The fuel of my climate optimism, the reliable spark that keeps it moving, is a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as an offhand miracle.

That’s how I caught the bug. Way back in 2000, I was sent to Montreal by Time magazine to report on environmentally friendly cars. The occasion was one of those somewhat obscure trade shows that  would soon become central to my journalistic beat, an event called the 17th International Electric Vehicle Symposium—EVS-17.

Given what’s happened to electric vehicles in the 20 years since, I should set the stage here. As of 2000, nearly all the world’s major automakers had begun to tinker with the elusive promise of the emissions-free car, electric or otherwise. Toyota had the first version of the Prius there, and Nissan had a prototype of the Leaf. There were those little Smart cars alongside glorified golf carts, motorbikes and scooters. But this whole showcase was a minor sidelight on the heart of the automotive business. The major car companies had brought their prototypes and test models out to a racetrack in Montreal for us all to take for a test spin, but nobody was in any hurry to get those vehicles to a showroom near you.

The real star of EVS-17 wasn’t even a plug-in electric or hybrid. It was Ford’s P2000, an experimental sedan that ran on hydrogen gas and spat potable water and nothing else from its tailpipe. That was the car that attracted the crowd of journalists and motoring geeks at the racetrack, and it’s the one that I featured most prominently in my Time story. Because a fully functional Ford sedan whose only exhaust is water is pretty goddamn miraculous. And it was offhand, too, in the way that a test-lab engineer from Ford showing you the droplets of water on his hand as he squats next to a tailpipe on a racetrack at an obscure technical conference is intrinsically  offhand. It launched me on a quest — 20 years and counting — to find other offhand miracles.

That quest has been more fruitful than anyone’s wildest dreams that day in Montreal. Because here’s the thing: Everyone thought that day there would be Priuses and Leafs on the road before too long, maybe some little all-electric shoebox made in Europe for crowded city streets or a future car-share program. And some day someone might crack the range problem of fully electric cars and/or the cost problem of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, and then those would find a place on a few roads away from a test track too.

Twenty years from then? Maybe 30? Sure, it could happen.

But no one had the slightest notion, not the vaguest inkling or the wildest premonition, that what would actually happen was some weird, megalomaniacal engineer who was working at the time on the thorny problem of small-scale internet business transactions at PayPal would cash out a couple of years later, use his dot-com riches to take over a fledgling manufacturer of experimental electric cars, and turn that company into not only the first successful automotive start-up in America in more than half a century but also the maker of the first mass-market all-electric sports car in history—all in barely more than a decade. But that’s what Elon Musk did with Tesla Motors. A fantastical idea too wildly speculative and distant-future-tense to even make it to a racetrack in Montreal in 2000 is now everyday reality. Keep that in mind as we discuss the limits of what’s possible for the next 10 or 20 years.

Now, if the miraculous rise of Tesla were the only story of its genre, the only wild arc from impossible fantasy to everyday reality I’d discovered in 20 years on this climate-solutions beat, I would have a hard time holding it up as the avatar of anything. Happily, that’s not the case.

My first focused reporting on this beat was a visit I made in 2005 to a Danish island called Samsø, which was endeavouring to become the world’s first island powered entirely by renewable energy. Fifteen years later, not only has Samsø surpassed its own goal, it is a pacesetter for the entire country and all of the European Union, which has pledged to duplicate the island’s achievement by 2050. (Denmark  itself  intends to eliminate all emissions from its electricity grid by 2030.) When I first began reporting on solar power in 2005, there were five gigawatts’ worth of photovoltaic panels connected to all the electricity  grids on earth, and it was common sense to suggest that solar would never amount to more than one per cent of the world’s electricity supply. It was at 0.2 per cent at the time. In 2020, China alone connected almost 50 gigawatts of new solar power to its grids, the largest share of 127 gigawatts added worldwide that year, for a grand total of 707 gigawatts — more than three per cent of global production and growing at a pace considered sheer fantasy back in 2005.The first bike-share system I ever encountered was a novelty at the Copenhagen train station, and I  rode my rented bike to the harbour and back on the first physically separated bike lane I’d ever seen. Bike and scooter shares are now commonplace in hundreds of cities around the world, including my own, where I can ride downtown and back on 10 kilometres of real separated bike lanes.

