Reflecting on his long struggle against South African apartheid, Nelson Mandela said, “One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start.”

The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is not apartheid — let’s get that off the table right away. It’s a pipeline. But in its sustained, divisive nature, in the way in brings up hard constitutional questions and emotional responses while deepening political entrenchment, the very debate over the pipeline is worth considering in its own light.

“Debate” might not even be the right word at this point. When one side is being arrested for opposition while the other is worried about their ability to operate within the basic Canadian principles of peace, order and good government, this has become something deeper and less flexible than a debate.

How did we get here?

“What mobilizes or activates our defences is almost always that there’s enormous fear,” Renee Lertzman, an expert in the psychology of environmental education, told DeSmog Canada. “The tendency to go towards polar positions and black-and-white is a well-known defence mechanism.”

In the Kinder Morgan debate, the parties talk past each other like a bickering couple; the values and even the realities from which they’re speaking are driven further apart with each new rhetorical volley.

Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan, describes scenarios in which two opposing sides talk past each other as a “logic schism.”

“In a logic schism, a contest emerges in which opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position and disconfirms their opponents’ arguments,” Hoffman told the University of Michigan Record. “Each side views the other with suspicion, even demonizing the other, leading to a strong resistance to any form of engagement, much less negotiation and concession.”

For Lertzman, the solution to the seemingly intractable problem of where to go from here — or at least how to talk about it — is to start by recognizing the fear and concerns others have.

“You don’t just start with attack, you actually acknowledge this might seem like the right thing to do,” she says. “Without that acknowledgment, it’s very hard to break through.”

So what is that fear?

Here’s a cheat sheet; it’s not a perfect representation of everyone’s fears within the groups, plus, there are subgroups, and there are entire factions that aren’t included. But if you’re firmly embedded in any side of this debate, take a moment to consider the following.

For some First Nations, the fear is that their constitutional right to decide for themselves how their land is used is being trampled upon and that their sources of food, water and cultural practices are being compromised as a result. It wouldn’t be the first time: we live in a country that has routinely ignored First Nations’ rights for its entire history and only now are many of their cultures beginning to recover and regain control over their lands and resources.

Free, Prior & Informed Consent means #FirstNations have the right to say yes or no & to determine conditions for development in their territories. Together we must arrive at a process that respects rights, title, #FPIC and #UNDRIP. #TransMountain #KinderMorgan

— Perry Bellegarde (@perrybellegarde) April 10, 2018

Many Albertans fear their ability to grow their economy and provide for their families is being limited by their intransigent neighbours. This is a province with a strong dependence on one resource, and which is only beginning to recover from an oil-price shock that devastated its economy in 2014.

Alberta is a province of warm hearted people who fundamentally believe in the balance between resource development and responsible environmental stewardship. Every day that @JustinTrudeau allows #KinderMorgan to be stalled is a day he hurts the people of this province. #ableg

— Kristin Raworth (@JC4ever) April 8, 2018

Many British Columbians worry that their invaluable coastline and coastal economy is being put further at risk to benefit foreign corporations, while they have no say in what level of risk they are willing to accept. Many are also more wary of the impacts of climate change than Albertans are, and see the pipeline as a mechanism that will ramp up emissions.

.@JustinTrudeau‘s government has a choice: They can stand up for Canadians protecting their coast, or a Texas pipeline company protecting its investors. https://t.co/uhXB2bjOTX #cdnpoli #kindermorgan #notankers

— Dogwood (@dogwoodbc) April 10, 2018

For some Canadians outside of the affected provinces, the fear is that authority over important infrastructure is now more of a question than a statement; for others, it’s that growth of the oilsands, and its associated emissions, will be locked in for another 50 years at least.

