Politics – Page 36 – a sibilant intake of breath

A critique of movement-building via institutions

Our main point, however, is not simply that efforts to build organizations are futile. The more important point is that by endeavoring to do what they cannot do, organizers fail to do what they can do. During those brief periods in which people are roused to indignation, when they are prepared to defy the authorities to whom they ordinarily defer, during those brief moments when lower-class groups exert some force against the state, those who call themselves leaders do not usually escalate the momentum of the people’s protests. They do not because they are preoccupied with trying to build and sustain embryonic formal organizations in the sure conviction that these organizations will enlarge and become powerful. Thus the studies that follow show that, all too often, when workers erupted in strikes, organizers collected dues cards; when tenants refused to pay rent and stood off marshals, organizers formed building committees; when people were burning and looting, organizers used that ‘moment of madness’ to draft constitutions.

Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail. Random House, 1979. p. xxi-xxii

The monarchy and Canada’s Indigenous relationships

John Fraser, former head of Massey College, has an article in today’s National Post: Canada’s First Nations and the Queen have a kinship like no other.

I’d like to see a rebuttal from someone like Pamela Palmater. Personally I think it’s rather questionable to be upholding the idea that the crown has behaved honourably less than four years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada finished its work.

Redwater Energy Supreme Court decision

A bit of good news: Supreme Court rules energy companies cannot walk away from old wells.

The fossil fuel industry has huge future cleanup costs, including the UK’s North Sea platforms, and of course Canada’s bitumen sands. The CBC story notes:

Alberta has been dealing with a tsunami of orphaned oil and gas wells in the past five years. In 2014, the Orphan Well Association listed fewer than 200 wells to be reclaimed. The most recent numbers show there are 3,127 wells that need to be plugged or abandoned, and a further 1,553 sites that have been abandoned but still need to be reclaimed.

The industry functions by socializing costs and privatizing profits: for instance, imposing climate change on everybody while directing revenue to shareholders, staff, and executives. The post-productive phase for oil, gas, and coal projects can be a major opportunity to divert costs that should legitimately be borne by the corporation onto the public.

Presenting at Power Shift

I am preparing to present a preliminary version of my research results at the Power Shift conference in Ottawa, which takes place from February 14th to 18th.

It’s an unusual venue for presenting academic research. The website says that it will “convene hundreds of young people from across this land to build a powerful and intersectional youth climate justice movement”. This speaks to both unusual features, including an audience comprised of young activists who in the case of my workshop will likely be divestment veterans, and a commitment to be intersectional and emphasize “climate justice”.

In my interviews I have made a particular effort to elicit the views of subjects on questions about which alliances the climate change activist movement should make and why. It’s not a natural match with my research — or with an analytical approach generally — to endorse or criticize particular approaches to allyship. Rather, I am trying to explain descriptively what people believe and what seems to have led to the development and reinforcement of those beliefs. To some extent, I am also trying to comment on what effects those views may have in the future.

Trying to come at the problem in a relatively disinterested way may be unfamiliar to many of the participants. It’s certainly at odds with a lot of the program, which seems to understandably emphasize energizing and exciting people over asking them to think over the strategies they have been using. Nonetheless, I think we’ll have an interesting and respectful discussion. It’s pretty easy to explain at the outset the logic for not assuming our current approach is correct, and being willing to consider deficiencies or limitations it may have. Maintaining morale and a sense that people have done good work is important, but surely actually doing good work must take precedence when the fate of the planet is at stake. It can be very comforting and motivating to see the movement you’re in as already in possession of all the answers and just needing to spread the word to everyone to succeed. Thinking critically about the real barriers to implementing a decarbonization project globally may require more unfamiliar thoughts and company, but there’s a strong case that it’s necessary.