I went to the desert outside Taos, New Mexico, in 2006 to inspect a crazy hippie fever dream called an Earthship — a house designed to use the natural heating and cooling of the sun to achieve self-sufficiency for its energy needs. There is now an eight-storey apartment building in downtown Vancouver that uses “passive house” design principles to do roughly the same thing. By 2032, every  new building in the province of British Columbia will be built to a code broadly consistent with those “net zero” standards.I tracked a series of these victorious arcs in their paths from margin to mainstream. Offhand miracles, one after another.

Excerpted from How to Be a Climate Optimist by Chris Turner. Copyright © 2022 Chris Turner.Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Updated on May 27, 2022, at 10:52 a.m. EST: This story has been updated to remove a line that stated the Toyota Prius was not available in North America until 2003. The Prius was in fact available as of 2000.

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This week, Natural Resources Canada released a major report on climate change and its potential impacts in Canada. The report is novel-thick, the first significant NRCan missive on climate change since 2008, and it rattles off a list of near-future worries that will be familiar to anyone watching climate news closely — heavier rains, more extreme weather events, rising sea levels and acidifying oceans.

You can be forgiven if this is the first you heard of it, since the report was published without so much as a press release. I can only assume this is because the report represents a straightforward, data-driven, thoughtful analysis of the status of the planet’s climate and the likely impact of a changing climate on Canada’s environment, economy and society. And this kind of serious talk is just not how you talk about climate change in Ottawa these days.

I speak often to a wide range of Canadian audiences – from conventional and renewable energy professionals to academic crowds to municipal officials – about the status of the green economy’s vanguard, much of which is situated in western Europe. And I frequently encounter some variation on the same question: Why has Canada lagged so far behind in building a low-carbon society? There’s no single answer, but when I’m in need of a shorthand, I say that we’ve failed for the most part to develop and maintain a serious public conversation about climate change. We talk about climate change – a ubiquitous, universal problem of epochal scale – as something distant in time and space, self-contained and inconsequential, unworthy of intense and sustained scrutiny. Sometimes, our government doesn’t even tell the public when it has issued a major report on the subject.

Another textbook example of Canada’s stunted climate conversation transpired just days before the NRCan study’s launch, when Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott paid a visit to Stephen Harper in Ottawa. It was a perfunctory state visit for the most part. Harper and Abbott had no big announcements to make, no agreements to sign or policies to peddle. There was a photo op, then a press conference at which a joint statement was delivered. The media, in Harper’s preferred style, were strictly limited to four questions, two from the Aussies and two from the Canadians. Later in the evening, there was a formal dinner, which the Aussie press corps didn’t bother sticking around for. As Colin Horgan put it in a Guardian post-mortem, the whole thing was “a lesson from political message makers on how to create nothing out of something.”

And yet there was some news generated by this Seinfeldian summit. It emerged when one of the Australian reporters who’d been granted the rare privilege of a question asked about Barack Obama’s recently unveiled climate plan. Abbott and Harper, who take evident pride in being two of the world’s least enthusiastic climate change warriors, used the question as an opportunity to lecture the rest of the world on its irrationality and hypocrisy regarding the climate file.

A shrug and a sneer at climate change

The full responses of the respective prime ministers to this question are in this post from Mike De Souza if you’d like to read the whole thing. The takeaway was a two-parter, a shrug and a sneer at taking action on climate change. Abbott handled the shrug. “It’s not the only, or even the most important problem that the world faces,” he said. Then he aimed his rhetorical sneer at do-gooder wastrels like the ones who’d passed a carbon tax in Australia. “We shouldn’t clobber the economy and that’s why I’ve always been against a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme because it harms our economy, without necessarily helping the environment.”

Harper, not to be outdone, switched into the smug lecturing mode that has become his default approach to international policy discussions of this sort. “No matter what they say, no country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country. We are just a little more frank about that.” He also indulged in a dusty old NDP-bashing talking point, thanking Abbott for cutting taxes, “most notably the job-killing carbon tax.”

A shrug – climate change? No big deal, guys – and then a sneer at treehugging lefties who’d rather have us wreck the economy to do barely anything at all about climate change anyway. The daily press dutifully reported on the limited story they’d been given, the CBC explaining that both PMs “took a hard line” on climate change and the Globe & Mail noting the “unapologetic tone” both shared on the subject. The Globe story placed the exchange in the context of the forthcoming Northern Gateway pipeline decision, while the Ottawa Citizen filled out its story with a bit of background on Harper’s relationship with previous Australian leaders.