This is a clear challenge to federal jurisdiction. It leaves the federal gov’t with no choice but to assert its authority. If the BC Gov’t’s position is let stand, it means activists & the politicians who support them can simply ignore the rule of law. 1/2 https://t.co/UkanVzf1la

— Perrin Beatty (@PerrinBeatty) April 9, 2018

What is the common theme? Agency. Everyone fears that the people and institutions they care about have no say in what happens to their resources, their livelihoods, their climate, their rights, their backyards.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that this pipeline “is going to get built,” in a distant echo of his father’s famous “Just watch me” moment during the October Crisis, he’s speaking as someone who is trying desperately to reassure Canadians that the government, at least, has agency over projects that happen within the country.

“That surprised me because it’s not the sort of thing politicians normally say,” Adam Kahane, a conflict-resolution expert credited with helping to end Colombia’s civil war, told DeSmog Canada.

“What’s interesting to me about all the people who are saying ‘it’s going to be like this’ is what is their power to impose the solution they want? Does the federal government have the power? Constitutional, regulatory, financial or, in an extreme situation, with security forces?

“Does the government of Alberta have the power, including through the trade sanctions that have been discussed? But similarly, do the opponents have the power — legal or political or through their willingness to protest and be arrested? Does anybody have the power to impose the solution they want regardless of the others? And if not, who is going to negotiate?”

In his latest book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People you Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust, Kahane outlines four choices when it comes to working with others: collaborate, adapt, force or exit.

Forcing a solution, either through legal, economic or even police or military means, usually doesn’t result in a stable situation, he says.

“That’s the problem with forcing, is it tends to be temporary. Eventually, the people who were on the losing side of it find a way to get back in the game.”

Kahane brings up the Mandela quote to illustrate that this doesn’t need to remain the way things are: gridlocked, escalating and fearful among all the parties, or, as he described them “wholes” with their own realities and concerns.

“There are lots of different ways to do things and I don’t know whether a solution that works for more of the wholes can be arrived at, but stating that it either has to be my way or no way doesn’t move us forward much.”

The debate isn’t going to return to normalcy on its own, and if Kahane is right, that’s especially true if the government decides to use forceful means to make it happen. It’s going to require a great deal of empathy, a cooling of rhetoric and an acknowledgment that most of the arguments flying around come from a genuine place of concern and of love for one’s home.

As Mandela himself put it, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

— With files from Emma Gilchrist

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.

As the national conversation about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline goes thoroughly bananas, one thing is becoming crystal clear: this conflict is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Thankfully, there are people out there who specialize in resolving conflicts like this — people like Canadian Adam Kahane who has been credited with helping to end Colombia’s civil war.

For Kahane — the author of the book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust — the most striking thing about the pipeline debate is that the rules are not clear.

“The question of who gets to decide on what in Canada between the provincial and federal governments on one hand and Indigenous rights holders on the other hand is not settled,” he told DeSmog Canada in an interview.

While many statements by politicians pretend there’s one right answer and agreement about what’s in the “national interest,” that too is up for debate.

“To say ‘this is what’s needed for the good of the nation’ gives an overly simplistic answer to a very difficult question, which is: whose good is being talked about here?” Kahane said.

And then there’s the question of whether the hysterical political statements are part of a negotiation strategy we’re not aware of.

“People say all sorts of things to try to shift the terrain to their advantage,” Kahane said.

We asked Kahane to shed some light on the dynamics at play in the pipeline debate, based on his experience mediating conflicts around the world.

What do you think about the heated rhetoric that’s happening with our political leaders right now?

I was very surprised at the rhetoric, especially when Trudeau and Notley both said … within the last few days ‘this is going to happen.’ That surprised me because it’s not the sort of thing politicians normally say.

I would have expected them to say ‘we’re going to try to find a way forward’ and ‘this is complicated, but no doubt we can work it out.’ But when you say ‘this is going to happen’ for me it means two things: first of all, that there’s only one correct answer to this. It has to be this way. And mostly when there are disputes like this, actually the way to move forward is to make some sort of compromise or new idea. The way things end up is not the way things are at the beginning.

That’s an unusual thing to say about a complicated and contentious situation.

