Category: The environment

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

Democracy and fossil fuels

The rise of mass democracy is often attributed to the emergence of new forms of political consciousness. The autonomy enjoyed by coal miners lends itself to this kind of explanation. There is no need, however, to detour into questions of shared culture or collective consciousness to understand the new forms of agency that miners helped assemble. The detour would be misleading, for it would imply that there was some shortage in earlier periods or other places of people demanding a less precarious life.

What was missing was not consciousness, not a repertoire of demands, but an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands. The flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners to those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored. Strikes became effective, not because of mining’s isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected chambers between the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electrical power.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 21

Two responses:

First, it’s unfamiliar to think of fossil fuels as a positive force for social welfare.

Second, perhaps the familiar climate activist strategy of building a social movement is insufficient and we need to think about what means (if any) can align power with the objective of a stable climate.

Animal transport and the ethics of meat

In a perceptive tweet Ziya Tong argued: “In the 21st century you’ll find cameras *everywhere* except: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes”.

I have long been of the view that if people were forced to look at where our meat, eggs, and dairy come from, few would still be willing to eat them.

That lines up with a recent episode of The Current, in which Anita Krajnc’s acquittal for giving water to pigs heading to a slaughterhouse was used to open a broader conversation about animal transport in the meat industry, including high mortality among “spent hens” used to make nuggets and chicken soup.

My vegetarianism has softened since the long period when I was pretty strict about it starting in 2005, though not for any morally-informed reason. Rather, I think it has just been a result of the way meat-eating (among so many other unsustainable and potentially unethical behaviours) is normalized in our society.

At a minimum, I will try to be more mindful again going forward. Talk of “spent hens” and the conditions of pig, cattle, and horse transport has kept me vegetarian since the broadcast.

Related:

Establishing a Responsibility to Repair

The concept of Right to Repair is meant to help consumers and tinkerers keep their vehicles, electronics, and other equipment going, despite the preferences of manufacturers that they buy something new or at least pay the original builder for any repairs.

In a more sustainable world, we can imagine a Responsibility to Repair, where any manufacturer of a product intended to be durable – from a phone or laptop to a car or house – would be expected to support repairs by providing blueprints and source code, by making spare parts available, and by designing products in the first place so that failures can be repaired (a) by individual users (b) by third-party repair centres and (c) by the company itself.

This is the opposite of the Apple philosophy of keeping everything secret, building machines that cannot be taken apart, and throwing away anything broken to replace it with something new.

In a Responsibility to Repair world, governments could keep track of all devices which consumers report as broken and impossible to fix, and then press companies to comply with regard to those items. Companies that refuse could face sactions from fines to losing the right to advertise to losing the right to make products in certain categories.

It would be the end of planned obsolescence, and the start of a much more sustainable form of consumerism. Even for companies that close down, this approach would create multiple benefits, since their design specifications and software would be openly available and their products would be designed with public repair in mind from the beginning. If one big jurisdiction like the EU were to establish laws of this kind, the benefits would be felt around the world.

Canada and climate ethics

On Friday, I presented my paper “Canadian Climate Change Policy from a Climate Ethics Perspective” at the Centre for Ethics’s graduate conference: Imagining 150: The Ethics of Canada’s Sesquicentennial.

The paper was well received and the conference overall was worthwhile and a welcome variation on the standard political science gathering.

A break from grading

At lunch at Massey College today, the closest available seat was beside a fellow Junior Fellow and photography client who was having lunch with Carolynn Benett, the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs.

We were soon joined by a climate change advisor from the Ontario provincial government and ended up talking about carbon capture and storage; the dangers of sea level rise; mitigation pathways for meeting the Paris Agreement climate change targets; the lack of a sufficient climate change plan from any Canadian party or government so far; the imperative not to invest further in long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure; renewable energy options; nuclear power; ways to reduce and replace diesel use in remote communities; and passive houses.

Labour art project denied

Ages ago I submitted a photo essay to the Canadian Labour Congress for their “Workers’ Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice” project.

It was meant to be funded as part of the (at least dubious, and almost certainly offensive, given that people have lived here for many thousands of years) Canada 150 celebration.

The call to photographers in June 2016 explained: “The CLC invites photographers to participate in a historic exhibition on workers’ rights, social justice, and equity.” They went on to say:

Workers have historically taken the lead role in fighting for social justice issues, which have had an impact far beyond the workplace and into every part of the daily lives of Canadians. Therefore, the exhibition will be both a celebration of victories and an opportunity to take stock of the continuing struggles for social justice. Where have we succeeded as a social movement?

In the end, the people behind the proposal (Vince Pietropaolo and John Maclennan) told the photographers that it’s not going to happen due to lack of funding.

As such, I am making my photo essay submission public: Victories and continuing struggles.

Why we can’t avoid dooming our grandchildren

A recent Slate article proposes a neurological mechanism for why human behaviour so frequently consists of choices where we harm our own long-term future prospects and those of others in order to satisfy near-term preferences.

Not only do our brains seem to regard our future selves as strangers, but most people rarely think about the “far future” more than a few years out, and imagining the future becomes harder as people age: “The data showed that having children or grandchildren did not increase future thinking.”

This may help explain why so many grandparents maintain behaviours and continue to support politicians who are burning up their grandkids’ future by rapidly destabilizing the climate.

Lately it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re going to permanently wreck the climate and any prospects for peace and stability in human civilization because we’re psychologically incapable of behaving otherwise. Climate change is racing at full speed through a gap in human reasoning, all because we can’t really accept how serious the consequences will be and because we are so unwilling to be the first to undertake a shared sacrifice to avoid disaster.

350.org origin

We took 350.org for our name, reasoning that we wanted to work all over the world (they don’t call it global warming for nothing) and that Arabic numerals crossed linguistic boundaries. And then we took a leap of faith that in retrospect seems ludicrous — since there were seven continents, each of those seven young people working with me took a chunk of one and set to work: Kelly Blynn on South America, Jeremy Osborn in Europe, Phil Aroneanu in Africa, Will Bates on the Indian subcontinent, Jamie Henn in the rest of Asia, May Boeve at home in North America, and Jon Warnow on the antipodes (he also got the internet). Our success the year before meant that a couple of foundations (the Rockefellers, the Schumanns) were willing to help fund our work, and so the rest of the team was getting paid small salaries, and they had money to travel. But how do you just land in, say, Vietnam or Peru or Kazakhstan and start “organizing”? We found out.

McKibben, Bill. Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. Times Books; New York. 2013. p. 12 (hardcover)

Contentiousness in climate activism

Charley Tilley has studied social movements overall and activism specifically as a set of “contentious performances”, in which organizers choose from a “repertoire” on the basis of who they want to influence and what opportunities exist for doing so.

Repertoires which are familiar can easily become stale and ineffective, as Micah White discusses in the context of big marches, and as was also widely discussed in the context of various cities sharing strategies to effectively shut down Occupy encampments. The fairly clear failure of the huge People’s Climate March and Toronto’s March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate makes it frustrating that a group of Toronto activist organizations are preparing another march on the same model (with the same name!). Given the urgency of climate change, we can’t dedicate our energy to repeating failed tactics.

If actions like marches have become routine, and lost their ability to produce broad media coverage or political action, we should expect climate change activists to begin engaging in more contentious forms of activism like barricades. One risk – of course – is that with a complacent population that broadly tolerates the status quo such actions will reinforce rather than undermine support for the existing political and economic order.