All in all, though, nothing much to see here. Move along.

But let’s be just a little more frank, shall we, about what actually transpired in this summit about nothing. The leaders of two G7 countries met in the wake of a major climate plan rollout by the United States – a policy package that appears to be the signature initiative of the president’s second term – and just ahead of a G20 summit in Australia at which one of them (Abbott) is doing everything he can to keep climate change off the agenda. Both of them glibly dismissed the very notion of taking meaningful action on an issue that the other of them (Harper) once called “perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today.”

Reporters transcribe glib comments … and that's about it

And Canada’s mainstream press, conditioned to ignore that which official Ottawa shrugs at, filed the most rote and routine of stories. They transcribed the glib comments, padded them with a bit of vaguely relevant context. And, like the hapless stormtrooper convinced by Obi-Wan’s dismissive Jedi hand wave that these aren’t the droids he’s looking for, they moved along.

Try to imagine this response in another context. Let’s say Abbott and Harper were discussing national defence and the global security situation. Someone asks about the Middle East, the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. Abbott says really it’s all been overblown, nothing to worry about. Harper says devoting government resources to something as trivial as the conquest of Iraq by jihadists would get in the way of higher priorities, then takes an offhand dig at Trudeau.

In this context, is it plausible that any reporter would file a story with no contextual detail at all about, for example, the actual situation on the ground in Iraq? Would there be barely a word about previous policy positions on the Middle East or the strategic importance of the region or the rather shockingly indifferent tone being taken regarding such a grave crisis? Would the coverage marvel at what a non-event this was? Of course not. War is serious business. Global security issues are always a top priority.

But climate change? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Consider each PM’s soundbite comment on the subject, the ones that marked off that “hard line” and struck such an “unapologetic tone.”  Abbott: “We shouldn’t clobber the economy.” Harper: “No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth.” Both of them are referring to a carbon tax. The one Australia has, which Abbott is dead-set on repealing (though his government hasn’t yet, despite Harper’s suggestion otherwise, which not a single report on the summit bothered to correct). And the one Harper wields as a Question Period bludgeon, that “job-killing” threat which is just one reason why only his government should be trusted with the keys to the treasury.

Here's a thought: how about verifying climate change claims?

In the midst of this non-story, how is it that not one reporter thought to verify these claims? Given that both PMs spoke explicitly about carbon taxes, why didn’t reporters fill out their stories with detail on what carbon taxes are and what they do? Does a carbon tax actually clobber the economy and destroy jobs and growth? Australia’s economy has operated under a carbon tax for nearly two years. British Columbia’s had one for three times that long. Do either of these economies resemble a punchdrunk boxer in the late rounds of an epic beating?

Well, actually, Australia’s GDP has grown by three per cent or so in 2012 and 2013. Electricity prices are up a bit, but the carbon tax is not the sole cause of that. And at the same time, Australia saw its biggest drop in greenhouse gas emissions in 24 years, refuting Abbott’s claim that such policies don’t help. Similarly, B.C.’s carbon tax has utterly failed to kill jobs or clobber economic growth. Again, fuel prices are up a bit, but B.C. consumers have responded, as expected, by consuming less. And this week a new World Bank report actually indicated seriously tackling climate change could increase GDP.

But hey, maybe carbon taxes are too esoteric, too wonky, too “inside baseball.” What about at least some discussion of the state of the planet and what climate change is doing to it and what the costs might be – today and in the future – if we continue to shrug at the problem and accept as fact the unproven argument that dealing with it would wreck the economy?

With the exception of Aaron Wherry at Maclean’s, who at least quoted an NDP MP talking about current climate change costs, the Canadian press was again mostly silent. Or what about that perennial Hill reporter’s favourite – the reading of the Harper tea leaves? To go from claiming (falsely) that the government will meet its climate change targets to saying they don’t really matter represents a significant shift in rhetoric if not necessarily in policy. Wouldn’t that warrant a bit more substantial discussion? Evidently not.

This is, after all, not the only or even the most important problem the world faces. Why bother reporting on it like it matters at all?

Image Credit: RHL images via Flickr.

