Category: The environment

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

Democracy within social justice movements

My friend Stu sent me a long article about the functioning of social justice movements of the Occupy / Arab Spring variety, discussing how their efforts at being internally democratic work.

Much of it is of interest, but this passage made me think of the climate movement especially:

When the anarchist participation prevented the Trotskyists, Real Democracy activists, and other grassroots politicians from producing the sort of unitary demands and manifestos that the general assembly had earlier vetoed, the Commission was broken up into a dozen sub-commissions. Every single day, in multiple sub-commissions, the grassroots politicians made the same proposals that had been defeated the day before, until one meeting when none of their opponents were present. The demands were passed through the commission and subsequently ratified by the general assembly, which ratified nearly every proposal passed before it.

Social movements suffer from extreme forms of some of the problems of traditional representational democracy. Participants lack training, time to do research, and support from experts. Procedures designed to (a) make good decisions (b) through participatory means are imperfect and often feel tedious and frustrating to participants. There is no ideal way to deal with situations where a plurality of people have reached general consensus, but smaller groups have principled and fundamental objections to the most favoured popular course.

“Grass on the other side is greener” thinking about democracy makes me wonder about alternatives like an agenda-setting vanguard or movements governed principally by a charismatic leader. As I have argued before, the virtue of democracy is more in mandating restraint than in necessarily making good decisions.

That might be as good as we can do when it comes to governing nation states. Whether popular movements pursuing environmental or social justice objectives can do better is an open question.

Explaining Trump

The often disturbing spectacle of the rise of Donald Trump as a leading Republican contendor in the presidential race prompts many emotional and analytical responses: about the long decline of America as a superpower since 1945, about the dysfunctional features of party politics and American politics in particular, and about the chasm between quality information on one side and public policy and (especially) public opinion on the other.

Many interpret the Trump phenomenon in terms of disaffected voters, as this passage from The Economist describes:

The reason evangelicals vote for Mr Trump has little to do with faith or specifics of policy. It is more a question of attitude. A study by the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, has found that the most reliable way to tell whether a Republican voter was going to support Mr Trump was whether he agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have any say about what government does.” Trump voters feel voiceless, and whatever attributes Mr Trump lacks, he has a voice. He lends it to them, to express their grievances and their aspirations for greatness, and they love it.

All this at a time when people are prosperous and governments are making easy choices, at least compared with what is likely in coming decades because of our criminal unwillingness to stop burning fossil fuels.

We had better hope that worsening global conditions eventually have a rallying effect, rather than prompting a scramble of every state, region, and ideology for itself.

Divestment discussed by the Governing Council

U of T: the President and the Governing Council

U of T President Meric Gertler’s decision to reject fossil fuel divestment in favour of ESG screening was formally presented to the Governing Council today.

UofT350.org held a rally outside, and Gertler’s remarks were followed both by questions from governors and a five minute presentation from Graham Henry, a second-year law student who has been deeply involved in the divestment campaign and spoke against the president’s choice.

In the questions (which came before Graham’s remarks), most of those who spoke commended the decision. One even thanked the president on behalf of steelworkers in the fossil fuel industry. A couple had limited questions about timelines, and one spoke out clearly in favour of divestment.

I was disappointed that what I see as the central issue never came up: the implications of further investment in long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure. Many people mentioned the 1.5 ˚C warming limit from the Paris Agreement, but nobody drew the contrast with the billions of dollars the fossil fuel industry continues to invest in projects that only make sense if we intend to warm the planet by much, much more. The issue, therefore, is less that the conduct of the fossil fuel industry in the past has been severely injurious to people all over the world (though it has) and more that their future plans are catastrophic for people everywhere, ecosystems, and all the life we know about in the universe.

President Gertler criticized divestment as empty symbolism, less meaningful than having U of T’s secretive and unaccountable financial managers in the U of T Asset Management Corporation adopt some new screening criteria. The symbolism with the potential to be highly meaningful would have been pointing out the reality that the fossil fuel industry has no long-term future, or at least none compatible with planetary safety.

If U of T had come out to say that investors everywhere are behaving dangerously and irrationally by continuing to fund fossil fuel development, it could have had a positive impact all over the world. By saying instead that climate change creates some minor financial and ethical issues which can be addressed through existing processes, U of T is fuelling our collective complacency in the face of a slowly-unfolding but nearly unstoppable catastrophe.

U of T’s investments are burning up the futures of their students, but with this decision such conduct has become just one of many minor factors to be considered by financial experts behind closed doors.