The second thing is when someone in authority says ‘it is going to happen,’ it implies that if necessary they will impose it … Usually you impose things only when finding a mutually agreeable solution has proven to be impossible or where the other actor is illegitimate. So it’s an unusual thing to say about a public policy issue.

Have you seen situations before in different contexts where a government has started to say ‘this will happen’ when there’s a contentious situation? Does it bring up any parallels for you?

Yes, absolutely. Governments and other people with power often say ‘it’s going to be like this.’

What’s interesting to me about all the people who are saying ‘it’s going to be like this’ is: what is their power to impose the solution they want?

Does the federal government have the power — constitutional, regulatory, financial or, in an extreme situation, with security forces? Does the government of Alberta have the power, including through the trade sanctions that have been discussed? But similarly do the opponents of the pipeline have the power — legal or political or through their willingness to protest and be arrested? Does anybody have the power to impose the solution they want regardless of the others? And if not, then who is going to negotiate?

Normally when there’s a situation where different people want different things, there’s a lot of fuss and eventually some kind of agreement is come to. In the end, it’s not a unilateral solution. It’s a negotiation or collaboration or whatever you call it.

What I can’t tell is: to what extent are the statements … really meant as a declaration of unilateralism … or is it part of a negotiation? That’s not clear to me. Are the people making these statements on all sides announcing their intention to force … or are they simply being vocal about their positions as part of a negotiation or collaboration?

For me, what makes this very complicated and unusual is the question: who has power over what is not clear because there are many constitutional questions here including, I think, questions about the power and authority — political, constitutional, moral authority — of different First Nations groups. It’s not as though there’s this one rule here, everybody knows what the rule is and the question is who’s following the rule or not following the rule. No, the rules about who gets to decide about what, especially about land use in unceded territory, is not settled in Canada.

It seems like in much of the news coverage and political statements on this, there isn’t much addressing of the real differences that are at play. There’s a lot of posturing, but there’s almost a logic schism. People aren’t discussing the same thing. Is that something that you come across often in your work?

Yes, and I would go further than that. I think there is not an acknowledgement that there are real differences, that there are multiple conflicting objectives. Many statements are pretending that actually there is one right answer, but something that makes it even more difficult is that there is not acknowledgement that when we talk about the good of the whole, that there’s not one whole. There are many wholes here. So when many people say ‘the good of the nation,’ what is that? Canada? Alberta? B.C.? Burnaby? The different First Nations that are affected by the pipeline?

To say ‘this is what’s needed for the good of the nation’ gives an overly simplistic answer to a very difficult question, which is: whose good is being talked about here?

When B.C. people say, ‘this might be good for Alberta, but it’s not good for those of us along the coastline of B.C.,’ not only are there real differences that are not being discussed, there are different wholes that are being ignored. The fact that there is not one superior whole in Canada — the fact that it’s a confederation of multiple wholes where the rules about some of the wholes, especially the Indigenous wholes — makes it difficult to assert that this is the one correct answer.

And yet that is something that we see. Is that common in political rhetoric that you see around the world, this assertion of one correct answer when it’s quite obvious to anyone who’s paying close attention that there isn’t one correct answer?

It’s very common that politicians or chief executives or community leaders, it’s very common that authorities say ‘it’s like this. This is what matters. This is the good of the whole. This is the correct answer.’ They try that and sometimes it works and sometimes they simply don’t have the capacity to impose their answer.

That’s what’s really not clear to me about this situation is when Prime Minister Trudeau says ‘it’s going to be like this’ does he actually have the constitutional and political and moral authority to make it like this? It doesn’t look that simple to me.

People do this all the time, all around the world and in every sphere of life … That’s called forcing and sometimes it works, but the problem with forcing, as everybody knows is I try to make it the way I want it to be, you don’t like it and you push back and we either ping pong back and forth or we get stuck. That’s the problem with forcing.

Have you seen situations like this play out in Canada before, where there’s been these statements that a leader will impose their desired solution upon a certain jurisdiction?

I don’t think it’s an analogy, but it’s another interesting example of this. I was talking to somebody today about: what are different ways that different actors have tried to impose an answer to the question of Quebec separatism?

