Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

350.org, fossil fuel divestment, and the campaign in a box

From a social movement perspective, one of the most interesting things about 350.org’s fossil fuel divestment campaign is how they have proliferated the strategy among (often newly formed) independent groups.

One mechanism has been written documents. Bill McKibben told me that reading the Carbon Tracker Initiative’s 2011 report “Unburnable Carbon: Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble?” was part of what prompted him and Naomi Klein to start promoting fossil fuel divestment. One of the main ways he got attention for the idea was his 2012 Rolling Stone article: “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

350.org also undertook a “Do the Math” tour in 2012, visiting 21 cities in part to seed divestment campaigns.

350.org and other NGOs that worked to proliferate fossil fuel divestment held convergences for university divestment organizers at Swarthmore College (where Swarthmore Mountain Justice had first tried using divestment against mountaintop removal coal mining) in 2013, as well as in San Francisco and Montreal in 2014.

There are also written materials on setting up and advancing campaigns. A campus guide was released in 2012 and a trainers’ handbook in 2013. There has also been a similar document on their gofossilfree website since 2016.

I won’t get into analysis of the implications of this approach to organizing here, but I was prompted to write this because I have found the “campaign in a box” idea strangely undocumented online, despite how I thought it was a widely discussed feature of the movement.

Putin’s war in Ukraine and nuclear energy

Theoretically, nuclear fission could play a big role in providing energy-rich lifestyles to people around the world without climate change.

At the same time, there are severe economic, social, and political headwinds to even maintaining existing capacity, much less building more.

Now, I fear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will add further causes for concern. Ukraine has four nuclear plants and 15 operating reactors — any of which could be damaged intentionally or unintentionally by combat, or which could experience a station blackout if the electricity grid goes down.

Russia’s actions are calling into question longstanding assumptions about global stability. If conflict will again be a feature of life in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia then potentially nuclear operators who already have public acceptance and cost competitiveness against other forms of energy generation as major concerns will have another reason to be wary of reactors. If an incident actually occurs at a Ukrainian nuclear facility, those public and elite concerns will be far more salient.

Canada’s climate change record

I have rarely seen such a concise and numerically-backed summary of Canada’s climate change policy outcomes than this one from Steve Easterbrook’s blog in 2016:

Several things jump out at me from this chart. First, the complete failure to implement policies that would have allowed us to meet any of these targets. The dip in emissions from 2008-2010, which looked promising for a while, was due to the financial crisis and economic downturn, rather than any actual climate policy. Second, the similar slope of the line to each target, which represents the expected rate of decline from when the target was proposed to when it ought to be attained. At no point has there been any attempt to make up lost ground after each failed target. Finally, in terms of absolute greenhouse gas emissions, each target is worse than the previous ones. Shifting the baseline from 1990 to 2005 masks much of this, and shows that successive governments are more interested in optics than serious action on climate change.

At no point has Canada ever adopted science-based targets capable of delivering on its commitment to keep warming below 2°C.

In my July 2021 letter to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson I defined the term “gapology” as: “the process going back to the Chrétien era of setting a GHG reduction target for political reasons and then performing economic analyses to compare potential mitigation measures and the GHG reductions expected to accompany them against the political target, always finding a gap in which some further action would be required.”

Trudeau’s net zero promise is an extension and reiteration of the gapology strategy: safely pushing accountability for meeting the target to long beyond his own time in office.

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Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

…

Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

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Linkages between universities and the fossil fuel industry in Singapore

A group from Singapore called Students for a Fossil Free Future has a new report: “Fossil-Fuelled Universities: A Call for Universities to End Links with the Fossil Fuel Industry.”

There is also a summary.

They found linkages between the fossil fuel industry and universities in terms of endowments; board members; donations; professorships and fellowships; scholarships, bursaries, and student awards; on-campus career events; and industry-linked professional programmes.

The transnational nature of the climate change activist movement

One challenge in the dissertation process has been repeated entreaties to only talk about Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns, not those in the US and UK.

I think Karen Litfin’s 2005 article “Advocacy Coalitions Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Globalization and Canadian Climate Change Policy” may be helpful for making my case that divestment is a transnational movement and that more is lost than gained by imposing national borders on its analysis. Litfin argues that “the twin phenomena of economic globalization and the internationalization of environmental affairs are blurring the distinction between some policy subsystems and the international arena.” I would argue that this is especially true for climate change activism, for several reasons. The politics of climate change are inherently bound up in international relations, since unilateral actions can’t solve the problem in the absence of cooperation between states. Furthermore, in North America the highly integrated energy systems — and the everpresent concern about Canadian economic competitiveness compared to the US — contributes to the transnationalization of climate politics, as do influences between ideologically similar political parties in both countries.

In addition, the strategies of broker organizations which have promoted divestment — including 350.org, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, the US Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, Canada’s Divest Canada Coalition, and the UK’s People & Planet — are based around providing a “campaign in a box” with coordinated objectives, branding, and messaging. Since the CFFD movement is focused on non-government actors, governments and national policy environments have a secondary importance for the movement.

Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en against the Royal Bank of Canada

Yesterday I photographed a rally outside RBC headquarters, protesting their financing of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.

The measure of whether businesses and governments care about climate change is their actions, not the sympathetic statements invented for their advertising and media relations. We can never build our way out of the climate crisis with huge new long-term investments in fossil fuels.

