The environment – Page 20 – a sibilant intake of breath

Jason Kenney and the end of oil

Don Braid is reporting on recent comments from Alberta premier Jason Kenney, presumably uttered in the hope of bolstering the chances the Trudeau cabinet will approve the Teck Frontier mine:

“Over the next decades as we go through the energy transition, we all know that there will be a continued demand for crude,” he told a panel at Washington’s Wilson Center last Friday.

Kenney added: “It is preferable that the last barrel in that transition period comes from a stable, reliable liberal democracy with among the highest environmental, human-rights and labour standards on earth.”

Energy transition. Last barrel. Transition period. Six not-so-little words we’ve never heard clearly from Kenney before.

“I have a firm grasp of the obvious,” Kenney said in a later interview. “There is no reasonable person that can deny that in the decades to come we will see a gradual shift from hydrocarbon-based energy to other forms of energy.”

There is still a lot to criticize, of course, and Canadian oil is far less positive from an environmental and human rights stance than industry boosters admit.

Still, there is cause to see these comments as significant. Even for a politician that defines their political programme in terms of support to the oil and gas industry it has become necessary to acknowledge that there is a limit to total permissible global production because of climate change, even if Kenney talks about it here in the impersonal and indirect language of a ‘change in demand’.

Kenney is setting out the logic of the bitumen industry’s downfall here, even though he is trying to do the opposite. Once you accept that oil production can’t continue forever or until all reserves are exhausted, and then you start deciding which oil to produce or not produce on economic and environmental grounds, unless you have motivated reasoning and a set conclusion all along, few people are going to conclude that it makes sense for that oil to come from the bitumen sands.

Carbon capture options

Because the alternative is deep and rapid emissions cuts which countries are unwilling to implement, the IPCC now assumes that stabilizing the climate will involve heavy use of negative emission technologies: “between 100bn and 1trn tonnes of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere by the end of the century if the Paris goals were to be reached; the median value was 730bn tonnes–that is, more than ten years of global emissions.”

There are numerous possible options. CO2 could be separated from flue gasses from power plants, compressed, and injected underground. If those power plants burn biomass which recently took CO2 out of the atmosphere, that could help draw down the stock of carbon in the atmosphere. That approach is called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage or BECCS. It’s also possible to separate CO2 directly from the air and bury it (direct capture). It’s also worth bearing in mind that sometimes CO2 is injected underground to push up oil to be sold (enhanced oil recovery or EOR). In that case, it likely creates more emissions than it avoids since the same volume of oil is pushed out and then likely burned in a vehicle where it cannot be captured.

All this may be highly questionable as a climate change solution and, indeed, the main push for CCS is from corporations and states that don’t want to give up fossil fuel production. The notion the technology will eventually exist at scale helps justify today’s fossil fuel burning, even though right now we’re buying about 40 million tonnes of CO2 while emitting 43.1 billion tonnes. Burying any substantial fraction of global CO2 emissions would mean compressing and burying many times the total quantity of oil we take out of the ground — with everything that implies about costs, deployment times, and capital requirements — and this whole infrastructure would require energy to run instead of producing it, either requiring us to deploy yet-more climate-safe energy to build and power the equipment or putting us in the self-defeating position of burning more fossil fuels to generate energy to bury the CO2 from the fossil fuels we already burned.

Police and intelligence services as defenders of the status quo

In Victoria today, about ten young Indigenous protestors were arrested after occupying the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources building.

Meanwhile, British security authorities have categorized Greenpeace and the Extinction Rebellion with far-right groups and neo-Nazis.

Today’s George Monbiot column calls out how government security forces have often been more focused on threats to the political and economic order than on genuine threats to security:

The police have always protected established power against those who challenge it, regardless of the nature of that challenge. And they have long sought to criminalise peaceful dissent. Part of the reason is ideological: illiberal and undemocratic attitudes infest policing in this country. Part of it is empire-building: if police units can convince the government and the media of imminent threats that only they can contain, they can argue for more funding.

But there’s another reason, which is arguably even more dangerous: the nexus of state and corporate power. All over the world, corporate lobbyists seek to brand opponents of their industries as extremists and terrorists, and some governments and police forces are prepared to listen. A recent article in the Intercept seeks to discover why the US Justice Department and the FBI had put much more effort into chasing mythical “ecoterrorists” than pursuing real, far-right terrorism. A former official explained, “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists’.” By contrast, there is constant corporate pressure to “do something” about environmental campaigners and animal rights activists.

