over and over, and in the face of an ever-worsening crisis. How can we do that (a) while continuing to reach out to moderates and decision-makers and (b) changing real-world outcomes, rather than becoming an increasingly radicalized and angry sub-population who are easy to dismiss, ignore, or undermine with trivial policy changes?

ESG screening isn’t a substitute for fossil fuel divestment

Following up on their public criticism of President Gertler’s decision in The Varsity, eight out of eleven members of the ad hoc committee published a letter in The Globe and Mail:

Quoting from our report: “The committee recognizes that fossil fuels will remain indispensable and a contributor to social welfare for many years.” We did not recommend universal divestment.

Instead, we called upon the university to lead an effort to, in The Globe’s language, “gradually ratchet down fossil-fuel use worldwide,” beginning with the worst offenders, whose behaviour we should not tolerate. Much like the apartheid regime, the worst offenders need to be identified and isolated. These fossil fuel companies are the ones blatantly disregarding the international effort to limit the rise in average global temperatures to not more than 1.5 C, thereby greatly increasing the likelihood of catastrophic global consequences. These are the companies that are properly the focus of divestment and such a targeted strategy is an application of what has become known as the Toronto Principle.

We tried to get an op-ed, but the G&M was unwilling.

On Thursday, a member of the campaign will be addressing the Governing Council. Before their meeting begins, we will be holding a rally outside.

Fossil fuel divestment on As It Happens

Responding to an earlier interview with U of T President Meric Gertler (in which the host was impressively spirited and well-informed while pushing back), UofT350.org media representative Amanda Harvey-Sanchez was on CBC’s As It Happens today.

She highlights a key point about how the proposed ESG approach is less effective than divestment: it will be implemented by the people at the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) who have preferred to do nothing all along.