About this time I became aware of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Students from over 20 universities across the country are attempting to convince their schools to divest their endowment funds from the top 200 fossil fuel companies within five years, and immediately freeze any new investments in those companies. And I thought, hey, I have a couple of university degrees, maybe I can help.

But first you might be wondering why exactly these students and I are so worked up about climate change and fossil fuel companies. The answer boils down to 3 numbers:

2 DEGREES CELSIUS

Every country in the world has formally agreed to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to two degrees, and recently agreed in Paris to aim even lower.

900 GIGATONS

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) scientists estimate is the maximum amount we can burn to have a decent chance of keeping warming under 2C.

2860 GIGATONS

The total CO2 contained in the proven reserves of fossil fuel companies. So if we’re serious about keeping warming under 2C, most of that needs to stay in the ground.

BUT not only are fossil fuel companies committed to burning all of those reserves, they’re spending billions looking for new ones. New UNBURNABLE reserves. So by investing in fossil fuel companies you’re essentially placing a bet on how long they can fool people.

This “carbon bubble” is openly acknowledged by big players in the financial community, including Bank of England (and former Bank of Canada) governor Mark Carney, the IMF, the World Bank, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and a coalition of 70 investors worth $3 trillion.

But this isn’t just a financial issue, it’s a moral one.

New investigations (available here and here) have concluded that ExxonMobil (and other fossil fuel companies) understood the science of climate change and its implications by the mid-1980s, and then spent decades systematically funding climate denial. That’s some soul-boggling evil right there.

Exxon is now being investigated by New York’s attorney general, and it could be the start of years of lawsuits like those against the tobacco industry after they were caught covering up the health effects of their product.

The fossil fuel industry is not some benevolent group of companies competing on a level playing field to make an honest buck. It’s heavily subsidized, subverts democracy by blocking laws that protect the environment, and funds climate denial lobby groups (there’s lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of evidence for this).

How Will Divestment Help?

The goal of divestment is to revoke the social license of an industry whose business model is not compatible with a liveable climate. Divestment activists are simply saying “It is immoral to profit off of climate change. Period. Exclamation mark.” BUT…

• Isn’t divestment hypocritical since we all use fossil fuels every day?
• Isn’t divestment pointless if it doesn’t bankrupt fossil fuel companies?
• Isn’t shareholder engagement the best way to drive change?

All reasonable questions, and all answered by The Guardian in this handy article.

Even a former CEO of Shell called divestment a “rational approach,” and it must be at least somewhat effective since the industry feels threatened enough by the movement to attack it.

Over 500 Institutions Valued at $3.4 Trillion Have Divested

These include colleges and universities, churches, charities, cities, and others. However only one Canadian university — the University of Ottawa — has joined the fossil free movement. (Congrats to the hardworking students of Fossil Free uOttawa!)

And some have explicitly refused, including Dalhousie, Queen’s, UBC and U of T.

In their reasoning for their decision, the Dalhousie Board of Governors cited their “fiduciary duty to generate reasonable risk adjusted returns from a diverse portfolio of investments.”

But is the primary duty of a university to “generate reasonable returns?” They claim to be preparing students for the future, but how can they claim to do that while profiting from an industry that is actively working to make that future uninhabitable?

Easy, they pretend, and hope the calls for change grow quieter. But in fact, the calls are only growing louder by the day.

And here's where you can help.

A university’s most valuable asset is its reputation, and its alumni network is a crucial part of that reputation. As alumni, you have the power to influence the behaviour of your alma mater if enough of you act together.

THE ASK: ADD YOUR VOICE TO THOSE CALLING FOR DIVESTMENT

Sign a petition to urge your alma mater to divest from fossil fuels, and send the message that you will withhold any donations until they do.

