climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
Students who were occupying the Roger-Gaudry Pavilion at the Universite de Montréal say the university has committed to divest from fossil fuels by 2025.
The development was first announced on Facebook, and I haven’t yet seen a formal release from the school.
As a practical matter, the democratic uproar needed to build whatever alternative economy [Naomi] Klein and the Pope have in mind is far greater than the upswell of the Climate Capitalism I’m proposing, which harnesses financial markets in the climate fight. Reengaging our political system to reform financial institutions like the World Bank, motivate the quantitative analysts (quants) on Wall Street, and redirect trade agreements to accelerate climate solutions is faster and more effective than waiting for something akin to Che Guevara’s revolución. I will admit that I simply don’t know what that revolution looks like. Nor how we manage a complex modern economy without market forces. Those who’ve tried (today’s Venezuela comes to mind) failed miserably. And none of the far-left socialist experiments of the past gave up growth — the primary bugbear in Klein’s view.
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The trillions of dollars that sit in money markets and pension funds is the most powerful tool in our climate arsenal — if it can be redirected. We need to co-opt capital markets, not slay them. That capital is conductor for the rest of the economic orchestra. With it, we unlock the financial, engineering, and entrepreneurial might that can rebuild global energy systems. To think overwise is naïve — the supply chains are too complex, the scale of manufacturing and project development too big, and the degree of entrepreneurial innovation required too deep. Like it or not, we must harness the very market forces that threaten our planet, to save the planet.
Rand, Tom. The Case for Climate Capitalism: Economic Solutions for a Planet in Crisis. ECW Press, 2020. p. xxviii-xxix
Related:
Amanda Harvey-Sánchez — who played a key role in the first Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign — has written a detailed timeline of the campaign at the University of Toronto.
This kind of effort is especially valuable given the limits on institutional memory in the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement. In part that’s because of how campaigns of student volunteers will experience constant turnover, though it is also the product of the informal style of organizing promoted by 350.org and implemented by most CFFD campaigns.
The closest document which I have a record of is from the SFU campaign, though it is much less detailed.
With student volunteers dispersing in all directions following graduation, and with few institutionalized structures to preserve knowledge between cohors of organizers, it has been especially useful to see some of the campaign debriefs which have followed divestment commitments. Climate Justice UBC (which I think is the new name / successor organization to UBCC350) released an especially good presentation about their campaign.
The Trudeau government’s latest climate change announcement is a plan to cut emissions by 40% by 2030.
The plan also aims to cut oil and gas sector emissions from 191 megatonnes to 110 megatonnes, though the government says it won’t reduce production “not driven by declines in global demand.”
Whether out of political calculation, the influence of the industry, or a simple lack of understanding, this announcement perpetuates the idea that “emissions” can be cut in a meaningful and sustainable way while continuing to expand fossil fuel production. This conforms with earlier analysis of how Trudeau promises action to the public while at the same time comforting business with promises that not much will change.
As long as Canadian politicians are too afraid to acknowledge that avoiding catastrophic climate change requires abolishing fossil fuels we will keep getting plans predicated on the nonsense that we can solve the problem without addressing its chemical causes. It’s fair enough at this point to attribute some of the blame to Canadian voters, who keep proving by their electoral choices that they want the government to express concern about climate change while not even meaningfully slowing down the pace at which we’re making it worse.
It also doesn’t help that the plan’s title sounds exactly like something the Harper government would have created. Climate change isn’t an issue of how “clean” the air is, and setting up clean air beside “strong economy” sticks to the narrative that good policy is about trading one against the other. That’s at best a distorted way of thinking about a fossil fuel dependency which threatens to undermine the very basis of human civilization. For people used to playing for only political stakes, gambling with the future of the whole species is outside of their training and conventional mindsets.
The Trudeau Liberals have made a supply and confidence agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP.
According to the CBC, the climate-related elements are:
“A commitment to phasing out federal government support for the fossil fuel sector — including funding from Crown corporations — starting in 2022.
A commitment to finding new ‘ways to further accelerate the trajectory’ to a net zero economy by 2050.
A ‘Clean Jobs Training Centre’ to support retraining for energy workers as Canada moves away from fossil fuels.
Pretty weak sauce, I’d say, when we’re beginning to experience a potentially civilization-ending calamity, but that’s the state of Canadian politics today.
Carleton University has announced that they are following their neighbours at the University of Ottawa and committing to divesting their direct holdings in the fossil fuel industry.
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.
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.
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.
Related:
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.
