The environment – Page 27 – a sibilant intake of breath

Organizing and seizing the moment

A memorable criticism in Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail alleges that organizers often miss their opportunity because the use the moment of chaos in which the common people are prepared to rebel as an opportunity for institution-building instead of revolution or immediate large-scale reform.

The point is well taken, and organization-building can indeed involve tedious bureaucracy that bores volunteers and doesn’t seem to justify the time it takes. For the climate activism movement specifically, however, we need to think more than most about the durability of the edifices we create, because this fight isn’t going to end for decades. Even if miracle after miracle takes place, we aggressively decarbonize around the globe, and we manage to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 ˚C, there will still always be the temptation to exploit valuable fossil fuel reserves that nations have so far forborne to use for the sake of the climate. Perhaps we will one day have energy technologies so superior that fossil fuels will lose their commercial value, but especially with hard-to-replace applications like air travel and spaceflight rising in popularity, it seems imprudent to assume that will happen. And so we will need to keep the fossil fuels buried not just now, but for generations to come. In all probability, we will need to do so despite steadily-worsening climatic conditions and secondary stresses associated, from famines to mass migration.

Certainly organization-building can be done wrong, and we all learn from the mistakes of past efforts. Climate activism may well be unlike some other movements, however, and face a particular need to keep functioning and influencing public policy even after the current generation of organizers are dead, to say nothing of three years down the line when everyone involved in the movement has switched their primary organizational affiliation and central area of focus.

Prospects for a Green New Deal

A frequent criticism of climate change policies like the Leap Manifesto and the Green New Deal which seek to accomplish a number of labour and social justice objectives alongside controlling climate change is that the policies don’t have a logical relationship with one another, framing the effort this way reduces the emphasis on climate change specifically, and taking this approach will create barriers to political success. The Economist‘s online Democracy in America column recently argued:

Such objections are thought unsportsmanlike by the proposal’s backers. The Green New Deal has people excited in ways think-tank white papers on cap-and-trade schemes never did. Boosters argue that it moves the “Overton window” of political dialogue: towards taking serious action on climate change. The little details, like how to pay for universal health care and a federal jobs guarantee can be dealt with later. Perhaps the Green New Deal will galvanise the youth vote, or help elect environmentally minded Democrats. Perhaps it is good politics to yoke environmentalism to other economic policies that could be popular.

Yet it seems rather more likely that the politics of the Green New Deal will backfire for Democrats. Republican strategists have stymied progress on climate change by caricaturing Democratic ideas as pie-in-the-sky efforts that would result in massive tax increases. Their parody now seems reality. The next Democratic nominee may well be someone who has endorsed the idea of the Green New Deal.

There is little wonder that Nancy Pelosi, who cares about climate change but also retains shrewd political instincts, has been so public in her doubting of the proposal. “The ‘green dream’ or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is but they’re for it, right?” she told Politico. The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states, ensuring that Republicans retain control over one chamber of Congress or even the White House and then stymie all climate legislation—whether sensible or not—for years to come.

There’s certainly a counter-argument. People may care somewhat about climate change, but it’s never their top priority in comparison to personal welfare issues like health, education, or taxes. Also, people have many financial concerns about climate change action. Conceivably, a broad-based policy could tie climate change protection to other tasks of more immediate political interest to people, and mitigate concerns that decarbonization will be economically damaging.

There’s cause to the skeptical about that enthusiasm, however. If a package consists of a bunch of objectives with relatively appealing short-term benefits, along with decarbonization policies which are largely about enduring near-term costs to avoid long-term catastrophe, it’s quite possible that the climate parts will be dropped, diluted, or counteracted. One virtue of an approach that focuses narrowly on decarbonization and climate protection is that it could be made compatible with a range of ideologies and party platforms. That is to say, there may be a lower chance that it will just be scrapped by the next non-progressive government to be elected.

Louis Sobol on divestment at Mount Allison

Louis Sobol recently wrote a piece in the National Observer about university divestment organizing in New Brunswick: Lessons from campaigning for divestment at Mount Allison University.

It covers some themes of the movement: the sense of ecological threat motivating people to take action, the dominant perspectives within the movement about intersectionality and progressive allyship, an explanation of the objective of stripping fossil fuel companies of social license, a description of a range of tactics used by campaign organizers, and frustration with the university’s response.

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.

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.

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.

US carbon pollution rising

Several recent analyses have found that America’s contribution to climate change worsened in 2018:

There are a number of factors behind the rise in US emissions in 2018, some natural, mostly economic.

Prolonged cold spells in a number of regions drove up demand for energy in the winter, while a hot summer in many parts led to more air conditioning, again pushing up electricity use.

However economic activity is the key reason for the overall rise in CO2 emissions. Industries are moving more goods by trucks powered by diesel, while consumers are travelling more by air.

In the US this led to a 3% increase in diesel and jet fuel use last year, a similar rate of growth to that seen in the EU in the same period.

Economic growth consistently ranks as a higher priority for governments than environmental protection, even though failure to constrain carbon emissions threatens to destroy the entire economy in the decades ahead. Furthermore, failure to act anywhere legitimates inaction elsewhere. I’m sure the media and people commenting online about Canadian climate policy will use these headlines about the US to argue that action in Canada is pointless.

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.