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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Political propaganda employs the ideals of liberal democracy to undermine those very ideals, the dangers of which, not even its architects fully understand.

In the early years of DeSmog’s research into anti science propaganda, I thought of energy industry PR campaigns such as “junk science,” “clean coal,” and “ethical oil” as misinformation strategies designed to dupe the public.

Although that’s obviously true, I now understand that propaganda is far more complex and problematic than merely lying about the evidence. Certainly propaganda is designed to deceive, but not in a way you might think. What’s more, the consequences are far worse than most people who produce and consume it realize.

My deeper understanding evolved after I interviewed Jason Stanley and read his important book How Propaganda Works. The American philosopher and Yale University professor will speak about the history and dangers of demagogic propaganda at UBC’s Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on April 27 (7 p.m. Buchanan A210, 1866 Main Mall).

According to Stanley, the danger for a democracy “raided by propaganda” is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is being used to mask an undemocratic reality.

In a democracy where propaganda is common, citizens believe they live in a liberal democracy; they have free speech. But this belief masks an illiberal, undemocratic reality. In his rich and thoughtful book Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” DeSmog stories about groups concealing ideologies and financial interests behind cloaks of alternative science, and offering “facts” designed to undermine real science, are paradigm examples of this type of propaganda.

“Propaganda that is presented as embodying an ideal governing political speech, but in fact runs counter to it, is antidemocratic …  because it wears down the possibility of democratic deliberation,” Stanley writes.

He dismisses the idea that deception is what makes propaganda effective. Instead, Stanley argues what makes propaganda effective is the way it, “exploits and strengthens flawed ideology.”

This sometimes involves outright lies, but Stanley points to a bigger problem, “that sincere, well-meaning people under the grip of flawed ideology unknowingly produce and consume propaganda.”

In his introduction to a recent reprinted edition of Edward Bernays’ classic book, Propaganda, Crispin Miller agrees. The professor of media studies at New York University says behind-the-scenes wirepullers are often prone to losing touch with reality themselves because in their universe “the truth is ultimately what the client wants the world to think is true.”

It’s an occupational hazard facing all full-time propagandists, he warns, but the greater risk is to the public since a slick propaganda campaign can squelch any inconvenient investigation or journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate and escalating ills receive no mass attention.

With this in mind, my worry is that when we cannot spot propaganda or don’t understand how it works, democracy is damaged to a point where we cannot tell truth from fiction or make evidence-based collective decisions.

Jason Stanley. Photo: Carol Linnitt/DeSmog Canada

Authoritarian Propaganda Undermines Democracy

We saw the emergence of dangerous propaganda in the United States recently, during the presidential campaign when Trump branded Latino immigrants as criminals and rapists. His efforts to whip up fear and anger about race and religion were highly successful and he is now in the White House — despite the fact many people in his own party see him as unstable, untrustworthy and unpredictable.

Trump’s warlike attack on the EPA, the FBI, the CIA and even the Pope is classic authoritarian propaganda. It is an attempt to concoct an alternative reality through the creation of enemies. In Russia they call it theater craft and Putin has been fine-tuning this choreographic approach to authoritarian propaganda for decades.

Donald Trump’s dispute with science and facts is less about old-fashioned misinformation propaganda and more about authoritarian theater. Part of his strategy is to undermine confidence in the public square and in the institutions that democracies rely upon to mediate competing versions of the truth: courts, universities, science, news media, etc. The authoritarian must decide what is true; there can be no competition.

One of his prime tools is Twitter. With a deluge of lies, fake news accusations and outrageous claims his provocative tweets create a chaotic, alternative reality. He sabotages democracy by creating his own swamp where we can’t tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts and deflects accountability.

Trump repeatedly described climate change as a Chinese hoax intended to make U.S manufacturing less competitive, but now denies ever having said it. This is not the ranting of a madman but the voice of a demagogue turning science into a partisan sport.

Powered by propaganda, Trump is now rolling back President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which called for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The new president appointed a trio of infamous anti climate science propagandists to oversee the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They include Myron Ebell, the non-scientist chair of the Cooler Heads Coalition formed in 1997 to dispel the “myths of global warming” and a director in the anti-regulation think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute; Steve J. Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com which aims to debunk climate change, and a man who has continually affirmed that smoking does not cause cancer; and Scott Pruitt, a self-described “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

According to NASA data, the Earth’s surface temperatures in 2016 were the hottest since records began in 1880 and that made last year the third in a row to set a new heat record. This data was corroborated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which confirmed 16 of the 17 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.