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A couple weeks back, I found myself enmeshed briefly in a local debate here in Calgary regarding the validity of the argument that a continent-wide spell of frigid weather raised a serious challenge to the scientific foundations of anthropogenic climate change. In the depths of the cold snap, a rookie city councillor, Sean Chu, tweeted:

I replied:

The exchange and other snarky dismissals of Chu’s line of reasoning got picked up by the Calgary Herald, which ran a news item on its blog and a follow-up piece defending Chu against “anthropogenic global warming religionists” on the op-ed page.

As we were engaged in our local rhetorical joust, climate change deniers continent-wide were re-enacting the same little drama on stages big and small, eventually inspiring one of those killer rapid-fire round-ups of TV news talking-head idiocy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “Apparently decades of peer reviewed study can be, like a ficus plant, destroyed in one cold weekend,” Stewart concluded.

In itself, any given one of these minor foofaraws (or are they argle-bargles?) is barely worth wasting the pixels contained in this sentence. But as a whole — as a tenaciously consistent, recurring pattern of discourse — they actually illustrate a singular challenge to concerted and sustained climate change action. So if you’ll stick with me, let’s unpack the mess a bit and take a look.

Now, the phrase “Hot enough for you?” is a cartoon cliché, a bit of glib small talk placed in a character’s mouth as a signifier for “obnoxious person.” I’d argue that its 21st century reboot should go like this: If global warming is real then why is it cold? This sentiment, the current iteration of which was parodied by Stewart, is trucked out by right-wing critics of action on climate change with such seasonal regularity that it has inspired its own Tumblr.

The line is especially notable for its tone, which is usually hyper-confident and self-congratulatory, freighted with the assumption that there’s not a climate scientist in the world who can possibly explain cold regional short-term weather on a warming planet. In Stewart’s clip round-up, the Fox commentators invoking the line sound like they’re dismissing the ravings of flat-earthers (as opposed to, you know, being flat-earthers).

Never mind that the argument backing the phrase is logically identical to the argument that the arrival of night proves the sun has been extinguished forever. Never mind indeed that the very moment this latest round of witty rejoindering swept frozen North America, Australia was sweltering under a record-breaking heat wave. No, your typical deployer of the If global warming is real then why is it cold? trope is not just convinced he’s right but delighted by the certainty he’s just sprung a logical trap on you that will have you stuck in a snowbank till the next summer heat wave.

The tendency among climate change advocates, in the face of such braying nonsense, is to fire back with a barrage of facts, footnoted arguments, citations and links. There’s even a whole subgenre in this vein, an online chapbook of bullet-pointed lists tallying the 8 ways to prove you’re right or 14 ways to debunk your right-wing uncle or 27 LOLCAT gifs that are more complex and nuanced than the baseless argument behind the question If global warming is real then why is it cold?

The hitch, though, is that the assertion, the line of thinking and the whole vast culture propping it up are not sustained by insufficient access to facts. They are sustained by a mistrust of the sources of those facts — and, moreover, the disseminators of them. In other words, it’s not them, it’s you. It’s us.

Let’s dissect another local case in point, which arrived in my Twitter feed hot on the heels of that city councillor’s musing on the connection between cold weather and climate change. It was a link to an ad in the Calgary Herald, touting the latest line of denial — that cosmic rays are largely responsible for climate change — from Friends of Science, an astroturf “public interest” group funded through the office of arch-conservative University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper.

I’d seen this line of reasoning already awhile back, when Friends of Science’s under-read Twitter feed sent me a link to the source of this paradigm-shifting scientific breakthrough in response to something or other I’d posted about climate science. Thus did I learn that Friends of Science has a new pet dissenter, an astrophysicist named Nir Shaviv who co-authored a paper in a journal called GSA Today arguing that “cosmic rays” were a bigger factor in climate change than anything people had ever done, and so “a significant reduction of the release of greenhouse gases will not significantly lower the global temperature, since only about a third of the warming over the past century should be attributed to man.”

Now, GSA Today is a legitimate scientific journal. This is a genuinely remarkable finding. It invites further consideration. And here’s where those of us in the consensus camp — which includes more than 97 per cent of climate scientists, the vast majority of Canadians and pretty much all of Europe — part ways.

You or I might consult a valid source — RealClimate.org, for example, which is written and curated by climate scientists — and we might discover in less time than it takes to tweet that Shaviv’s paper has been considered, responded to and determined not to actually bring the entire climate change consensus down into a pile of rubble.