School-specific petitions: McGill University University of Toronto Dalhousie University Queen’s University Mount Allison University

(UBC’s is being finalized and I will post here when it’s up)

Create a new alumni petition for your alma mater, or send any existing ones, to divest@gofossilfree.ca to add it Fossil Free Canada’s list of alumni petitions: gofossilfree.ca/alumni.

You can also sign Fossil Free Canada’s alumni pledge to withhold donations.

I’ve put my degrees where my mouth is and ripped up my Dalhousie and Queen’s degrees to protest their refusal to divest (watch below). Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve been inspired to help!

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The latest leaders debate was an unwatchable mess that resembled a malfunctioning Chuck E Cheese animatronic puppet show. But what made it truly sad was that the three men competing to lead our country had a verbal pissing match over who could build climate-torching pipelines the fastest. It epitomized the race to the middle that this campaign has become. Just look at a graph of how party popularity has changed over the year. It looks like snakes in a feeding frenzy.

It was a helpful reminder that voting is important, but not enough. Leadership isn’t going to come from the top down on climate. And that leadership vacuum is what the newly released Leap Manifesto is meant to fill. But it’s been fascinating to watch the media react to this thing by dusting off their cold war rhetoric. “Know who else has manifestos? The Reds. Know who else leaps? Chairman Mao. And frogs…”

One of Canada’s papers of record actually referred to it as “madness.” They apparently concluded that “Caring for one another and caring for the planet” is literally insane. I’m curious what the cure is for this sickness? And does it involve several spoonfuls of oil and Vitamin catastrophic climate change?

It shows just how pathetically narrow the Canadian media has set the range of acceptable debate on climate. They’re fine with environmentalism steered by the free market and entrepreneurs, but the Leap Manifesto proposes a new approach, one that might actually work.

I’ve signed this thing. It’s reasonable, doable, and our best chance at survival. And if that’s “madness,” then call me Crazy Uncle Scott. My nephew already does.

This video was created for the Toronto Star. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The purpose of the National Energy Board, like any regulator, is to be unprofitable. They perform unprofitable environmental assessments to make sure we have access to unprofitable clean drinking water and preserve unprofitable nature for unprofitable future generations. That’s because citizens value things beyond profits, and the National Energy Board represents citizens. In theory… 

One of the last things the Harper government did before it launched the federal election was to appoint Steven Kelly, who is a consultant for Kinder Morgan, to the National Energy Board. This guy was paid to convince the government to approve the expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline. And now he’ll be part of the team that helps to decide if his own argument was convincing. If the pipeline review process was a cutest baby competition, we just hired the baby’s mom.

In fact, over half of NEB’s board members are pipeline mommies, a.k.a. oil industry professionals. Which is probably why the Kinder Morgan pipeline review processes has been widely condemned as a farce. The NEB refuses to take climate change into consideration in their review, even though scientists have made clear that more pipelines will lock us into a very hot, very grim future. But the fossil fuel industry, and their representatives in the NEB, are content to watch the world burn, as long as they can make money selling the matches.

There’s good evidence that the NEB no longer represents citizens and no longer works in the public interest. That could change before any more pipelines get built, depending on which Canadians are interested enough in their interests to vote on October 19th.

This video originally appeared in The Toronto Star. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In the wake of the NDP’s new majority government in Alberta, Steve Williams, the CEO of Suncor, announced that he believes climate change is happening and the right way to address it is a carbon tax that applies to both producers and consumers.

Well it’s pretty obvious what happened here. Steve Williams read Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything” and was so inspired by her vision of a just, sustainable future that he set short-term considerations of profit aside for his deeply held moral convictions, in preparation for his eventual ascension unto heaven. Or maybe there’s something else going on…

Maybe the oil industry knows that funding climate denial is a losing battle, so they’re falling back to their next line of defense. “Yes, okay, climate change is happening, but how can we pretend to care in a way that costs us the least amount of money? And can we fit the word green into it? Or maybe a picture of a baby lemur?"

