Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

“We won’t stop using fossil fuels tomorrow”

Sometimes paired with the fallacious argument that only people who use no fossil fuels can legitimately oppose fossil fuel development is the statement: “We won’t stop using fossil fuels tomorrow”.

The logical error associated with using this statement to defend new fossil fuel infrastructure like fracking wells and bitumen sands pipelines (as well as new fossil fuel vehicles or power plants) is so obvious that it may seem unnecessary to state, but the quip is so popular among those trying to delay adequate action on climate change that it requires a quick rebuttal.

It’s true that human society is dependent on fossil fuels, and not only for discretionary activities that people can legitimately be asked to give up. That said, it’s now entirely evident that climate change threatens human civilization if unchecked, to say nothing of the profound damage it’s already doing to non-human nature. Preventing the worst impacts of climate change requires a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and that is fundamentally incompatible with building new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Under contraction and convergence, it is plausible that some poor places can legitimately build a modest amount of additional fossil fuel infrastructure. This is most defensible in places that have low per capita emissions, low historical emissions, and where new fossil fuel use will address basic human needs instead of luxuries. None of these conditions apply in Canada or the United States, where per capita and historical emissions are both unconscionably high, and where most citizens routinely make heavy use of fossil fuels for trivial purposes.

The line about not giving up fossil fuels tomorrow is rhetorically appealing because it makes the speaker seem like a level-headed pragmatist and suggests that anyone who disagrees is out of touch with reality. In actual fact, our existing dependence on fossil fuels is an argument against new fossil fuel infrastructure, not for it. The media, members of the public, and decision-makers need to accept this.

Climate leaders don’t build pipelines

Reject Kinder Morgan

Tonight Toronto350.org organized a vigil to resist the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, which took place along with 44 others across Canada.

Justin Trudeau is going to find that his promises about indigenous reconciliation and restoring Canada’s environmental reputation require him to stop further bitumen sands extraction and export. If not, he will end up as confounded as the Harper government.

Piketty on inequality and Trump

In a piece for The Guardian, Thomas Piketty argues that inequality in the U.S. and the failure of governments to address it are the primary cause of Trump’s victory. He argues that:

The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development.

Piketty’s claim about inequality seems plausible in part because of how mental distortions seem to be central to the social and political consequences of inequality.

I am increasingly open to the view that the two ideas are related, including through the sense of entitlement that accompanies privilege. The terrifying willingness to impose suffering and death on innocent people around the world and on nature in order to maintain a preferred lifestyle is at the heart of the climate crisis.

Related:

Clinton, Trump, and the electoral college

Here’s an irony of the Trump election:

The electoral college was recommended by Alexander Hamilton, who argued in Federalist Paper 68 that: “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”.

Of course, if the 2016 election had been conducted based on the winner of the popular vote getting the presidency then candidates, parties, and voters would all have behaved differently. You can’t take the results of a game played with one scoring formula, then project that the results would have been the same under different rules. Among other things, under a popular vote system both Democrats and Republicans would have worked harder to turn out the vote in uncompetitive states, and voters would probably have been more willing to cast a ballot in non-swing states. It’s impossible to say whether Trump would have done better or worse than under the electoral college, making the petition to have the electors choose Hilary Clinton instead misguided, at least insofar as they rely on the popular vote outcome as justification.

The “not in an eminent degree endowed” justification may be stronger, but it’s hard to argue that the members of the electoral college (or signers of the petition) are more capable of judging the question legitimately than voters following the system which the U.S. has in place for electing a president.

What Canada and U.S. climate activists need to work on

For a few reasons, I am trying to reconsider what sort of political activity presents the best odds of helping to mitigate the seriousness of climate change.

I think people are right to target new fossil fuel infrastructure. There is a good chance of delaying or preventing many projects which would otherwise worsen humanity’s total historical carbon emissions. We just need to be careful to move on from tactics which have proven ineffective. I would put big marches and many common forms of direct action into this category.

