John Jost: I do think I have to say I’ve come to the view that it’s much easier to govern from the right in a system justifying, conservative manner because you can always frame your opposition as a threat. (31:37)
…
David Roberts: My larger pessimism has to do with… it just seems like globally we’re heading into a time… just look at climate change, right? Climate change is going to create more disruption, more migrations, more uncertainty, and threat! Which are gonna have the effect of making it more difficult to think clearly about how to solve climate change in a just way. (33:00)
Category: The environment
Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet
Dissertation on TSpace
I am still trying to get them to replace the file with one that has a few minor typos corrected, but my dissertation went live on the University of Toronto’s TSpace platform today:
Please don’t buy one before asking if I was planning to make you one already, but you can buy a print copy at cost from Lulu.com. I am also ordering a batch to reduce shipping costs, so if you want to get in on that let me know.
Media reports on fossil fuel divestment
Now that I am no longer tracking media references to the movement for my dissertation, I need a thread to post stories of interest to people tracking the movement.
For example: How Change Is Actually Made on Campus
Longer dissertation discussion
New podcast on the U of T divestment campaign from 2014 to 2016
Back in November, Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva released a podcast episode for Climate Justice Toronto about the first generation of fossil fuel divestment organizers at U of T. That episode covered from the inception of the campaign in 2012 until the People’s Climate March (PCM) in New York City in September 2014.
They have now released the second episode, which features Katie Krelove, Ben Donato-Woodger, Keara Lightning, and Ariel Martz-Oberlander, and which discussed the period from the PCM until president Meric Gertler’s rejection of divestment in March 2016.
Two sectors excluded from the job search
Looking for some temporary stability, the chance to get back to secure paycheques for the first time since I left the federal government in 2012, and the ability to repair the countless things that have been worn down and damaged during the PhD — I am casting a net wide for jobs I can start at soon.
Based on my own experiences and discussions with others, however, I am excluding two fields which might seem among the most obvious for me: the academic precariat and the environmental NGO precariat. I know plenty of people caught up in the low pay, overwork, and stress of postdoc positions, lecturing, adjunct professorships, and similar. The common theme seems to be coldhearted skinflint employers, intolerable working conditions, and jobs where you spend half your time fundraising for the grants to pay your own salary. I feel much the same about the eNGO sector, which is even more poorly paid and insecure, even more a game of always working to win the grant to pay your salary for the next month of grant applications, and a social culture that broadly demands ideological conformity to a theory of change and set of objectives that I do not see as very likely to produce the public policy wins sought. (Believing this, or at least pointing it out, tends to risk making one unemployable in the sector.)
I feel like the common pattern in both the junior academic and the eNGO world is to demand that employees give more than they can sustainably, provide them less material and moral support than they need to keep going long term, and then condemn them for insufficient loyalty when this combination pushes them out into other employment. I suspect I can get more done on the environmental file by getting a decent job that provides genuine time off and working as a volunteer for groups that seem to have a sound strategy.
CO2-energy / climate justice contention on Indigenously-backed fossil fuel projects
My PhD dissertation highlights the distinction between the CO2-energy and climate justice worldviews in climate change organizing.
Put briefly:
[C]limate justice (CJ) activists emphasized the linkages between climate change and other justice issues in both diagnosing the causes of climate change and in crafting their political strategy to control it, insisting that only revolutionary political and economic changes like the overthrow of capitalism will let humanity preserve a stable climate. This analysis and prescription is challenged by CO2-energy (CO2-e) activists who see climate change as fundamentally about fossil fuel energy, with a solution that lies in replacing coal, oil, and gas.
One area where the two viewpoints can be clearly distinguished is how to respond to Indigenously-backed fossil fuel energy projects. The climate justice viewpoint holds that environmentalists should be led by and not criticize Indigenous peoples. For them, if the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it community in BC wants to build a coal mine, it is at least much harder to oppose while maintaining their values than the same project proposed by someone else. For CO2-e activists, it is about the fuel to be burned and not the identity of those benefitting, and so it is unproblematic to resist fossil fuel projects regardless of their backers.
Related:
Reading my dissertation, step by step
Step #1: Learn a bit of the context and background to climate change politics
I know throwing a whole PhD thesis at someone gives them a lot to handle, especially if it is written in an unfamiliar academic style. Nonetheless, I took pains all through my PhD process to come up with a product which would be comprehensible and meaningful to the community of climate activists.
Several posts down the line, we will come to the “meta question” which motivates the chapter about the ethics of what ought to be done. As someone new to the document and/or climate change policy, I would start by looking at what I considered important explanatory text but which my committee directed I should remove from an over-long document:
Structural Barriers to Avoiding Catastrophic Climate Change
Basically, why is solving climate change a hard problem? We have governments that do an OK-to-decent job at most things, so why are they uniquely bad at caring for the climate long-term when its integrity is damaged by the use of fossil fuels? This first document explores that question in detail, and elaborates upon why old solutions aren’t working for this problem.
Air pollution co-benefits to fossil fuel abolition
When we think about fossil fuels, we often fixate on the trade-offs between their economic and energy utility and their damage to the climate. The case in their favour gets a whole lot weaker when you factor in toxic pollution and its effects on health.
For example, while they may have been effectively marketed as glamorous and gourmet, gas stoves can create “indoor pollution worse than car traffic” and a recent study found them linked to 1/8 US asthma cases.
Related:
350.org’s perspective in 2023
May Boeve, Executive Director of 350.org, has “An Annual Check-Up for the Climate Movement” with the summary: “After a year of energy shocks, natural disasters, and calls for new investments in hydrocarbons, efforts to reduce our fossil-fuel dependency have gained greater urgency. While the world made some additional progress in 2022 to address climate change and protect nature, much remains to be done to overcome entrenched interests.”