Saudi Arabia as an argument for Canadian oil

An increasingly frequent media line from supporters of the bitumen sands and the fossil fuels industry generally is that if oil isn’t produced in Canada it will be produced in Saudi Arabia instead, and that is undesirable because the conduct of people in Saudi Arabia is unethical while Canadians behave ethically. As more morally worthy recipients of fossil fuel revenues, Canadian industry can thus feel unblemished by any adverse consequences the bitumen sands produce.

Obviously it’s a weak argument. At the most basic level, misconduct by some unrelated party has no bearing on whether or not Canada’s ethical choices are acceptable. One can object factually by questioning how much Saudi oil really comes to Canada. One can make the economic argument that if we’re not burning all the oil, we should burn the cheapest stuff and avoid developing the expensive stuff. You can argue that a global transition away from oil, intended to avoid catastrophic climate change, will eventually undermine Saudi oil revenues too. In the alternative, you can argue that this is simply a deflection, not a sincere effort to critique the conduct of the Saudi government or to propose any meaningful solutions to that problem. It’s using the mistaken supposition that we can solve one problem (while actually doing nothing) to strengthen political resistance to implementing real climate change solutions.

Has anyone seen a good online rebuttal to this general argument? It would be good to have some convincing pages to link, as well as rebuttal’s pithy enough to include in a tweet or blog comment.

Soufan on the ineffectiveness of torture

After [redacted by the CIA] left, Boris had to keep introducing harsher and harsher methods, because Abu Zubaydah and other terrorists were trained to resist them. In a democracy such as ours, there is a glass ceiling on harsh techniques that the interrogator cannot breach, so a detainee can eventually call the interrogator’s bluff. And that’s what Abu Zubaydah did.

This is why the EIT [Enhanced Interrogation Technique] proponents later had to order Abu Zubaydah to be waterboarded again, and again, and again—at least eighty-three times, reportedly. The techniques were in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring that harsher and harsher ones were introduced.

Cruel interrogation techniques not only serve to reinforce what a terrorist has been prepared to expect if captured; they give him a greater sense of control and predictability about his experience, and strengthen his resistance. By contrast, the interrogation strategy that [redacted] employed—engaging and outwitting the terrorist—confuses him and leads him to cooperate. The art of interview and interrogation is a science, a behavioural science, and [redacted] were successful precisely because we had it down to a science.

Evidence gained from torture is unreliable. There is no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful, or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information. Indeed, as KSM, who was subjected to the enhanced techniques, later told the Red Cross: “During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop”.

Soufan, Ali H. The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. 2011. p. 423

News on North American planetary stewardship not encouraging

Some less-than-encouraging news today:

The first story about the poll has some room for interpretation. Seeing pipelines as a “crisis” doesn’t necessarily mean supporting them, though the article goes on to say: “Looking at Canadians’ impressions of the Trans Mountain and Energy East pipelines, 53 per cent of respondents voiced support for both, while 19 per cent opposed both, 17 per cent couldn’t decide”. It also notes: “Comparing age groups on pipeline issues, the survey found the majority of Canadians ages 18 to 34 were not supportive of pipelines, while little more than half of those ages 35 to 54 were supportive, and those over the age of 55 expressed the most support for pipelines and labelled the lack of pipeline capacity a crisis.”

In part this reflects a crisis of education and self-interest. Older Canadians who are likely the least informed about climate change and the economics of a global transition to decarbonization are the most supportive of climate-wrecking old industries. They are also the ones with the least to lose personally from climate change.

As for Trump’s pro-coal plan, it’s not surprising from someone who is gleefully controlled by industry and utterly uncomprehending of everything complex. Still, it demonstrates the huge danger of backsliding with climate change policy. For every leader who tries to do something helpful (almost always while keeping climate change at a lower level of priority than economic growth and other objectives) there can be a successor who takes us back to a place worse than when we started. The challenge of climate change isn’t just putting the right policies in place, but keeping them there long enough to matter.

Open thread: novel activist tactics

One criticism of the climate activist movement is that it continues to rely on tactics which were either never effective or which have lost effectiveness as opponents of decarbonization have learned to counter them.

