Documents filed with the Alberta Lobbyist Registry reveal that Canadian media behemoth Postmedia — which owns the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, Calgary Herald, Calgary Sun, Vancouver Sun, The Province, Ottawa Citizen and many others — is actively seeking to become “involved” in Premier Jason Kenney’s “energy war room.”

The lobbying records state Postmedia hired Kenney’s former campaign director Nick Koolsbergen to “discuss ways Postmedia could be involved in the government’s energy war room.”

Postmedia registration to l… by on Scribd

A filing in Albertas lobbyist registry indicates Postmedia will lobby the government on ways to be involved in the government’s “energy war room.”

Kenney proposed the creation of a “war room” during Alberta’s most recent election campaign.

The war room — which the UCP said in its campaign platform will run on a $20 million budget — will “fight fake news and share the truth about Alberta’s resource sector and energy issues.”

In his victory speech, Kenney made it clear that Alberta would take an aggressive stance against any negative attention directed at the province’s energy industry.

Kenney named several organizations, including prominent charities, environmental groups and multinational companies, suggesting they may be early targets of the war room.

Postmedia, it appears, is now seeking to become a part of this campaign.

Postmedia Network Inc. has hired former UCP Chief of Staff and campaign director Nick Koolsbergen to lobby the Alberta government “To discuss ways Postmedia could be involved in the government’s energy war room.” #ableg #cdnpoli #postmedia

Link: https://t.co/b7JMLMFwAT

— Dave Cournoyer (@davecournoyer) May 17, 2019

Postmedia hires lobbyist who will ‘win high stakes campaigns’

Koolsbergen has deep political roots, having taken on the role of chief of staff for the United Conservative Party in October 2017. He remained with the party, as campaign director, during the most recent election campaign.

Koolsbergen also worked briefly as former B.C. premier Christy Clark’s chief of staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Koolsbergen announced earlier this month on Twitter that he had left his role with the UCP and had founded a new group called Wellington Advocacy, a firm that would work in “government relations” and “help companies and candidates win high stakes campaigns.”

Wellington Advocacy boasts its team has “a decade of working alongside Stephen Harper on the campaign trail and in office.”

Less than ten days after Koolsbergen announced his new company, Postmedia filed documents to have Koolsbergen lobby the new UCP government on its behalf.

Postmedia plans to lobby the Alberta Treasury Board and Finance, Alberta Environment and Parks, the Executive Council, the  Premier’s Office, Alberta Energy and Alberta Legislative Assembly, according to documents filed with the Alberta Lobbyist Registry.

The lobbying records contain few details as to how exactly Postmedia plans to become “involved” in the energy war room.

‘An abrogation of everything that we as news media are supposed to stand for’

Postmedia purchased the Sun newspaper chain in 2015 and went on to merge the newsrooms of the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun, as well as the Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun.

The Competition Bureau reviewed the acquisition, but did not oppose the purchase despite the fact it meant the chain took ownership of both dailies in three major cities: Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.

At the time of the purchase, Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey said he intended to maintain separate newsrooms, but less than a year later the chain announced it was laying off 90 journalists and merging newsrooms in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.

Sean Holman, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University, called the lobbyist registration “disturbing.”

“If I was to speculate about what they might be doing here, I would think that they would be discussing branded content or custom content that Postmedia could provide in the service of this war room,” Holman said.

In an emailed statement, Postmedia’s vice president of communications, Phyllise Gelfand, told The Narwhal that “Postmedia has engaged Wellington Advocacy with respect to the commercial content area of the business and the previously announced Alberta government’s energy war room.”

“This sort of exposes the problematic nature of that kind of business,” Holman said. “Is it appropriate for a news media organization to be providing political custom content while at the same time reporting on politics? And how does that impact trust in that media organization?”

Holman said having newspapers looking to profit from a “government operation that is designed to punish a certain kind of speech” is “problematic.”