Indeed, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt reported at RealClimate.org that the claims in Shaviv’s paper “were subsequently disputed in an article in Eos by an international team of scientists and geologists … who suggested that Shaviv and Veizer’s analyses were based on unreliable and poorly replicated estimates, selective adjustments of the data (shifting the data, in one case by 40 million years) and drew untenable conclusions, particularly with regard to the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations on recent warming.” So then: Just lousy science. Happens all the time. Move along.

But Mann and Schmidt go even further. They speculate on the impact of the study if cosmic rays had in fact done all the stuff Shaviv and his co-author said they did. “Even if the conclusions … had been correct,” they write, “this would be one small piece of evidence pitted against hundreds of others which contradict it. Scientists would find the apparent contradiction interesting and worthy of further investigation, and would devote further study to isolating the source of the contradiction. They would not suddenly throw out all previous results.”

There’s a really significant point there. Did you miss it? THEY WOULD NOT SUDDENLY THROW OUT ALL PREVIOUS RESULTS. (If net etiquette still allowed it, I’d have made the previous sentence blink like a late-’90s Geocities post.)

Friends of Science, however, has no qualms with throwing out all previous results. I’d speculate they uncovered Shaviv and Veizer’s paper on a needle-in-a-haystack hunt for something to use for the expressed purpose of throwing out all previous results. Convinced there must be a magic bullet, Friends of Science found one. They discovered a single data point against a thousand others and reckon they’d found Galileo in the pages of GSA Today. (Friends of Science’s Twitter feed actually cites Galileo in reference to Shaviv.) It’s a very slightly more highfalutin version of If global warming is real then why is it cold?

To come back to my point: there is no amount of contradictory data that you or I or RealClimate.org could assemble, no PowerPoint TED-exy talk we could deliver, no infographic so incontrovertible and compelling that it would convince the Friends of Science or anyone else peddling this line to reconsider their position in any fundamental way. The data doesn’t count. The accumulated facts don’t matter. This is about culture and social trust and a kind of tribalism. You’re wrong — or at least I am — because I’m One of Them.

The motivation here is explained in significant measure by a fine old Upton Sinclair line: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But it’s not just the financial investments or the near-term rewards; Friends of Science and their brethren on Fox News and on Calgary City Council are invested culturally in climate change being something other than primarily human-caused. They are invested culturally in the idea that Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann and thousands of other climate science PhDs are no more likely to know the truth than Nir Shaviv or Barry Cooper or anyone who just stepped outside into an abnormally chilly morning.

There’s a name for this, and (to amble finally to my main point) it is a vital concept for climate change communicators, climate scientists and anyone else with skin in this game to understand. The name is cultural cognition. It comes to us from Dan Kahan of Yale University and his colleagues, whose 2010 paper in the Journal of Risk Research is an essential read for the tribe David Roberts at Grist once dubbed climate hawks.

Cultural cognition, Kahan and his colleagues write, “is a collection of psychological mechanisms that dispose individuals selectively to credit or dismiss evidence of risk in patterns that fit values they share with others.” Subjects in Kahan’s study were divided into those holding “hierarchical and individualistic outlooks” and those holding “egalitarian and communitarian outlooks” — conservative and progressive, more or less. They “significantly disagreed on the state of expert opinion about climate change.” And they did so, the paper argues, due to the “polarizing effect of cultural cognition.”

Put more plainly, people tend to trust information only from sources and outlets they’ve already identified as their sort of people — sharers of common cultural values, members of their tribe. To reach those who reject the consensus on climate change, the paper concludes, “communicators must attend to the cultural meaning as well as the scientific content of the information.”

It’s not enough to be right. To put it in Colbert Nation’s terms, it has to feel truthy. The message has to come in the right frame, through the right kind of channel.

Among the tools Kahan et al. innumerate to do so are these:

1) “Identity affirmation” (a framework in which accepting the consensus leads to an outcome you already like — in the climate change context, perhaps energy independence or an entrepreneurial boom).

2) “Pluralistic advocacy” (emphasizing that experts from a range of backgrounds are involved — clergy and right-wing political icons like Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger as well as your Al Gores).