Decarbonization is going to be a huge political fight, and it’s clear that the fossil fuel industry has the support of the security and surveillance states which have exploded since the September 11th, 2001 attacks. At the societal level we need to reconceptualize the threats which we face and the appropriate means for dealing with them. Armed force in defence of economic interests which hope and plan to keep fossil fuel use going as long as possible is the opposite.

BlackRock shifting from fossil fuel investments

The CBC is reporting: BlackRock, world’s largest asset manager, changing its focus to climate change.

This is intriguing in several ways. Climate change action is held up politically in part because right wing parties have embraced climate change denial and the defence of the fossil fuel industry. Even progressive parties seem to take the Trudeau approach of promising ambitious targets for long after they are in power, making incremental positive changes, but then continuing to support fossil fuel development to such a degree that those positive changes are overwhelmed.

If the world’s vast pools of finance capital have begun to seriously question the financial return from fossil fuel investments it could do more to decarbonize the global economy than anything which humanity has done so far. It would also be interesting politically if the aims of a climate activist movement which is largely anti-capitalist and redistributive in its membership end up being adopted more immediately and meaningfully by for-profit actors than by governments notionally accountable to the public. It would be interesting too to see what effect this kind of capital shifting may have on right-wing politics.

Re-kindling multilateralism with non-carbon energy?

Clearly one of the principal things we need to learn as part of dealing with climate change is how to get along with one another as an international community. For one thing, we cannot afford the inevitably vast and frantic fossil fuel use which any great-power conflict would involve. More optimistically, it will only by coordinating efforts all around the world that we can follow the sort of decarbonization pathway which would avoid breaching the 1.5 – 2.0 ˚C temperature limit people talk about.

We can choose to be part of a noble tradition in statesmanship: of nations with different strengths, needs, and priorities being able to cooperate on projects of mutual interest and avoid the needless waste of arming excessively for war. It’s a waste in many senses: in terms of the time and skills of people who serve in military forces and who would otherwise contribute to society more in other ways; in terms of the spending on military equipment; the greenhouse gas emissions from remote location diesel generators and military vehicles; the fossil fuels which we are burning instead of keeping underground in order to keep our climate crisis from becoming catastrophic, or at least putting to an important social purpose which benefits people’s lives.

What it requires is a willingness to accept that people around the world are morally comparable to us, akin. We cannot choose a course of action which will condemn their nations to destruction, nor impose the level of disruption and suffering expected from unmitigated climate change. Once we have made a collective determination among some states that it is possible to move beyond fossil fuels and remain prosperous and democratic societies, we can begin to build that bloc outward on the basis of trading links and good and forthright relations with states outside our collective fossil fuel rationing system. Imposing tariffs at the border for states exporting carbon-intensive products may be a necessary part of containing opposition from trade-exposed domestic industries, while encouraging outside states to join the rationing bloc by implementing a credible set of decarbonization policies themselves, or at least established a comparable or integrated carbon price.

Politics and the identification of lies

The November 2nd Economist included an article with some interesting claims about lies, politics, and identifying deceit:

But even in daily life, without the particular pressures of politics, people find it hard to spot liars. Tim Levine of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, has spent decades running tests that allow participants (apparently unobserved) to cheat. He then asks them on camera if they have played fair. He asks others to look at the recordings and decide who is being forthright about cheating and who is covering it up. In 300 such tests people got it wrong about half of the time, no better than a random coin toss. Few people can detect a liar. Even those whose job is to conduct interviews to dig out hidden truths, such as police officers or intelligence agents, are no better than ordinary folk.

Evolution may explain credulity. In a forthcoming book, “Duped”, Mr Levine argues that evolutionary pressures have adapted people to assume that others are telling the truth. Most communication by most people is truthful most of the time, so a presumption of honesty is usually justified and is necessary to keep communication efficient. If you checked everything you were told from first principles, it would become impossible to talk. Humans are hard-wired to assume that what they hear is true—and therefore, says Mr Levine, “hard-wired to be duped”.

…

In politics, however, these explanations cannot be the whole story. At the heart of the lying-politician paradox is an uncomfortable fact: voters appear to support liars more than they believe them. Mr Trump’s approval rating is 11 points higher than the share of people who trust him to tell the truth. A third of British voters view Mr Johnson favourably but only a fifth think he is honest. Voters believe in their leaders even if they do not believe them. Why?