This is a central part of the thesis in Micah White’s book The End of Protest, in which he argues in particular that big marches have lost their ability to help.

It’s worth devoting a thread to any new activist tactics. For instance, there is this recent show of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en in British Columbia: Convoys of pipeline protesters slow traffic on Ontario’s busiest highway.

twitter’s an addictive land of trolls

I have written before about the cognitive and emotional (and insomniac) downsides of checking the news too often. It seems worth re-emphasizing how twitter is a worst-case scenario in this regard, at least for people more interested in developments in matters of public interest than developments in the lives of friends and acquaintances, where facebook is untouchable.

With twitter it’s possible to use any internet-connected device to get an endless stream of updates and — crucially — little decisions for as long as you want at any time of day. It’s an exercise perfectly crafted to short-circuit longer term planning, even at the scale of turning off your phone to get a night’s rest before a busy day tomorrow. Every tweet presents the cognitive task of interpreting the content; determining whether it contains any factual, ethical, or political claims; and then evaluating that content in light of what the user believes and what, if anything, they are trying to accomplish through engagement online. Even for fairly passive users, every tweet involves the decision of whether to publicly ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ it, forcing your brain to engage decision-making circuitry more often and immediately than when reading a news article or book. Of course the real addictive prompts come from the social features: the notifications that someone has ‘liked’ or responded to your tweet. That engages all the emotional machinery which we use to socialize with others, maintain or alter our beliefs about the world, and protect out own self-esteem. It also embodies the slot machine logic of unpredictable and variable responses to the same action, ranging from someone amazing expressing agreement or saying something clever in response to your message to the depredations of the most hateful trolls.

Twitter often exposes me to content which I subsequently wish I could unsee, including particularly blockheaded claims and arguments which tend to re-emerge with a sense of frustration and anger in the shower the next day. The platform isn’t entirely without virtues — it can provide useful or at least engaging up-to-the-minute information and analysis on ongoing events, it allows users to engage directly with people who would otherwise be inaccessible, and perhaps it does sometimes direct people to good quality information they wouldn’t otherwise see. At the same time, it’s the venue for the least pleasant interactions in my life and it’s a repository of almost limitless idiocy and unkindness.

I have resolved for now to “cut off the time wasters quickly. They can’t be won over and whatever value there is in publicly refuting their arguments doesn’t justify the time and stress commitment”. There’s really no alternative strategy possible, since the platform is so full of people who (a) aren’t debating in good faith (b) can never be convinced or won over and (c) only get nastier with repeated interaction. They can take decades of meticulously collected, analyzed, and reviewed scientist and ‘refute‘ it with a silly accusation about the scientist or the person referencing them, a conspiracy theory, or an disreputable source which is nonetheless equally accessible online. Maybe very early on engaging with them helps draw some of the undecideds who are silently observing toward well-supported beliefs, but that almost certainly ceases to be true once your back and forth with that person has become one of your top ten present-moment sources of annoyance and irritability.

RCMP enforcing gas pipeline construction

In British Columbia, the Unist’ot’en Camp has been operating for years to try to keep fossil fuel pipelines out of the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation.

Anticipating RCMP enforcement of a court order to allow access for the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline to Kitimat, the Gidimt’en checkpoint was more recently established to protect unceded lands from pipeline construction.

That checkpoint has now been demolished with 14 arrests.

The Unist’ot’en Camp may be the next target for police action.

Rallies in support of the Wet’suwet’en have taken place in a number of Canadian cities, including Toronto, with more being planned.

All this highlights at least three major contradictions. The British Columbia government is trying to be a climate leader, while also trying to develop a liquified natural gas (LNG) industry which may cause more climate damage than coal once leakage from fracking and the rest of the gas network is taken into account. Canada is also simultaneously trying to develop fossil fuel export infrastructure while trying to play a productive role in global decarbonization. Thirdly, the Trudeau government is trying to undertake reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, while simultaneously being willing to use the power of the state to force fossil fuel project construction in spite of Indigenous opposition.