The FLQ tried to impose an answer through, amongst other things, kidnappings and bombings in the October crisis. Then Prime Minister Trudeau tried to impose an answer first through the use of the military and then through a constitutional settlement, then the PQ government tried to create an answer through the referenda. And actually, in each of these cases, people were trying to say ‘it’s going to be like this, we’re going to make it like this’ and it actually didn’t turn out like this. The story keeps going and keeps unfolding in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

With respect to the current situation, that the people who are saying ‘it has to be like this’ — whether it’s the Alberta government or the B.C. government or the federal government or the protesters — I’m not confident that any of those people have the way to make it the way they want it to be. And furthermore, I’m not confident that if they do succeed that it will last. That’s the problem with forcing is it tends to be temporary. Eventually the people who were on the losing side of it find a way to get back in the game.

I’m interested in such situations in how is it possible to find a way forward collaboratively, through negotiation. This is what I’m not seeing in this current situation. Maybe it’s taking place behind the scenes, but I don’t see it.

The dialogue is very heated and quite polarizing. At the same time, when I think about the situation, sitting down and trying to collaborate, on some issues maybe there isn’t a middle road. What if there isn’t a collaborative solution in the sense that B.C. simply doesn’t want a new oil pipeline and Alberta absolutely does want a new oil pipeline?

I don’t believe that there’s only two answers — that either there is a pipeline as currently proposed or there isn’t. I don’t know what they are, but I’m confident that there’s more than two options. Options about safety, options about governance, options about economics, options about control, options about volume, options about all kinds of things.

Nelson Mandela once said that one of the features of the complex is the way things end up can’t be seen from the beginning. The exact quote is: “One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start.”

One of the features of these conflicts is polarization. There are lots of different ways to do things and I don’t know whether a solution that works for more of the wholes can be arrived at, but stating that it either has to be my way or no way doesn’t move us forward much.

I don’t believe the statement that it’s either like it is now or it’s the opposite. This is not plausible to me.

You raise this interesting tension that there’s likely this negotiation or collaboration happening behind closed doors and there are also these public statements that are potentially playing some role in that larger negotiation game.

Probably. Maybe all of this is just part of the negotiation. That would be a normal thing. People say all sorts of things to try to shift the terrain to their advantage … I suppose in a constitutional democracy if you really litigate everything to the Supreme Court, there’ll be a right answer and a wrong answer, but that’s a long road. Maybe that’s how the answer will be arrived at.

That’s why some things in Canada have to be settled in the court.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

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For decades, the ‘battle of Alberta’ has alluded to the intense rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton, especially on the ice or the football field.

“The worst way to engage Edmontonians is to tell them how things are done in Calgary,” wrote Harvey Locke in a piece titled “The Two Albertas” for the Literary Review of Canada.

But as demographics shift, there’s a different kind of battle of Alberta brewing, one that doesn’t divide people along municipal boundaries. And that battle has elicited boycotts, harassment campaigns and even death threats.

“I think there are multiple Albertas and multiple identities … at play in terms of the political future of the province,” said David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

There’s long been an urban vs. rural divide in Alberta and that gap is widening, Coletto says. But there’s also been an influx of young people into the province, particularly to Edmonton and Calgary.

“There’s a generational divide that’s growing,” Coletto said.

Yet despite deep divisions within Alberta, Albertans are often viewed monolithically by the rest of Canada.

“Albertans will unite to defend their economic freedom and autonomy,” Locke wrote. “They will put aside any difference to avoid being told what to do by Central Canada.”

One need look no further than the current Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline dispute with B.C. to see evidence of that. But, although Albertans may appear to rally together from time to time, they are far from a singular entity when it comes to the environment.

Environmental campaigns draw violent threats

The latest skirmish in the new battle of Alberta broke out in late January over an event called Hops and Headwaters hosted at a brewery in Edmonton. The event was in support of a campaign to protect the Bighorn Backcountry, a region in the province’s foothills home to the headwaters of the North Saskatchewan River, which provides drinking water to the citizens of Edmonton.