The answer starts with the primacy of intuitive decision-making. ln 2004 Drew Westen of Emory University in Atlanta put partisan Republicans and Democrats into a magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner and found that lying or hypocrisy by the other side lit up areas of the brain associated with rewards; lies by their own side lit up areas associated with dislike and negative emotions. At no point did the parts of the brain associated with reason show any response at all. If voters’ judgments are rooted in emotion and intuition, facts and evidence are likely to be secondary.

…

A new version of confirmation bias is “identity-protective cognition”, argues Dan Kahan of Yale Law School. This says that people process information in a way that protects their self-image and the image they think others have of them. For example, those who live surrounded by climate-change sceptics may avoid saying anything that suggests humankind is altering the climate, simply to avoid becoming an outcast. A climate sceptic encircled by members of Extinction Rebellion might do the same thing in reverse. As people become more partisan, more issues are being taken as markers of the kind of person you are: in Britain, the country’s membership of the European Union; in America, guns, trade, even American football. All give rise to the acceptance of bias.

…

Thomas Gilovich of Cornell shows how fake news, cognition bias and assuming that people are telling the truth interact to make it easier to believe lies. If you want to believe a thing, he argues (that is, a lie that supports your preconceived ideas), you ask yourself: “Can I believe it?” A single study or comment online is usually enough to give you permission to hold this belief, even if it is bogus. But if you do not want to believe something (because it contradicts your settled opinions) you are more likely to ask: “Must I believe it?” Then, one apparently reputable statement on the other side will satisfy you. That may be why so many climate sceptics manage to cling to their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Activists point out that 99% of scientists believe the Earth is warming up because of human actions. But people who doubt the reality of climate change listen to the other 1%.

There does seem to be good reason to believe that people often have powerful psychological impulses to protect their existing worldview rather than believe the most accurate available information or most plausible explanation for what has happened.

Scholarly perspective on the U of T divestment campaign

Professor Joe Curnow, now at the University of Manitoba, studied the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto, in part using multi-angle video recordings of campaign planning meetings.

Her dissertation is now available on TSpace: Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement.

Belliveau on the CFFD movement

Open thread: faith groups and climate politics

There are several reasons to be interested in the climate politics of faith groups. Some progressive ones like the United Church of Canada and the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have taken meaningful action by divesting. The pope’s Laudato Si encyclical may have an impact on billions around the world.

Faith groups becoming champions of a stable climate could have the potential to shift the character of the climate change debate, which is presently mostly about progressives calling for strong action (usually coupled with a social justice and redistribution agenda) and conservatives either denying that there is a problem or finding a justification to take no action. If the arguments of climate scientists can be legitimized by faith communities which conservatives care about, we might start to see progress toward a pan-ideological consensus on climate action.

One story today that reminded me of this: Why Four Christian Activists Risked Arrest to Shut Down an oil Pipeline

The Teck Frontier mine

Not only is the Trudeau government calling into question its seriousness about decarbonization by allowing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, they are considering allowing Teck to build another open-pit bitumen sands mine which will produce 6 million tonnes of CO2 per year in its operations and far more when the fuel it produces is burned.

Every Canadian government must live in fear of being the ones in power when the markets and Canadians finally realize that developing the bitumen sands has been a mistake and the industry has no future. Since every government wants to avoid the blame when that happens, they each do what they can to maintain the illusion of a future for the industry which will justify the tens of billions that have been invested. In so doing, they inadvertently tell Canadians and the world that they are willing to create a permanently destabilized global climate in exchange for as many more years of oil profits as they can get away with.

Concordia and UBC commit to full divestment

It complicates the process of completing my PhD dissertation, but there has been highly encouraging movement from administrations targeted by fossil fuel divestment campaigns. While McGill has again said no, Concordia and UBC have pledged to go beyond their prior partial commitments and entirely divest from fossil fuels:

The movement has generally had a hard time in Canada, perhaps because of the size and influence of the fossil fuel industry.

I’m working this week on finishing my NVivo coding of interviews, then moving on next week to finishing the literature review. Spending the rest of the month working on a finalized and complete manuscript, I will need to make sure to mention new developments without expressing false confidence about my ability to explain something which happened so recently and which I don’t have independent data about.