Toronto considering a net zero target for 2040

Next week, the Toronto city council is considering a proposal to adopt a net zero target by 2040. I have written to my city councillor and the mayor supporting the idea as better than nothing, but also explaining why net zero promises risk prolonging rather than curtailing fossil fuel use:

Councillor Mike Colle and Mayor John Tory,

I am writing to you in support of the effort to establish a net zero CO2 target for Toronto by 2040, but also to warn you about the risks of the net zero concept and to advocate fossil fuel abolition as a preferable policy. Please do not be mistaken about my intent: a net zero target is better than inaction, and ought to be passed. Addressing climate change, however, will require much more.

There is a major risk that “net zero” is a delay and distraction tactic which aligns with the interests of fossil fuel producing states and corporations. It’s a way of distracting from the cause of climate change — fossil fuels — and to conjure a misleading sense that the problem can be solved without getting rid of them. By endorsing net zero targets, advocates of climate action risk playing the role of doctors advocating low-tar or filtered cigarettes: extending the life and profits of a noxious industry through the false suggestion that we can get the benefits while avoiding the consequences.

One of the clearest signals that net zero is being used to extend rather than constrain the history of the fossil fuel industry has been the enthusiasm with which such targets have been adopted by fossil fuel producers. For example, Saudi Arabia has made a net zero promise for 2060 while Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.” This ought to be a warning sign that net zero is a Trojan horse designed to delay policies and regulations to abolish fossil fuels before we catastrophically destabilize the climate.

An examination of scale also calls into question the plausibility of achieving net zero by any means other than ending fossil fuel use. Global oil production was about 88.4 million barrels per day in 2020. That’s about 32.3 billion barrels, each with about 136 kg of oil. That adds up to about 4.3 billion metric tonnes (gigatonnes) of oil taken from the ground every year. Even with COVID-related reductions, global CO2 output in 2020 was about 34.81 gigatonnes. That means to bury all the CO2 from our fossil fuel use, we would need to replicate the global oil industry more than eight times over, except with equipment to extract, compress, and bury CO2. All of this would cost energy and money to run and would produce no profit. It has also taken a century to build that level of oil infrastructure. The idea that we can solve our CO2 problem by burying it simply doesn’t make sense physically, even before you start comparing the cost of avoiding the emissions in the first place to the cost of separating and burying them.

In addition, there are enormous non-climate co-benefits from fossil fuel abolition. A 2021 journal article estimated that just the fine particulate pollution from global fossil fuel combustion causes 10.2 million premature deaths annually. This is another demonstration of how the apparent profitability of the fossil fuel industry arises only because we do not deduct the amount of harm arising from their products. Fossil fuel abolition has the promise of saving ten million lives per year, and more when pollution beyond just particulate matter is factored in.

The other risk of a net zero as opposed to a fossil fuel abolition approach is that it will fail to incentivize the right investments. If families and businesses in Toronto knew that fossil fuel use was going to be coming to an end before mid-century, it would no longer make sense to construct new buildings heated with gas, or countless other pieces of infrastructure that reinforce and prolong our fossil fuel dependence. If we let that investment continue and only get serious about fossil fuel abolition later, it will raise the total cost because we will have wasted money on inappropriate infrastructure which we will need to scrap and because we have delayed the deployment of appropriate infrastructure compatible with a stable climate.

To repeat my main point: adopting a net zero target by 2040 would likely have some benefits and is better than inaction. At the same time, the city council must be mindful of the risk that net zero targets are a concealed fossil fuel promotion strategy, not a strategy to stabilize the climate. It is always tempting to be told that you can get the benefits of a damaging activity while avoiding the harms, but with net zero there are strong reasons to fear that it is a marketing strategy designed to keep letting fossil fuel producers profit while others absorb the costs.

Thank you for your attention,

Milan

We’re not going to bury our way out of the fossil fuel catastrophe. What needs burying is the fossil fuel industry itself.

David Brooks on Burkean conservatism

Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks has produced a good short summary of Edmund Burke’s classical conservatism and how it relates to contemporary US politics:

This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental. Down the centuries, conservatives have always stood against the arrogance of those who believe they have the ability to plan history: the French revolutionaries who thought they could destroy a society and rebuild it from scratch, but who ended up with the guillotine; the Russian and Chinese Communists who tried to create a centrally controlled society, but who ended up with the gulag and the Cultural Revolution; the Western government planners who thought they could fine-tune an economy from the top, but who ended up with stagflation and sclerosis; the European elites who thought they could unify their continent by administrative fiat and arrogate power to unelected technocrats in Brussels, but who ended up with a monetary crisis and populist backlash.

…

Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe that human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness; most of the time our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness. They did not believe that individual reason is powerful enough even to comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

My view is that what we need more than anything is a movement of the right demanding climate change mitigation. Otherwise we end up with an endless sea-saw between strengthening and repealing fossil fuel abolition policies, at the same time as voters are only offered climate change action as part of an intersectional agenda which they may not otherwise agree with. We need to split the right between fantasists who decide what they see based on what they believe politically and empiricists who accept evidence as the adjudicator of truth.

The progressive climate movement has been a crucial development and remains the main force pushing for action. At the same time, this perspective is conspicuously lacking in humility about re-making long-standing societal institutions, with the assumption that most of what is pernicious politically in the world will disappear once everyone is wise enough to accept their ideology. It’s a perspective that concentrates support inward with ever-greater demands for moral purity and ideological conformity, whereas what we need to produce a consensus behind fossil fuel abolition in the US, UK, and Canada is the understanding that nobody’s political project is served by radically destabilizing the climate. If we want to preserve institutions that have endured and shown value over time, we need to eliminate the fuel sources that are destabilizing the physical environment in which they have evolved. There’s nothing more conservative than that.

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