“Water being the largest ingredient in our beer, it’s an issue and something that’s very near and dear to our hearts and important to us,” Bent Stick Brewery co-founder Scott Kendall told City TV News.

Seems fairly reasonable, right? Nope. The brewery was struck with dozens of one-star reviews on its Facebook page for supporting the headwaters protection campaign.

Reviews like this one: “I will not support any company that supports foreign-funded groups such as Y2Y [Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative] and Love Your Headwaters that strive to limit my ability to responsibly access and enjoy the beautiful public lands in Alberta.”

And it didn’t stop at Facebook comments. By the time the event date rolled around, there were enough threats made on social media to warrant hiring four private security guards.

Why were some Albertans so hot under the collar? Because of a proposal to limit off-highway vehicle use in certain areas.

“My organization never had a security protocol until we started working on this issue,” said Stephen Legault, a program director for Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y).

Up until now, parts of the Bighorn Backcountry have been somewhat of a free-for-all when it comes to off-highway vehicle use, but all of that ripping around in the wilderness has consequences.

“Off-highway vehicle use can have a dramatic impact on downstream water quality and on the ability of endangered species to survive,” he said.

An example of the type of damage that can be caused by off-highway vehicles. Photo: Stephen Legault.

Legault — who’s lived in Alberta for 25 years — is adamant he isn’t against quadders and other off-highway vehicle users, noting that citizens have done a good job of managing stream crossings in some areas.

“I think the critical thing is that it’s not about eliminating it, it’s about finding a place for it where it does less damage.”

The first threats of physical violence came when Legault gave a talk in Caroline, Alberta, a few months ago.

“For the first time in 25 years, I actually had to leave an event and drive away in order to de-escalate the situation,” Legault said. “In many ways, what’s happening is there’s a proxy fight happening right now over government.”

It’s certainly not the first time a complex policy conversation has turned into a toxic, polarized debate. It’s just one of several attacks on academics, scientists and environmentalists in Alberta in recent years. Veteran environmentalist Tzeporah Berman has faced violent threats for her role in Alberta’s Oil Sands Advisory Group. And economists Andrew Leach and Trevor Tombe have weathered more than their fair share of rage online.“

Collaborating with the enemy

Adam Kahane knows a thing or two about how public conversations can get derailed. He has mediated conflicts around the world for more than three decades and has been credited with helping to end Colombia’s civil war.

In his latest book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People you Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust, Kahane says there are four choices when it comes to working with others: collaborate, adapt, force or exit.

There’s always the choice to collaborate. Unfortunately, often times when people can’t get what they want, they turn the other side into an “enemy.”

“The situation quickly moves from ‘those people have a different perspective’ to ‘those people are wrong’ to ‘those people are my enemy.’ That’s the process of enemy-fying, constructing enemies,” Kahane said.

“I’m not saying people never have enemies, but I’m saying we don’t have enemies as often as we think we do. And so turning an ordinary situation into a declaration of war is an unfortunate escalation.”

Another factor that has really irked some Albertans in the debate over limiting off-highway vehicle use in the Bighorn Backcountry is the involvement of Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Both of these organizations (like most non-profit organizations, including ourselves), receive some of their funding from foundations located outside of Canada that share a common interest in protecting wildlife and wilderness and addressing climate change. (We might need a passport at the border, but wide-ranging animals such as grizzly bear, wolverine and lynx roam freely back and forth between the two countries and require protection on both sides of the border for their long-term viability).

As for the involvement of “foreign-funded” groups, Kahane says it’s not the first time there have been charges of “foreign-funded” organizations coming in from the outside and meddling in local affairs.

“It’s a classic form of othering,” Kahne said. “It’s a very common way of looking at things, because then the problem isn’t us. It’s those outsiders. It’s a scapegoat.”

French thinker Rene Girard says a scapegoat removes the need to look at ourselves.