“Media organizations certainly shouldn’t be in the business of working in support of that type of activity. It’s an abrogation of everything that we as news media are supposed to stand for.”

The Edmonton Journal recently ran a “built on trust” ad campaign. Photo: Mack Male / Flickr

Postmedia told local papers to endorse conservatives

During the most recent election campaign, the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun publicly endorsed the UCP and then-candidate Kenney, writing “voters should choose the UCP.”

“Kenney has shown force of will and determination to accomplish tasks some believed impossible,” the editorial staff wrote.

“The election is about who can best lead Alberta …. That person is UCP Leader Jason Kenney.”

In 2015, then editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal, Margo Goodhand, told Canadaland that the paper was “asked to endorse” the Conservative party during that provincial election campaign by Postmedia leadership in Toronto.

All four major Postmedia papers in Alberta ran endorsements of the Conservative Party in 2015.

Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey has long been known to be a conservative supporter, having financially contributed to conservative campaigns in the past.

Postmedia also reportedly told its papers to endorse the federal conservatives in 2015.

“This was a decision made by the owners of the paper,” tweeted Paula Simons, at the time a columnist at the Edmonton Journal (Simons is now an independent senator).

The admission prompted CBC’s Charles Rusnell to question the ethics of “an American hedge fund telling an Alberta newspaper which federal Canadian party to endorse.”

In 2014, a presentation was leaked that detailed a partnership between Postmedia and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. Later that year, we revealed that Postmedia had been running editorial content paid for by the oil industry without any labelling to indicate it was sponsored content.

Holman said it seems there is more and more reason to believe “Postmedia has ceased to be a news media organization and has become a political organization.”

And, he said, that raises concerns about the future of democracy in Alberta.

“If the major dailies are unable to do their job to hold power to account and inform the citizenry, then that does not speak well for the future of democracy in Alberta,” Holman said.

“When a jurisdiction lacks a robust fourth estate, that leaves them vulnerable to political authoritarianism and subversion of democracy.”

— With files from Emma Gilchrist

Update Friday, May 17, 4:17 p.m. MST: This article was updated to reflect that Postmedia’s vice president of communications, Phyllise Gelfand, provided a brief statement in response to The Narwhal’s questions.

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.

It was the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae of entitlement.

On Monday, the day before the Alberta election, the province’s four largest newspapers — the Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun — endorsed the Progressive Conservatives.

Now, newspapers endorsing parties is nothing new, but every major newspaper in Alberta being owned by one company is new. (Postmedia acquired the Calgary Sun and Edmonton Sun this March when the Competition Bureau signed off on the purchase.)

What else appears to be new is that the Edmonton Journal (which did not endorse in 2012) was asked to endorse not by local management, but by head office in Toronto, according to editor-in-chief Margo Goodhand.

Asked by Canadaland who chose to endorse the PCs, Goodhand responded: "The owners of the Journal made that call.”

It’s hard to imagine a better way for Postmedia to undermine its own credibility than by dictating editorial policy in Alberta — from Toronto of all places.

As new Premier Rachel Notley said in the last days of the campaign: “Alberta doesn’t belong to any political party. Alberta is not a PC province, it’s not a Wildrose province. Alberta belongs to Albertans.”

As a born and bred Albertan with an election-watching obsession, it’s that quote that best sums up why Alberta voters made the leap to electing a majority NDP government. Albertans like to be their own bosses.

For a long time, they thought voting PC made that so, but this time, that changed — at least for the 40 per cent of voters who selected an NDP candidate on the ballot.

“The unprecedented New Democrat surge in Alberta was certainly abetted by a Conservative regime that looked out of touch and, frankly, acted like a dysfunctional family that needed counselling,” wrote Gary Mason in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

The first big blunder was made by PC Leader Jim Prentice, when he said Albertans needed to “look in the mirror” when it came to the fiscal mess the province is in.  Albertans weren’t too pleased about being blamed for a problem created by decades of fiscal mismanagement.

