Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Free dissertation release

Official versions are forthcoming on the University of Toronto’s TSpace thesis hosting platform and on paper from the Asquith Press at the Toronto Reference Library, but I see no reason not to make my PhD dissertation available as a free PDF to anyone who is interested:

Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20

I have been fighting for years to get this out into the world, so it makes no sense to wait for an arbitrary convocation date and then through further administrative delays.

If you are studying the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities or climate change activism generally in Canada, the US, and UK you may find the extended bibliography useful.

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.

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.

Trans Mountain would not be profitable

One of the most bizarre things the Trudeau government has ever said about energy and climate change is that building the Trans Mountain pipeline is necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels because it will raise the money needed to carry it out.

This has always been an absurd proposition. It’s ridiculous on its face that investing billions of tens of billions in fossil fuel export infrastructure which will operate for decades will help Canada do its share to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Now even the financial argument has come under serious criticism. Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux recently estimated that the cost of the project has grown from $12.6 billion in 2020 to $21.4 billion now and concluded that “Trans Mountain no longer continues to be a profitable undertaking.” At the same time, cancelling the project would yield a $14 billion loss.

Neither the federal nor Alberta government is changing course because of this analysis. Chrystia Freeland’s press secretary has said: “The Trans Mountain Expansion Project is in the national interest and will make Canada and the Canadian economy more sovereign and more resilient.” Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage said: “This project is necessary for Alberta and Canada’s energy sectors.”

All this is a reminder of how the behaviour a government needs to follow to stay in power does not consist of serving the public interest or putting forward a coherent policy agenda, but rather maintaining the support of the key societal actors that the government needs to keep in power.

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Exposure of individuals’ investments to the carbon bubble

Further substantiation of the carbon bubble / stranded assets argument that if governments act seriously on their climate goals then a huge amount of fossil fuel investment will become worthless:

Nature Climate Change study: Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies

Guardian reporting: People in US and UK face huge financial hit if fossil fuels lose value, study shows

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350 Canada and grassroots organizing

Sources writing about the fossil fuel divestment movement sometimes seem to think that 350.org and “Fossil Free” are distinct organizations, despite the footer at https://gofossilfree.org/ reading “Fossil Free is a project of 350.org”.

In part, this may be because of how easy it can be with 350.org to confuse branding with organizations. The clearest example which I know of is “350 Canada”. It’s an organization in the sense that you can sign up for a newsletter and track their social media channels and other publications, but not in the sense that you can attend a meeting, see the internals of how their strategic planning happens, or take part in that planning yourself. When they hold calls that people from their mailing lists can attend, it is for them to be told what to do using a pre-determined plan and messaging. Their work is grassroots in implementation, and in terms of the aesthetic that motivates 350’s staffers in Canada, but not in the sense of actually giving influence or input to movement members at the ground level. To me, this seems at odds with the long-standing slogan: “350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis”.

That’s by no means entirely a bad thing, since developing a coherent and well-developed political strategy isn’t something amateurs are great at (witness the failure to cohere around a genuinely popular and effective agenda in the Occupy movement). I also don’t think hypocrisy is necessarily a productive thing to focus on. At the same time, an organization controlled by a small group of staff members who share many of the same assumptions and preconceptions about what kind of change is desirable and how to achieve it risks ending up talking only to itself and core supporters, without much influencing the mass public or mainstream political dialog. Being in a vanguard can usefully let you get ahead of the public on an issue they haven’t properly come to terms with, but it can also isolate you from the public in a way that is hard to perceive from the inside and which inhibits the organization’s prospects for achieving real-world change.

Guterres on additional fossil fuel production and stranded assets

United Nations secretary general’s remarks on the ongoing release of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report are remarkable for their directness and candour:

“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) news conference on Monday. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

“Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at the report’s release Monday. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets, a blot on the landscape, and a blight on investment portfolios.”

Canada’s government, despite taking more action on the issue than its predecessors, remains firmly on the side of the production-increasing radicals. In part that is from how emission statistics treat the GHGs from fuels we export as someone else’s responsibility, along with the GHGs embodied in what we import. Avoiding climatic catastrophe requires an end to such numerical evasions and a firm commitment to fossil fuel abolition, with production falling by a significant percentage every year until the world no longer runs on coal, oil, and gas.

You can blame the government for their inadequacy, but at some level that becomes like blaming corporations for emissions rather than the consumers of their products. By continuing to select governments that misrepresent what the consequences of their climate change plans will be while dodging the question of ending production, Canadians are ensuring that they will be lied to. When both the Liberals and Conservatives promise that climatic stability and a growing fossil fuel sector can be compatible, they perpetuate the cycle where we sacrifice the welfare of all future generations and non-human nature for the sake of our short-term comfort and the temporary perpetuation of unsustainable ways of life.

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