3) “Narrative framing” (stock characters, familiar arcs — maybe farmers and tradespeople and CEOs instead of activists and progressive policy wonks, engaged not in saving the planet but renewing the economy).

None of this is wholly new, of course. Climate hawks and other progressives have been talking about getting the frame right for years, playing up the entrepreneurial angle of green energy and cleantech, making a hero of Texas natural gas baron T. Boone Pickens. So why does the counterfactual denialist/hoax message persist? One possibility, very funnily illustrated in a little Socratic dialogue I found via Metafilter, is the “crazification factor” — the argument, based on the number of votes Alan Keyes got when he ran against Barack Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, that there’s some core group of dug-in, dead-ender partisans who will never move on some issues.

In the case of Obama v. Keyes, the number was 27 per cent. Polls suggest Canada’s denialist base is much smaller — in a 2012 survey, for example, 86 per cent of Canadians agreed that humans were at least partially responsible for climate change, and only two per cent flat-out denied it was happening.

The voice of the If global warming is real then why is it cold? contingent, however, seems much louder in the public discourse than a 1/50 share. Which leaves me wondering: Could part of the problem be that the engagement of this argument on any level — and particularly one of just-the-facts rebuttal — amplifies it well beyond its actual constituency? Might climate change advocates themselves be way off in their perception of the size and scope of opposition to their point of view? And if so, might it not be best to carry on as if everyone in the room already agrees that the guy making the “Hot enough for you?” joke is just being obnoxious for its own sake?

Image Credit: Polar Vortex wind currents on January 7th, 2014 from earth.nullschool.net and featured on the Washington Post.

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The final report of the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel landed in Calgary today with an authoritative thud. “After weighing the evidence,” it announced in outsized type, “we concluded that Canada and Canadians would be better off with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project than without it.”

The report sprawls across two volumes — a 76-page summary entitled Connections, and a phone-book-thick 417-page volume of conditions and rationales called Considerations. Both are bound with bright green spines and back covers, and the front covers feature atmospheric photos of rugged Canadian wilderness, similar to the sort you’d find in a travel brochure.

I mention the cover images because they are among the report’s most significant environmental assessment features. Whatever else, the Joint Review Panel knows what a pristine environment looks like when it sees one. You want pictures of salmon spawning in streams and caribou peeking out from glades and humpbacks breaching majestically from Great Bear Rainforest bays? This report’s got ‘em.

On facing pages of the “residents and communities” section of Connections (Item 2.4 for those playing along at home), there are pictures of the Gitga’at village of Hartley Bay (which lies at the mouth of Douglas Channel, where supertankers would pass en route to and from Enbridge’s oil tanker terminal at Kitimat) and a tourist office with solar panels on its roof. They know what First Nations communities and low-carbon energy technologies look like too, those graphic design whizzes down at the National Energy Board.

But surely there’s more to the most hotly anticipated National Energy Board report in many moons, right? Surely the nation’s media did not gather eagerly in a conference room in the heart of downtown Calgary to look at a long-form travel ad for northern British Columbia? Surely all those numbers — 1,179 oral statements, 175,669 pages of evidence, 47 aboriginal groups and 884 hours of hearings — amounted to more than a sort of shrugging “seems pretty good to us, eh?”

Well, you tell me. Probably the most revealing passage of the report is the one entitled “What Was Outside Our Mandate?” (Item 2.2.2). Among the not-our-department issues were “both ‘upstream’ oil development effects and ‘downstream’ refining and use of the products shipped on the pipelines and tankers.” Got that? A report on the “public interest” involved in an oil pipeline decided that it was irrelevant where the oil came from or where it goes. 

Skipping ahead to 2.4.1, “a large oil spill” was deemed “unlikely,” and in any case “the adverse effects would not be permanent and widespread.” Pipelines don’t, in and of themselves, emit greenhouse gases. And oil spills are basically spilled milk, not worth crying over. So check off the 209 conditions between the picture of the grizzly bear on the cover of Considerations and the Forest Stewardship Council logo on the back cover and you’re good to go!

(Incidentally, Item 4.3.6 concedes that eight grizzly bear populations would be affected “over the linear density threshold,” but this — and the negative impact on woodland caribou — were “found to be justified in the circumstances.” There is a picture of a grizzly with a salmon in its mouth on that very page of Connections. I have thus far resisted adding to my pristine copy a cartoon word bubble indicating an out-of-frame voice saying, “Suck it, fishface!”)