Next up, Prentice insinuated during the televised leaders debate that Notley couldn’t do math.

That moment was the embodiment of so much that had become wrong with Alberta politics — old, white guys so entitled that they think they can treat everyone from average Albertans to smart female political leaders with condescension.

The Edmonton Journal’s editorial on Wednesday (not written by Postmedia bosses in Toronto by the look of things) hit the nail on the head:

“The one thing we know about Notley and all of these fresh new faces that now govern us is this: They will not take their victory for granted. They have never been the ruling party, and they well know that governing this province is a privilege, not an entitlement. That’s the lesson for all Alberta politicians this time around.”

More than a lesson for Alberta’s politicians, it’s a lesson for oil companies that had grown too tight with the PCs and too full of their own sense of entitlement. Aided by the government, they’d begun to lose sight of the fact the resources they are digging up actually belong to Albertans.

The NDP has promised to review the royalty system: “The resources we have in Alberta belong to all of us, and the return we get on resources needs to be discussed publicly and regularly, openly and transparently.”

Unlike much of the fear mongering coming from the oil industry today, the NDP has made no indication that it will rashly move to increase royalties in the midst of slumping oil prices.

"Business is mobile," Adam Legge, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Calgary, said before the election. "Capital, people and companies move."

Well, apparently votes move too, Mr. Legge. And unless the world’s third largest proven reserve of oil is going to migrate outside of Alberta’s borders, it’s time for politicians and companies alike to stop taking Albertans and their resources for granted.

Image Credit: Jim Prentice via Flickr 

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Today Vivian Krause published an opinion piece in The Province claiming “a vote for Vision is a vote for U.S. oil interests.” So, you might be wondering: just who is Vivian Krause? We’re so glad you asked…

An essential component of all public relations campaigns is having the right messenger— a credible, impassioned champion of your cause.

While many PR pushes fail to get off the ground, those that really catch on — the ones that gain political attention and result in debates and senate inquiries — almost always have precisely the right poster child.

And in the federal government and oil industry’s plight to discredit environmental groups, the perfect poster child just so happens to be Vivian Krause.

Krause describes herself as an “independent” researcher and a single mom asking “fair questions” about American funding of Canadian environmental groups. She blogged for many years in relative obscurity before becoming the federal Conservatives’ favourite attack dog.

Krause’s moment in the sun came in January 2012 when Joe Oliver, Canada’s then Natural Resources Minister, released his infamous letter decrying “foreign-funded radical” environmentalists for “hijacking” the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline review process.

Krause had primed the pump for the Conservatives to swoop in and achieve their goal — to discredit environmental groups by building a public narrative about them acting nefariously, thereby justifying spending millions of dollars on audits of charities’ political activities.

Never mind that philanthropic dollars cross international borders all the time. Never mind that the Northern Gateway proposal is sponsored by China’s state-owned oil company Sinopec, along with many other foreign oil companies. Never mind that there’s probably no more legitimate participation in a democracy than citizens signing up to speak at public hearings.

No, once you have a vendetta, inconvenient facts don’t matter. And Krause’s vendetta against environmental groups has been in the works for a long time — ever since she worked in public relations for the farmed salmon industry.

The Salmon Farming Industry and the Birth of a Vendetta

It was due to her interest in promoting salmon farming that Krause started rifling through the tax returns of large American foundations supporting wild salmon advocacy in Canada.

It didn’t take long for Vivian Krause to cook up a conspiracy theory involving American foundations working to undermine Canadian interests — and then to expand that theory to any number of conservation issues in Canada, with a special focus on conservation campaigns that were inconvenient for the oil industry.

To Krause, it seemed suspicious that foundations from across the border were giving money to Canadian groups working on Canadian conservation and energy issues. It must be, Krause surmised, that these big foundations are spending their dollars to manipulate Canadian energy and environment politics to further American interests. And, she went further to suggest, these Canadian groups are acting as pawns of these suspicious foundations.