There also needs to be a sustained effort against complacency within the environmental movement. We can’t fall into a pattern of doing things which are emotionally fulfilling to us, but which aren’t advancing a clear external purpose. “Raising awareness” doesn’t count.

We need to be working on cross-ideological alliances.

We need to keep developing alliances with other social justice movements, but make sure to try to do so strategically. Just because a clause is laudable doesn’t mean it’s prudent to engage in allyship automatically.

We need to be developing an alliance with what remains of the unionized labour movement: at a minimum to support the development of training programs for fossil fuel sector workers, and more ambitiously to support the emergence of an electable political ideology that calls for the transition away from capitalism intent on endless growth in consumption.

We need to keep pushing climate solutions justified in other ways. If people in some jurisdictions or social groups are more interested in renewable energy because of energy security reasons, it’s worth working with them on the deployment of climate-safe energy. Shutting down coal plants because of their appalling toxic pollution is just as desirable as shutting them down because of their damaging GHG emissions.

Other ideas?

A broken culture in Toronto climate activism

Recent developments (before the US election) have left me worried that there is a broken culture in Toronto environmentalism, and perhaps the environmental movement more generally.

Erosion of democracy

First — Toronto350.org and (while it existed) UofT350.org were founded on a model of open and participatory decision making, where all volunteers are members who have the final call on big decisions. That model has been undermined in a number of ways, primarily through institutional design choices, social cliques, and secrecy.

Toronto350’s decision to incorporate created a board, and almost none of the board members have been active volunteers. This has created a split between authority and involvement and has essentially broken Toronto350’s decision making structure, as decisions from the board are frequently informed by little understanding of how the group actually operates, and volunteers feel alienated from decisions being made by people who they neither see nor actually work with.

In both the Toronto and U of T groups, decision making based on personal relationships has often eclipsed or replaced open and inclusive decision making. In part this has been because a lot of members are bored and frustrated by decision making which they see as boring and bureaucratic. In part, it’s a response to interpersonal conflict: people pull back from engaging the general membership to engaging only with people who they still get along with. In part, it’s the result of a lack of respect for democratic procedure. There’s a case to be made that activist groups shouldn’t be democratic to start with, and would be better led by a vanguard of individuals capable of setting a coherent and effective agenda. That said, within groups that have been structured to function democratically, it’s deeply problematic when those in positions of authority fall back on making strategic decisions in private with their friends.

Taken to the next level, decision-making among friends becomes decision-making by a socially exclusive clique within but not representative of the general membership. In this situation, your social positioning and alliances become more important than the quality of your ideas and people interpret decision-making in terms of social impacts rather than the degree to which one action or another serves the stated aims of the group as a whole. A good sign that a social clique has taken over decision making is when elected executives do not meet or make decisions, and where changes in group functioning or priorities seem to come out of nowhere.

Periodic strategic planning sessions attended by a subset of the membership are not an alternative to a functioning executive, and can in fact make decision making problems worse by establishing contradictory priorities or being dominated by a small number of vocal members.

Secrecy is another major factor. For a few types of direct actions, it can be necessary to maintain operational security beforehand. At the same time, when strategic decision making begins to happen in secret, it’s often a way for a group of insiders to avoid having to hear or consider the perspectives of others. This can run in concert with when functions within an organization become enduringly linked to a specific individual, making the apparent elected structure not reflective of actual organizational functioning. This is a sort of empire-building, where people feel ownership and entitlement to particular campaigns or roles and where they assert themselves through hidden and private channels rather than involvement with the general membership.

Quite worrisomely, following the disbanding of UofT350.org after President Gertler rejected divestment, the principal group which has been formed by a minority of former members now seems to be exclusively engaged in Facebook activism, and actively rejects involvement from some of the most capable and committed organizers who were involved in the divestment campaign.