To be fair — I know, a little late in the game — the report does take some pains to indicate that it listened to a lot of dissenting voices. Why, Item 2.3 in Connections (“What were the public concerns?”) is a veritable litany of complaints and wrung hands. “People expressed concerns about the ‘catastrophic’ effects they believe a major pipeline rupture or tanker spill could have on salmon and other fish… People were concerned about the effect of tanker traffic… Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants said clean environments are crucial parts of traditional and present-day cultures.” Duly noted, y’all. We feel you.

I could go on, but there are two odd little logical hiccups I’d like to highlight from the report. They concern the two shrugging dismissals I’ve already mentioned: that upstream and downstream impacts were outside the mandate, and that large oil spills would cause damage limited in time and space.

Let’s start with upstream and downstream impacts. There are any number, but for the overwhelming majority of people not living along the length of the pipeline, the big one is climate change. This is broadly understood beyond the pages of Joint Review Panel reports on oil pipelines to be the absolute top concern regarding the extraction, refining and burning of the fossil fuels transported by such pipelines. It’s conspicuously absent from the report, aside from some passing references to “emissions.” Which — again to be fair — are created before and after the oil passes through the pipeline.

But perhaps you’d been led to believe — by Canada’s prime minister and natural resources minister and Alberta’s premier, among others — that the whole reason Northern Gateway was such a high-priority piece of infrastructure was because it would encourage new oilsands developments, thus creating new “Economic Action” in the field of “Responsible Resource Development,” as per maybe the most vociferously championed "Plan" in the nation’s history.

Well, hold it there, hoss. “We did not consider that there was a sufficiently direct connection between the project and any particular existing or proposed oil sands development or other oil production activities to warrant consideration of the effects of these activities.” Got that? Northern Gateway has no direct connection to Alberta’s oilsands! This must just be surprising the boots right off the feet of a great many CEOs in a great many Calgary boardrooms, but there you go.

And to their credit, the Joint Review panelists offer up “four factors” to explain this reasoning. (We’re back in that gem Item 2.2.2, by the way.) They’re all impressive, but I liked the third bullet point best. “Bruderheim Station” — the eastern terminus of the pipeline — “would not be located near oil sands developments and could receive oil from a variety of sources.” I wish I could report that those Joint Review Panel dreamers suggested a few other possible sources for the hundreds of thousands of barrels of diluted bitumen per day the pipeline is being built to transport, but alas they left us to wonder.

Anyway, point being this is a report that doesn’t consider such fussy “upstream” details. Except when it’s assessing the economic benefits of the very same pipeline, over in Item 3.1, which is rather inconveniently located just 12 pages further along in the very same report. “We have taken into consideration that Western Canadian crude oil supply and the demand for imported condensate are forecast to grow significantly over the life of the project.” So a cornerstone of the economic case for the pipeline is that oilsands supplies will increase, but those increases have no direct connection to the project being used to deliver them to new markets from an environmental perspective. Connections is nothing if not one seriously gutsy Joint Review Panel report.

There’s a similarly nifty trick going on in the oil spill risk assessment section, which as I’ve mentioned estimates the possibility of a major spill to be “unlikely,” with no “permanent” or “widespread” impact. Turn to Item 5.5 for some elaboration: “We found that, in rare circumstances, a localized population or species could potentially be permanently affected by an oil spill. Scientific research from a past spill indicates that this will not impact the recovery of functioning ecosystems.”

Sure aren’t a lot of specifics there, and to be fair (yet again!) you have to turn to a whole other page of the report to find the section where it says Northern Gateway is obliged to establish “a scientific advisory committee to study what happens to diluted bitumen when released into the environment.” So we don’t actually know how the oil would behave if it spilled, but we’re really quite sure the impacts won’t be too bad. Take our word for it or whatever.

This is a report that almost physically shrugs in your hands as you read it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Fisheries and Oceans Canada told the Joint Review Panel many, many moons ago it lacked the capacity to provide a full environmental impact assessment. Or that First Nations along the route are already asserting their intention to refuse to let the pipeline be built on their land. Or that as a country we have just maybe the most incoherent climate and energy policies in the industrial world.

I really could go on, but I won’t for now. Heckuva job there, Joint Review Panel. Lovely photos.

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