UofT350.org

From the perspective of UofT350.org, the group needs to decide what the most plausible strategy is for reversing this decision and what tactics would support that outcome. It also needs to do some deeper thinking about what the group is for, now that divestment has become an even more unlikely prospect. People have very different ideas — for instance, about ‘intersectionality’ as a strategy for success versus a rabbit hole of distraction (this connects to a broader debate about climate change as a leftist versus a pan-ideological issue). There’s also the question of what can be accomplished via protest tactics, particularly when confronting a conservative institution with strong constituencies favouring the status quo and skilled at using cover from superficial actions to placate those who care slightly.

Working on climate change activism generally requires experiencing failure over and over, and in the face of an ever-worsening crisis. How can we do that (a) while continuing to reach out to moderates and decision-makers and (b) changing real-world outcomes, rather than becoming an increasingly radicalized and angry sub-population who are easy to dismiss, ignore, or undermine with trivial policy changes?

ESG screening isn’t a substitute for fossil fuel divestment

Following up on their public criticism of President Gertler’s decision in The Varsity, eight out of eleven members of the ad hoc committee published a letter in The Globe and Mail:

Quoting from our report: “The committee recognizes that fossil fuels will remain indispensable and a contributor to social welfare for many years.” We did not recommend universal divestment.

Instead, we called upon the university to lead an effort to, in The Globe’s language, “gradually ratchet down fossil-fuel use worldwide,” beginning with the worst offenders, whose behaviour we should not tolerate. Much like the apartheid regime, the worst offenders need to be identified and isolated. These fossil fuel companies are the ones blatantly disregarding the international effort to limit the rise in average global temperatures to not more than 1.5 C, thereby greatly increasing the likelihood of catastrophic global consequences. These are the companies that are properly the focus of divestment and such a targeted strategy is an application of what has become known as the Toronto Principle.

We tried to get an op-ed, but the G&M was unwilling.

On Thursday, a member of the campaign will be addressing the Governing Council. Before their meeting begins, we will be holding a rally outside.

Metrics of activist success

The fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is still dealing with the disappointment of President Gertler announcing such an uninspiring response to the social injury and financial risk associated with fossil fuel investments.

One early response from the campaign was to hold a creative direct action outside Simcoe Hall, home to the Office of the President and the Governing Council.

The action made me think about different ways in which acts undertaken to provoke social or political change can be evaluated. At least two possibilities come to mind: evaluation in terms of the subjective experience of participants, and evaluation in terms of the effect on the thinking or behaviour of the mass public or elite decision-makers.

Subjective experiences (AKA “feelings”) are not trivial. I think the biggest challenge activist groups face is maintaining the health and motivation of their members and key organizers. Indeed, when it comes to big marches like the People’s Climate March and March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate I have reached the conclusion that they are more important in terms of energizing participants than in terms of changing public opinion. Not least, this is because the media tends to wildly under-report them.

That being said, I think activism by definition is an effort to change how the world works and that doing that requires changing the thinking and behaviour of the mass public and decision-makers. To be effective in that, we need to think hard about why people believe what they believe and make the choices they make, and what kinds of interventions can change those things. As activists resolutely focused on achieving positive change, we need to focus on producing good outcomes which would not have happened without us.

From the second perspective, I am less confident about how productive the action outside Simcoe Hall was. For the random student wandering by – or the random administrator listening through their window – did it improve the odds of them supporting fossil fuel divestment? The more militant members of the campaign often talk about “building power”, but we ultimately cannot force the administration to do anything. We need to convince them, which takes us back to serious strategic thinking about how to change the beliefs and behaviours of non-activists.

Fossil fuel divestment on As It Happens

Responding to an earlier interview with U of T President Meric Gertler (in which the host was impressively spirited and well-informed while pushing back), UofT350.org media representative Amanda Harvey-Sanchez was on CBC’s As It Happens today.

She highlights a key point about how the proposed ESG approach is less effective than divestment: it will be implemented by the people at the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) who have preferred to do nothing all along.

U of T President Meric Gertler rejects fossil fuel divestment

Back in December, an expert committee appointed by President Gertler recommended divestment from fossil fuel companies based on a range of criteria.

Today, that approach was rejected by President Gertler, who proposed instead a vague eventual screening of investments based on “environmental, social, and governance” factors.

Toronto350.org has a press release, and is working on a broader response.

Between the committee’s recommendation and the president’s decision, we issued a Community Response, which is essentially not addressed in the president’s decision.

2016 Walter Gordon Symposium — Indigenous reconciliation

The 2016 Walter Gordon Symposium (Word document) was about indigenous reconciliation in Canada, following the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I attended every panel, and I am working on processing and uploading my photos.

A complex confluence of factors seem to have combined to make indigenous issues critically important politically all around the world. In particular, the resurgence of aboriginal peoples is deeply bound up with our best hopes for avoiding destroying human flourishing and life as we know it through climate change.