“Usually there’s something amongst us that has to be worked out,” Kahane said.

Crescent Falls in the Bighorn Backcountry. Photo: Stephen Legault.

The real issues

In the case of the escalating tension over the North Saskatchewan River, Legault says there’s been almost no monitoring or enforcement of off-highway vehicle use in Alberta over the last decade.

“An identity has developed that part of being an Albertan means I can go anywhere I want,” he said.

“We’re not asking the government to ban off-highway vehicle use. What we’re saying is there needs to be careful thought given to where off-highway vehicle use occurs … What we’re really trying to do is find a place for everybody to enjoy nature.”

Coletto said this issue feeds into a larger narrative in which the battle lines are easily drawn.

“There’s always a defence of tradition and heritage,” he said. “On the one hand, you’ve got a solid and larger than perceived group of environmentalists and progressives who are living and working and trying to advocate for change in Alberta, but there’s just as large a group that’s trying to defend their way of life.”

Since the early 1970s, there’s been a conversation about protecting the Bighorn Backcountry. In 1974, former premier Peter Lougheed held the eastern slopes hearings, in an attempt to engage ranchers, hunters and sportsmen on a vision for how the region would be managed.

“That proposal has gone so far as to be on roadmaps in Alberta in the 1980s and then got quickly rescinded,” Legault said. “This issue has been part of the effort to protect Alberta’s headwaters for a very long time.”

Getting beyond the battle of Alberta

Kahane is clear that if you want to reach a solution, sometimes you need to work with people with whom you have permanent disagreements.

“I think those situations are more and more common and it is possible. I’ve seen it with my own eyes many times, but you have to make a choice,” Kahane says.

Sometimes that means talking in the presence of armed guards and sometimes that means talking under the condition that people leave their guns at the door.

In Colombia, progress was made in peace talks by bringing together everyone from armed left-wing guerillas and right-wing paramilitary to trade unions, churchgoers and academics.

Alberta may be no Colombia, but it’s important to remember there are real differences at play, Kahane emphasized.

“They’re not imaginary. And they’re not necessarily ones that if we really had a good chat over a beer we’d find we agreed,” he said.

A fascinating piece of Coletto’s research indicates Albertans think they’re more conservative than they actually are.

“I think it’s historical. You have to always keep in mind the historical political culture of Alberta as being a place that was for most of its history on the outside looking in,” Coletto said. “It is remarkable to think how resilient those views have been and how effectively they’ve been passed down even from generation to generation. If you’re a progressive or an environmental-minded Albertan … that’s always going to be a hurdle in the province.”

But, while being conservative has been a core part of the Alberta identity for a long time, “that identity is starting to be chipped away at,” Coletto says.

Legault said he’s recently been able to start some productive conversations through posting his photographs of the Bighorn Backcountry.

“I think all sides of the conversation need to get over their fear of losing,” he reflected.  “Conservationists need to get over their fear of losing nature and recreationalists need to get over their fear that we’re going to take away everything they care about.”

The irony is people on both sides of the conversation are defending their right to spend time outside in nature.

“There are lots of shared values,” Legault said. “The problem is the divisions are easily exploitable.”

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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.

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.

When it comes to strategies for changing the world, storytelling isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind. Things like conviction, advocacy, mobilizing and building networks of supporters seem like more obvious candidates. Adam Kahane isn’t saying that the conventional repertoire doesn’t work. But in his experience, the stories we tell about ourselves, our opponents and the kind of world we want to live in can have transformative effects.  

Kahane is a specialist in “transformative scenario planning,” a kind of dialogue technique that aims to bring together allies and enemies alike to map out new ways of resolving seemingly intractable problems. Although the name sounds like a bit of business school esoterica, the method is actually quite straightforward. Instead of coming to the table with a collection of demands, a transformative scenario planning process invites the parties involved to put their demands aside in order to focus on figuring out what’s actually possible in the first place. 