Corporations don’t have morals, they’re profit-making robots. They’re run by people, and those people are often perfectly nice. But if they don’t work the controls properly, the robot will crap them into the unemployment line.

I know Canadians are supposed to be polite, but if we’re serious about doing our part to avoid catastrophic climate change, we should consider being a lot less polite to the oil industry. They’ve shown really bad manners by spending millions to block climate action to protect their billions in profits, so maybe we shouldn’t focus on whatever solution offends them the least.

Maybe it’s time to be straight up rude and uncivilized and take some of those billions and spend them on creating jobs in renewable energy, to make the transition we’re way overdue on. Or we could create a new robot to go back in time and terminate James Watt and Henry Ford. Both solid options I think.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

At least 75 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change, but not only are fossil fuel companies committed to burning all of those reserves, they’re spending billions searching for more. Wrecking the climate in exchange for money is officially the worst business model. Truck Nutz, you’re off the hook.

Every time we read another bowel-loosening article on climate change it’s easy to feel powerless because fossil fuel companies are so deeply entrenched in our economy and politics. But one way people are pushing back is divestment. If institutions remove their investments from fossil fuel companies, it sends the industry a message in a language it understands — money — that its business model is no longer acceptable. We don’t like you anymore. You’re losers.

And if you’re an institution that claims to serve the public interest, it’s immoral for you to invest in fossil fuels. It’s not in the public interest to wreck the climate, so you shouldn’t be profiting from that wreckage. The goal isn’t to bankrupt fossil fuel companies, it’s to disgrace them. And as with tobacco companies, the eventual goal is to force them to pay for some of the damage they’ve caused.

Tens of billions of dollars have already been divested by colleges and universities, churches, charities, cities, and others. But Canada — shockingly — is lagging. In fact, no Canadian university has fully divested. But it just so happens that I have degrees from two of those universities.

So to Dalhousie President Richard Florizone: You announced last fall that Dalhousie wouldn’t divest, citing your “fiduciary duty to generate reasonable risk adjusted returns.” If you want to generate reasonable returns for a living, go work at a bank. Your job is to prepare students for the future, so you need to stop profiting from an industry that is actively working to make that future uninhabitable.

I’ve started a petition for alumni. The signatories commit to withholding any donations to Dalhousie until you commit to divest. And further, if there’s no change to your position, this fall I’m going to rip up my degree on camera and I invite others to join me.

I’ve started a similar petition for Queen’s alumni. To Queen’s Principal Daniel Woolf: You signed a Climate Change Statement of Action recognizing that Queen’s has an “obligation to demonstrate leadership in areas of community, national and global importance.”

Now’s your chance to demonstrate that leadership. Queen’s has formed an advisory committee that’s currently deliberating on divestment and they’ll announce their opinion in the fall. If at that time you choose to side with the fossil fuel industry, I’m throwing a degree-ripping party and you won’t be invited. 

Petition for Queen’s alumni: https://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/petitions/queen-s-university-alumni-for-fossil-fuel-divestment

Petition for Dalhousie alumni: https://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/petitions/dalhousie-alumni-for-fossil-fuel-divestment

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The government defines a threat completely differently than a citizen does.

We think of threats as violence, things that could physically hurt us. But to a government that also includes anything that could reduce its power.

So currently the definition of threats in the CSIS Act includes ‘foreign influenced activities detrimental to the interests of Canada.’

That doesn’t sound violent. That could describe a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band in Hamilton.

Watch me break it down in this video:

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Far more disturbing than what’s in Bill C-51 is the fact that most Canadians don’t seem to care about it. I don’t know if they’re scared, or uninformed, or think Earth will soon be knocked off its axis by a rogue planet sending us all hurtling into the sun so nothing matters anyway. In any case, here are a few reminders.