Speaking of suspicious, by early 2013, Krause had admitted that more than 90 per cent of her income for 2012 had come from oil, gas and mining interests. Groups paying Krause speaker’s fees included the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Association for Mineral Exploration and the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Vivian Krause's Convenient Aversion to Climate Change Facts

Fast forward to this week when Krause couldn’t resist weighing into the Vancouver election campaign, claiming that: “For Canada, there is no single economic issue that is more important than getting Alberta oil to global markets.”

While oil is no doubt an important part of the Canadian economy, Krause’s statement overlooks two inconvenient facts:

1) According to Statistics Canada, the oilsands account for only two per cent of the national GDP.

2) A study by Simon Fraser University and The Goodman Group Ltd released this week finds Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain jobs promises are overblown and recommends the proposed expansion be rejected as it is neither in the economic nor public interest of B.C. and Metro Vancouver.

The argument that continued oilsands expansion is a positive for the Canadian economy — and more to the point, the Metro Vancouver economy — is far from a slam dunk.

While Krause enjoys spinning another of her clandestine tales in linking Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to U.S. foundations, it’s increasingly clear that it’s all a convenient cover story for her to push her own view that the fossil fuel industry should be allowed to expand.

“Voting for Gregor Robertson means voting to support a U.S.-funded, anti-pipeline campaign that continues the U.S. monopoly on Canadian oil, keeping Canada over a barrel,” Krause writes. “When you go to the poll, don’t vote for Gregor Robertson. Vote for Canada.”

Perhaps Krause missed the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which states that governments need to peak emissions, rapidly phase out fossil fuels and transition to 100 per cent renewable energy pronto? Rapidly expanding the oilsands and building new pipelines to serve that expansion doesn’t actually fit into any plans to have an inhabitable earth — not to mention the terrifying consequences an oil spill could reap on Vancouver.

If Krause’s modus operandi is climate change denial, it would be nice if she just stated that right up front, instead of conveniently ignoring it.

(If you want to know where we’re coming from at DeSmog Canada, mosey on over to our About Us page, where you can find out. Hint: we agree with 97 per cent of scientists about climate change, we’re proud to accept donations from anyone who supports our mission and we’re not going to tell you how to vote because that’s not our thing.)

In a recent op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary professor and known climate skeptic called on Alberta Premier Jim Prentice to use Krause as an attack dog against environmental groups.

“[Prentice] knows from his work with Enbridge and B.C. First Nations that the real source of opposition to Northern Gateway are the enviros and the deep-pocketed American foundations that fund them,” Cooper wrote. “So, Jim, hire Vivian Krause, who has done a lot of work on this problem, and use the government megaphone to publicize her analyses of the pernicious sources of enviro funding.”

Which raises the question: did someone hire Krause to weigh in — clumsy as it may be — on the Vancouver election?

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.

Postmedia has struck a $316 million deal to buy 175 of Quebecor’s English-language newspapers, specialty publications and digital properties, including the Sun chain of papers, according to a report in the Globe and Mail this morning.

If it passes regulatory hurdles, the deal will mark a step further down the path of media concentration in Canada.

What does this mean for Canadians in practical terms?

In Calgary, for instance, the Calgary Sun would be owned by the same company as the Calgary Herald. In Toronto, the Toronto Sun and 24 Hours would be owned by the same company as the National Post. In Ottawa, the Ottawa Sun would be owned by the same company as the Ottawa Citizen. And in Edmonton, the Edmonton Sun would be owned by the same company as the Edmonton Journal.

It’s Vancouver that takes the cake for media concentration though — Postmedia already owned the Vancouver Sun and The Province, but if the deal goes through it will take over the free daily 24 Hours as well.

