Politics – Page 9 – a sibilant intake of breath

Persuasion and climate change politics

My PhD dissertation (which I am making the final pre-publication revisions on) is entitled: Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20.

The title has several connections to the subject matter. 350.org and the other eNGOs who proliferated the divestment movement sought to persuade student activists to run campaigns with particular objectives; they did this in part to help persuade politicians and the public that the fossil fuel industry has become an enemy to humanity. Individual divestment campaigns tried to persuade their target administrations to divest, while also persuading students to join the group and consider their political messages. Activists were also heavily involved in trying to persuade one another to adopt particular views on what caused climate change and how to solve it. Finally, the title emphasizes how the task in divestment was persuading universities and other investors to act, not “forcing” them as some activists aspired to or claimed.

On this subject of persuasion, I listened to an episode of CBC’s Front Burner podcast “Can persuasion bridge the political divide?” with Anand Giridharadas. Giridharadas makes some very clever points that relate to the arguments of Kathy Hayhoe and others about how to win political support for climate change adaptation. I ordered Giridharadas’ book, and will hopefully be able to have some engaging discussions about it with friends who are working to develop and implement effective activist strategies.

Podcast episode about the early U of T fossil fuel divestment campaign

The first episode of Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva’s podcast about the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is online. This one features three organizers from the early campaign in 2012: me, Stu Basden, and Monica Resendes.

Podcast series on fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto

Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva are making a five-episode series on the U of T campaign, and an intro episode is online already.

All along one of the challenges with volunteer-driven student organizing is that few people can stick around to maintain the group’s memory across the years. Efforts like this podcast series, to document and analyze what took place, will be valuable for the people setting up the next iteration of the climate fight.

Personality and system justification

In terms of differences among people, psychological research reveals that people who exhibit lower levels of complex thinking or higher levels of death anxiety or stronger desires to share reality with like-minded others tend to justify existing institutions and arrangements more than others. In other words, people who—for either chronic or temporary reasons—are especially eager to attain subjective states of certainty, closure, safety, security, conformity, and affiliation are especially likely to accept and rationalize the way things are and to embrace what contemporary scholars would recognize as politically conservative ways of thinking. In contrast, individuals who enjoy thinking in complex terms, or who are less sensitive to external threats than others, or who value uniqueness over conformity, are more likely to criticize the social system and to approve of insurgent movements aimed at changing the status quo. Thus, in addition to a general tendency for people to adapt to unwelcome realities, there are individual differences in personality as well as situational triggers pertaining to epistemic, existential, and relational motives that increase or decrease the likelihood of participating in system-challenging collective action.

Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press, 2020. p. 7-8

System justification and politics

After his thought-provoking podcast discussion with David Roberts, I will need to read John Jost’s two books on how our psychological needs for stability and respected position in the social order drive us to defend the status quo political, legal, and economic order as natural and just, regardless of our personal position in that social order’s specific distribution of burdens and benefits: Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult

Quebec’s 2022 election and climate change

CBC News reports:

Legault’s growing number of supporters endorsed, instead, his politics of the status quo.

This is a politics of more tax cuts aimed at the broad middle class and of docile environmental policies, of investments in elder care and the odd quarrel with Ottawa.

…

But Québec Solidaire, the progressive party that had hoped to emerge as the alternative to the CAQ, vowing urgent action on climate change, only mustered 15 per cent of the vote on Monday. That’s about how it fared last time. It finished the race with 11 seats — one more than in 2018.

Princeton divesting

Princeton is not only divesting but ‘dissociating’ from fossil fuel corporations:

Divestment is a decision to refuse to invest in a company or set of companies and entails the sale of all securities associated with a company, including both direct and indirect investments, and precludes the repurchasing of those securities.

Dissociation means also refraining, to the greatest extent possible, from any relationships that involve a financial component with a particular company. It includes no longer soliciting or accepting gifts or grants from a company, purchasing the company’s products, or forming partnerships with the company that depend upon the exchange of money.

Every highly reputable school that acts makes it easier for others to say yes and harder to justify continued fossil fuel investment.

Satellite to satellite espionage and warfare

One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to learn about the skullduggery of this era.

One potentially important example is happening now in space. Satellites have become crucial to everything from time synchronization for high precision activities to navigation and communication. They also can’t really be hidden. Perhaps there are satellites with optical stealth that are hardly or never visible, but even top secret spy satellites of the conventional design can have their orbits determined by civilians with stopwatches and binoculars.

That is why we know that Russia, among others, has been experimenting with satellites that approach others and can potentially disrupt or destroy them, or monitor their activity. An article on China’s program includes the intriguing phrasing: “non-cooperative robotic rendezvous” between spacecraft. Russia’s Cosmos 2542 is known to have approached USA 245: an American spy satellite believed to be one of the largest things in space.

One can only speculate on how such capabilities are influencing world politics and the unfolding of events.

Renewable energy has drawbacks and environmental consequences

Renewable energy sources — wind, wave, solar, and the like — are generally the preferred energy sources of environmentalists. At the same time, there is no way to produce energy without some sort of environmental impact, and the more people you need energy for the greater the impact will be.

Some examples of environmental impacts from renewable energy:

Nonetheless, unintended side effects of renewable energy sometimes lead environmentalists to oppose it. In my view, they are missing how every energy source will have drawbacks and the question is how they relate to the drawbacks from alternatives, chiefly fossil fuels. Environmentalists can be too easily inclined to become perpetual and reflexive critics, always emphasizing the problems with any course of action and effectively acting as a blockage to any action.

Renewable energy options:

Environmentalist / NIMBY opposition to renewable projects:

Energy storage:

Transmission and grid interlinkage:

Demand shaping:

Politics of renewables:

Open thread: New political parties as a climate change response

In the UK, Ed Gemmell launched a “Climate Party” to “take on 110 Conservatives in the next election”.

In the US, Andrew Yang is trying a “Forward Party”.

Is there any sense in this approach, or will such issue-specific parties inevitably be marginalized like other third parties in a first past the post electoral system?