Free speech is important. Once you allow speech you don’t like to be criminalized, you’re allowing the government to create a list of illegal ideas. That list will expand no matter which party is in power. Once a state outlaws a few kinds of speech, it gets all jacked up and has to keep that buzz going and before you know it they’ve snorted up a whole pile of them and have you cornered at a party talking your ear off about politics.

Civil disobedience is important. Some will say if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear from bill C-51, but “wrong” and “illegal” are not the same thing. If they were, when someone guesses incorrectly on Jeopardy Alex Trebek would say “Ohhh, I’m sorry, that answer is illegal. We were looking for Topeka. You are under arrest.” The point is, sometimes things are illegal AND morally right. Most social advancement starts with some kind of civil disobedience.

Intelligence agencies are not your friend. I’m not against them in principle, but if we’re going to allow people to exercise power in secret, we need to give them a laser-like focus and keep them on a short leash. We’re on the cusp of giving them a fog-like focus, and instead of democratic oversight we’re installing an applause sign.

And a final reminder, keeping Canadians safe is not the most important function of government. And if you think it should be, then please lock yourself up in a nice, safe bomb shelter and stop ruining the country for the rest of us.

This video was originally produced for the Toronto Star.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The government spent over $180,000 dollars last year to run the office of a corporate social responsibility counsellor for the Canadian mining industry even though there was no counsellor. Which is actually a fitting metaphor for what this office does: nothing.

It has no power to investigate problems or issue reports. Just look at the title, it’s not corporate social responsibility enforcer, it’s counsellor. “Hey man, there’s no judgment here. Think of me as a coach. How can I help you to help yourself to not murder activists, forcibly evict people and set their homes on fire? Yeah, help yourself to the jelly beans. Those are for everyone.”

Last spring over 30 organizations co-authored a report about mining in Latin America. It documented several human rights abuses by Canadian companies, and concluded that in spite of those abuses, the Canadian government provides those companies with political, legal and financial support. Because hey, what happens in Latin America, stays in Latin America.

Sometimes you just gotta take a break and get away from the hustle and bustle of…laws.

It surprised me to learn that I’m partly responsible for this problem. Because the Canada Pension Plan – and anyone who’s contributed to it – is an investor in these mining companies.

The NGO MiningWatch asked Canada’s pension investment board to divest the 26 million dollars it has in the company Tahoe, which owns a Guatemalan mine where security forces shot 7 protestors. But the board refused to divest, and said they aren’t allowed to consider any non-investment factors when deciding where to invest Canadians' retirement money.

Well if we’re not considering non-investment factors, know what company has a great return on investment? The mafia. Let’s invest our pension money in the mafia.

Between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of all mining in Latin America is done by Canadian firms, and until we have muscular laws and regulations to keep them in line, they will continue to make terrible ambassadors for our country. Even worse than Robin Thicke.

This video originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

One hundred and ninety-five countries, including Canada, have formally agreed that we need to limit the Earth’s temperature rise over pre-industrial levels to two degrees. It’s uncontroversial.

Because going much beyond a two degree increase would be “incompatible with an organized global community” in the words of one of the UK’s top climate scientists. And if you’re not sure what that would look like, imagine the movie Mad Max but replace Mel Gibson’s character with a pile of hot dirt.

To have a decent chance of staying below two degrees, the world can only burn around a thousand more gigatonnes of CO2. But current fossil fuel reserves in the ground are about 3000 gigatonnes.

If we burn all that it would be beyond Mad Max. It would be like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when those guys’ faces melt off, but realistic and not suddenly like Wallace & Gromit attempting horror.

Companies are spending billions searching for more fossil fuel reserves, and we literally can’t burn the stuff we’ve already found. And I don’t mean literally in a “literally zillions” kind of way. We cannot physically do it and hope for a Mentally Sound Max future.

A new study this month in Nature made headlines by restating these numbers, but it went further to say specifically which reserves make the most sense to leave unburned. For Canada it means leaving 71 per cent of natural gas, 97 per cent of coal, and 99 per cent of oilsands in the ground.