In a statement, Postmedia president and CEO Paul Godfrey said the company intends “to continue to operate the Sun Media major market dailies and their digital properties side by side with our existing properties in markets with multiple brands as we have in Vancouver with the Province and the Vancouver Sun for more than 30 years.”

Sean Holman, journalism professor at Mount Royal University, says the deal means three major things for the Canadian public.

“First, I think the Canadian public should be worried about what this potential sale could mean for press freedom,” Holman says. “If you have one media owner with the capability to dictate editorial policy across almost every single major newspaper in the country, that is not a healthy thing. There may be assurances of newsroom editorial independence, but we have seen over the years that newsroom independence has been violated by Canadian media owners.”

Holman also notes that as media companies encounter more financial trouble, business reasons are increasingly being used to compromise editorial standards. Case in point: In June, DeSmog Canada revealed that Postmedia had been running unlabelled oil advertorials.

The second major reason Canadians should be worried about this deal has to do with press criticism, Holman says.

“Right now, the Canadian media is not held to a very high level of accountability,” he says. “You look down in the States at the amount of media analysis and media criticism there is there and we simply can’t hold a candle to that. This potential sale will make that worse.

“If there is only really one major employer behemoth, how reluctant are newspaper journalists going to be to criticize one of their few major potential employers?”

Thirdly, Canadians ought to be worried about the capacity of the media to cover the important issues, Holman says.

“[Postmedia CEO] Godfrey has said that the chain won’t be closing any of Sun Media’s properties in major markets. I note that that statement does not include minor markets. Without further clarification, at this point in time, we could see closures there…We could see layoffs.”

“And as we reduce those newspaper resources and newsrooms themselves, that erodes the capacity of the media to perform its societal role which is to hold power to account.”

Media capacity is getting to such a point in Canada that Holman says Canadians need to be having a serious national conversation about how we are going to hold power to account in the absence of companies that seem to be concerned with that.

“I think this is certainly going to increase the pressure on independent and activist media to perform some of those tasks, which mainstream newsrooms may not be able to fulfill,” Holman says.

At DeSmog Canada, we are trying to fill that gap and hold power to account. Please give what you can today.

Photo: Rachael F. via Flickr

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A health study released today by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Manitoba, is the first of its kind to draw associations between environmental contaminants produced in the oilsands and declines in health in Fort Chipewyan, a native community about 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, Alberta.

The report, Environmental and Human Health Implications of Athabasca Oil Sands, finds health impacts for communities downstream of the Alberta oilsands are “positively associated” with industrial development and the consumption of traditional foods, including locally caught fish.

Dr. Stéphane McLachlan, lead environmental health researcher for the report, said the study’s results “as they relate to human health, are alarming and should function as a wakeup call to industry, government and communities alike.”

Findings include generally high concentrations of carcinogenic PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and heavy metals arsenic, mercury, cadmium and selenium in kidney and liver samples from moose, ducks, muskrats and beavers harvested by community members. A press release for the study says bitumen extraction and upgrading is a major emitter of all of these contaminants.

The Joint Oil Sands Monitoring Program has released data about the increases in these contaminants, but fails to address and monitor impacts to First Nations traditional foods,” said Mikisew Cree Chief Steve Courtoreille. “We are greatly alarmed and demand further research and studies are done to expand on the findings of this report.”

The First Nations worked in concert with University of Manitoba scientists, blending “western science and traditional ecological knowledge” to evaluate contaminant levels and potential community exposure, according to the press release.

“This is the first health study that has been conducted in close collaboration with community members of Fort Chipewyan,” McLachlan said in a recent interview.

“The results are grounded in the environment and health sciences, but also in the local traditional knowledge shared by community members. Unlike any of the other studies it has been actively shaped and controlled by both the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree First Nation from the outset.”

The report comes on the heels of the fifth annual ‘healing walk’ in the oilsands region, during which Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said the report would “blow the socks off industry and government.”