Lack of democracy is even more extreme with Canada350.org / 350Canada.org, which isn’t a real organization but rather a brand used by the handful of 350.org staff who are working on Canadian issues. That being said, unlike the Toronto and UofT organizations, the Canadian group (to the extent it exists) was never built on a model of open or participatory decision making. From the perspective of local 350.org chapters, at least, that also applies to the international 350.org organization.

One-way emotional progressions

Second — I have often felt that members of climate activist groups behave as though their emotions can only progress in one direction, toward the accumulation of more frustration and resentment both toward other volunteers and toward entire organizations.

It’s as though everyone has a little frustration thermometer for each organization and other person, and it ticks up by a degree or two every time there is a decision which that feels incorrect or problematic, and each time another volunteer does something which seems worthy of disapprobation.

This is one explanation for why so many of our most effective and committed activists have broken ties with the group, as well as for why people have a frustrating tendency to break off and form new small and ineffective organizations rather than working to revitalize older ones which are larger and have at times been more capable.

Decision making largely motivated by resentment has been especially evident during elections, where people who have long histories of involvement (and who have therefore raised the temperature in the thermometers of a lot of other people) have often been rejected in favour of people whose involvement has been non-existent, limited, or invisible to the general membership.

I have chosen to stop being involved with Toronto350.org for at least a year or two in order to focus on the PhD which I neglected so much while working on the divestment campaign. I hope the culture of climate activism in Toronto can improve, and that effective and popular new groups will emerge with a variety of decision making structures and theories of change. We can’t afford to fail in our response to climate change, so everything that strips us of effectiveness is something we need to think through seriously and respond to with practical solutions.

Reminder: Anonymous comments are encouraged

Donald Trump elected

I watched the U.S. election unfold at Massey College, where the mood grew progressively more grim with each new batch of results.

It’s still shocking that the U.S. has made such a self-destructive choice.

U.S. presidential elections: 2008, 2012, 2016

This outcome seems to have had a strong emotional effect on almost everyone I know, and with good reason. It’s a capstone on America’s decline as a world power, and of the growing dysfunction of the American political system. With both houses of congress and the presidency held by a party driven by harmful (often hateful) emotions and determined to disregard evidence, it’s scary to think what will happen in America during the next four years and what it will mean for humanity as a whole and nature.

The most optimistic plausible interpretation seems to be that this is the last gasp of an America that is deeply sexist and racist, threatened by every aspect of modernity and — able on this occasion to win by exploiting popular anger, but doomed in the longer term by demographics and their ineptitude.

Anti-capitalist environmentalism

I have generally been skeptical of anti-capitalist environmentalism for two main reasons: the added difficulty involved in changing our economic system and the possibility that an alternative economic system might not be more sustainable.

We have a tough enough fight on our hands, trying to create a sustainable world, even if we aren’t also trying to overcome the obsession of politicians and the public with endless economic growth and ever-increasing personal consumption. Indeed, criticism of either is so far outside the political mainstream that it raises questions of what kind of political program could succeed.

Furthermore, among 20th and 21st century political and economic systems, I don’t see non-capitalist economic systems that are clearly more sustainable than consumer capitalism. The clearest alternative – communism as practiced in Russia, China, and elsewhere – seems similarly ecologically destructive: maybe less capable of producing consumer goods, but even more cavalier about environmental contamination by heavy industry.

Reading Peter Dauvergne’s Environmentalism of the Poor has been another reminder of the plausible argument that the root of our environmental problems is unsustainable consumption, and only societal reforms that somehow counter that can succeed in keeping us from destroying the Earth and ourselves. If that’s true, we really have a lot of difficult political work ahead. The odds of success seem to depend on how humanity as a whole deals with the rising stress that will accompany trends like climate change and nuclear proliferation. If a growing recognition of crisis opens up political discourse and lets us challenge things like the assumption that economic growth is good, we may have a chance. If people respond instead by focusing ever-more on their own personal material interests, with less and less consideration for others, we may be on a trajectory to destruction with no means of course correction.