And like a patient being told they have 6 months to live, we can expect the Canadian oil and gas sector to react with denial, and then to publicly challenge the credibility of the doctor, and then pay another doctor to give a better diagnosis.

You know, the things terminally ill patients normally do. The metaphor works.   

Fossil fuel companies will do everything in their power to get their reserves above ground, because their stock prices depend on it. If everyone agreed with the conclusions of this Nature paper, the value of fossil fuel companies would crash.

So by investing in their stocks, you’re effectively placing a bet on how long they can fool people. And while companies have fooled us into buying a lot of stupid crap, from Snuggies to two-person Snuggies to camouflage Snuggies, a lot more is at stake this time than just our dignity. 

This video originally appeared on The Toronto Star.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This video, by comedian Scott Vrooman, originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

American energy corporation Kinder Morgan filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against five Trans Mountain pipeline protestors in Burnaby, B.C., because apparently nobody told them the average income of a pipeline protestor.

The National Energy Board — an anagram of “regulatory capture” — ruled that the City of Burnaby can’t stop Kinder from carrying out its work, so now the protestors are accused of trespassing in their own city’s park. Kinder solved the Not In My Backyard problem by taking the backyard.

The company also claims that protestors’ angry facial expressions constitute an assault on their workers. They’re arguing that freedom of expression doesn’t extend to your face. So I assume that if protestors draw angry faces onto their butts and display those towards Kinder Morgan workers, that won’t constitute assault. And I encourage every protestor to test that theory.

All of this comes within the context of a wider attempt to delegitimize protest itself. The University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy which just installed a new oil feature in their garden it’s lovely — they recently held a conference on “social license,” where the case was made that protestors undermine the rule of law by claiming to speak for the whole community.

But pipeline and climate change protestors are mostly speaking for members of the community who don’t have a voice: children. Or they do have a voice, but they’re babbling and responding to everything with “why” and just generally saying the darndest things.

We don’t have a law that says children have a right to a livable environment when they get older. They’re expected to earn their ice sheets and predictable planting seasons just like we did. 

Even radical, chaos-gargling anarchists like the International Energy Agency and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney have agreed that the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avoid devastating climate change.

So maybe angry protestors aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of anger of everyone else. Maybe the expression we should be worried about isn’t an angry face, it’s a shrug.

Follow Scott on Twitter: @mescottvrooman

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The below video originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

Birdwatchers – the paparazzi of the natural world – are subverting our democracy according to the Canada Revenue Agency – the overbearing mother of the financial world.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Field Naturalists, a registered charity, recently wrote a letter to federal cabinet members complaining about pesticides linked to dying bees. Shortly after, they got a letter from CRA warning them to “refrain from undertaking any partisan activities.” Activities like their dogmatic anti-bee-death manifesto.

It’s part of a recent crackdown on charities for political activities. CRA rules state that to get tax-free status a charity must be non-partisan. But what charity isn’t partisan? They all support something. We don’t say “Okay, we’ve heard from the ice-bucket challenge guys, but let’s give the pro-ALS folks a chance to weigh in on this… and their buckets of lava.”

And if CRA is so concerned with partisan charities, why aren’t they auditing The Fraser Institute? A “charitable” right-wing think tank whose heroic mission is to protect private profits from abuse by the poor, and protect climate change deniers from reality, and whose donors include Exxon, the tobacco industry and the Koch brothers. They tried getting a donation from Hans Gruber and someone had to tell them that was just the bad guy in Die Hard that’s not a real guy.

And if we’re really serious about people avoiding taxes, what are we doing about the billions we lose each year to offshore tax havens? It turns out, not much. Documents leaked early this year show that over 3000 full-time positions will be cut from the CRA budget in the next four years, including auditors.

So if the birdwatchers really want to keep the CRA off their back, they don’t need to stop partisan activities. They just need to stop being not rich. 

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.