Concerns over high rates of rare forms of bile duct, cervical and lung cancers have worried residents of Fort Chipewyan, a small community 300 kilometres downstream of the oilsands, for years.

A government report in March 2014 found elevated rates of the three forms of cancer in Fort Chip, but suggested overall cancer rates fall on par with cancer rates elsewhere in the province. The report’s author, Dr. James Tablot, chief medical officer for Alberta health, said there was little evidence environmental factors played a role in the elevated cancer rates.

The report was treated as largely inconclusive and confirmed the need for further, independent study.

An editorial in the Calgary Herald argued the report confirmed the need to “settle the matter once and for all” and called for an independent study.

“Only then will the nagging fear — whether founded or unfounded — that the Alberta government is too closely linked with the oilsands to provide objective data and conclusions, be put to rest.”

The community of Fort Chip has struggled for years to have a comprehensive, baseline health study conducted.

In March, Chief Adam suggested it was “time for a real study, that is peer reviewed and done in partnership with our communities.” He suggested the government report was conducted to “ease the public response to this and garner more support for approvals of more projects in the region.”

Today researchers and community leaders called for further investigation of contaminant concentrations, as well as community-based monitoring and improved risk communications from government and industry.

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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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Provincial auditor general Merwan Saher has agreed to conduct an audit of oil pipeline safety in Alberta, responding to requests from a coalition of 54 public interest groups dissatisfied with the provincial government's third-party report released in August.

"We will be auditing the government's monitoring systems to ensure compliance with Alberta's pipeline regulations. Our audit would include inspection and enforcement processes," Saher wrote in a letter to Alberta's Opposition parties Wildrose and the NDP, which were among the groups demanding the review.

The government-commissioned pipeline safety review, conducted by Group 10 Engineering, was announced by Energy Minister Ken Hughes in July 2012 after several major pipeline oil spills in the province, including a 475,000 litre leak from a Plains Midstream Canada pipeline in Central Alberta in June. The final report was made public a year later, in August 2013.

Following the release of the report last month, a coalition representing 54 environmental, First Nations, labour and landowner groups wrote to Premier Alison Redford requesting another review. The letter stated that "Albertans deserve to know the real scope of the province's pipeline problems and they deserve real solutions," leaving the group "no choice but to begin to petition the Alberta auditor general to take on such an examination."  

Eriel Deranger, Communications Coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said “Oil spills pose a major threat to our community, which depends on clean air, water and soil to sustain our way of life. We are pleased that the Auditor General will be looking into pipeline safety, as we feel the provincial government hasn’t been doing enough to prevent spills from happening.”

“It’s been a long road pushing for this review but hopefully the Auditor General will finally give Albertan’s some answers to Alberta’s pipeline woes because the Redford government definitely hasn’t,” said Mike Hudema, Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner. “Groups from across the political spectrum joined together to push for this review because of the growing threats pipeline spills are posing to Alberta’s communities and environment. I hope this review will give the government time to pause on its pipeline-pushing ways because all is not well in Alberta.”

Jennifer Grant, director of the oilsands program at the Pembina Institute, applauded Saher for "showing leadership on this important issue," saying that the "audit presents an opportunity to restore Albertans' confidence in the provincial regulator's ability to manage pipelines and the associated risks."

"With 400,000 square kilometres of pipelines crisscrossing the province, and an average of two crude oil spills a day for the past 37 years, ensuring the integrity and safety of Alberta's pipeline network is absolutely critical and could set an important precedent for other jurisdictions," Grant said in a news release.

Global News reports that the auditor general "has been considering a pipeline safety audit for much of the past year" according to spokeswoman Kim Nishikaze. Nishikaze added that they "will be looking at pipeline safety in the foreseeable future" but "can't say when."

Saher wrote in his letter that the pipeline safety audit would be undertaken "as soon as reasonably possible."

Image Credit: Jasonwoodhead23 / Flickr

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