 “The method in its simplest terms involves bringing together actors from across a given system, whether that’s a community or a sector or a country, or a larger system, and working together to understand what’s possible in this system,” explains Kahane. “That turns out to be the surprising key, that to talk about what’s possible rather than what we want (or what we don’t want) opens up a whole different kind of conversation.”

Kahane first tried his hand at scenario planning while working at Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1980s. Shell had begun using scenarios in the 1970s in an attempt to maintain a competitive edge over the other major oil companies. Still the corporate world’s leading practitioner of scenario planning, Shell claims that scenarios allowed them to anticipate the oil price shock of October 1973 and “recover more quickly than [their] competitors.”

“The key point about scenario planning in the Shell context is that it’s a tool for being able to adapt to a future that you can’t predict and can’t control,” says Kahane. Planners at Shell map out different variables such as political instability and resource constraints and flesh them out into plausible descriptions of the future. Rather than seek to change the world, scenario planning at Shell is an adaptive method for ensuring future corporate profits in the face of instability.

The transformative component of scenario planning first came into play in 1991, when Kahane was invited to South Africa to participate in a process known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise. Bringing together politicians, ANC activists, trade unionists, economists and business executives, the aim was to foster dialogue about possible futures for a country in the midst of a tumultuous transition from apartheid to democracy.

The exercises in South Africa were distinct from previous uses of scenario planning for two reasons. “[Mont Fleur] was the first time, at least the first major time, that scenario work was done not as an expert activity, or as a staff activity, but as what we now call a multi-stakeholder activity,” he explains. Whereas corporate or military strategists had previously used scenarios to plan for the survival and success of their respective organizations, Mont Fleur brought together a diverse range of people, each with a stake in the future development of South Africa. The discussions that took place there were not negotiations, but rather a kind of imaginative exercise that worked to find common ground between groups from opposing ends of the social spectrum.

“The second and even more fundamental difference, which has really been the motivating or the key point I’ve been working on for these 20 years since, is that they were telling stories about what could happen, not in order to adapt, but in order to influence what would happen.” By creating multiple possible narratives from a diversity of perspectives, Kahane argues that the process helped to open up new pathways into the future.

Kahane’s work has evolved in the two decades since the South African experience, and he now works as a partner at Reos Partners, a global consulting firm using techniques such as transformative scenario planning to address tough social problems. When he comes to Vancouver on October 21 to deliver a public lecture at the Stonehouse Institute, one of the themes he’ll be discussing is the application of transformative scenario planning to the daunting task of confronting climate change.  

There may be more than just a passing irony in the fact that Kahane hopes to use a technique developed by a major oil company in an effort to address climate change, a process driven in large part by the burning of fossil fuels. While Shell publishes the results of its scenario planning exercises in glossy reports on climate change and the stressing of planetary systems, it continues to invest heavily in extreme energy like fracking and Arctic drilling. Despite the inspiring language in their reports, Shell remains a major multinational oil company whose sole reason for being is to extract oil, stay ahead of the competition and deliver higher profits to its shareholders.

The case of Shell points to a limitation of the transformative scenario planning model: there are some problems for which narrative and dialogue are not up to the task. We know that the majority of remaining global fossil fuel deposits need to stay in the ground if we are to stay below a 2°C temperature increase. For that to happen, Shell would need to write off untold billions and likely cease to exist as a corporation—a fate it would no doubt resist. With stakes that high, it seems unlikely that Shell or any fossil fuel company could meaningfully participate in a scenario planning exercise together with anyone serious about stopping climate change.

Kahane recognizes the fact that some issues simply can’t be resolved through discussion and forging shared narratives. When political conflict rests not on a lack of mutual understanding but rather a genuine, unresolvable antagonism between conflicting interests, then the more traditional tools in the activist’s toolkit come into play. “If you think that your opponent’s interests are such that they will never do what you think they need to do, what you think they ought to do, then you’re back to the other strategy, which is advocating and mobilizing and pushing,” says Kahane. “You always have that as an option.”

For more information on Kahane's talk in Vancouver on Monday, October 21, visit the Stonehouse Institute.

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.