Trump appointed Ebell to his EPA team despite the fact that Gavin Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top Earth scientist at NASA, has explained that Ebell’s technique is to point out some little fact and then use it to deduce a larger unconnected and scientifically incorrect point.

As many of you know, the gusher of oil money in recent years has led to PR campaigns and propaganda on a grand scale, similar to that fuelled by the tobacco industry years ago. While facing an environmental crisis, we are also facing a group of industries and a new president who don’t want us to know anything about it.

Today’s public discourse on the environment is overflowing with fabrications and distortions, and I doubt the general public has the faintest idea just how much energy, intelligence and money is poured into these deceptive techniques.

‘Toxic Rhetoric & Spin Silence Critics. Let’s Get Savvier About How #Propaganda Works’ https://t.co/Wq6wrinCX7 #cdnpoli #bcpoli #bcelxn17 pic.twitter.com/2cZtmYWScP

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 26, 2017

Liberal Democracy Requires Rational Debate

This style of rhetoric is not as much an attempt to persuade, as it is an act of cultural tribalism: the creation of a team divided against other teams in a manner that shuts down open-minded thinking.

Stanley writes that a democratic society is one that values liberty and political equality. It is a society suffused with a tolerance for difference. It rests on the view that collective reasoning is superior, “that genuine liberty is having one’s interests decided by the result of deliberation with peers about the common good.”

These examples of propaganda pose a challenge for liberal democracy because they sabotage joint deliberations. They are touted as free speech but in fact undermine public reason by excluding certain groups.

Trump’s ad hominem name-calling undermines our ability to question our own views, or respectfully consider the perspectives of others, Stanley says. It undermines the inclusive, rational debate at the core of liberal democracy.

“…flawed ideologies rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by systematically concealing their interests from them,” he says.

Understanding what makes propaganda effective is at the heart of understanding political inaction on issues that scream out for action. Stanley is most worried about demagogic speech, saying it “both exploits and spreads flawed ideologies,” creating barriers to democratic deliberation. “It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all,” he says.

Stanley describes propaganda as a method of bypassing the rational will of others. The consequences are widespread and can be long-lasting. Accumulated over time, propaganda becomes a turn-off that discourages citizens from participating in democratic responsibilities, such as voting, the participation level of which is already embarrassingly low in free societies like Canada and the U.S.

Toxic Rhetoric and Spin Silences Critics

The impact of propaganda reaches far beyond immigration. When people deny climate change or label Canadian oil as “ethical” or coal from West Virginia as “clean,” to justify aggressive expansion and government subsidies, the entire planet is harmed.

According to Stanley, it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons of an issue when they are shrouded by spin. He believes assertions like these, where words are misappropriated and meanings twisted, are often less about making substantive claims than about silencing critics.

In his words, they are “linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.” Groups are silenced by attempts to paint them as grossly insincere, which in turn undermine the public’s trust in them. Consider the former Harper government’s labelling of environmentalists who opposed their aggressive oilsands expansion policies as “foreign funded radicals” trying to block trade and undermine Canada’s economy.

When I first met Stanley in Harlem, he used the example of Fox News, which he says is silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. “The effect is to suggest there is no such thing as fair and balanced. There is no possibility of balanced news only propaganda,” Stanley says.

This style of propaganda pollutes the public square with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates there are no facts, there is no objectivity and everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests.

Let’s Get Savvier About How Propaganda Works

When facts are spun, people mislabelled and it appears that you can’t trust what anyone says, why bother paying attention at all?

American linguist Deborah Tannen puts the problem this way: “When you hear a ruckus outside your house you open the window to see what’s going on. But if you hear a ruckus every night you close the shutters and ignore it.”

Propaganda makes it difficult for citizens to weigh facts honestly and think things through collectively. What’s more, it’s convinced many of us to disengage.

That is the opposite of what we should be doing. We need to ensure that conditions exist for reasonable conversations about serious problems that impact society.

Stanley cites a tradition in political philosophy dating back to Aristotle, called “defending rhetoric.” He argues there is a kind of propaganda that is necessary to help overcome obstacles to realize democratic ideals. That speech involves empathy and appeals to emotion as it brings reasonableness back into public discourse. In other words, fighting propaganda with propaganda that elicits empathy can help to reinforce the liberal democratic ideals of autonomy, equality and reason.

“The demand of reasonableness requires those deliberating about policy to take into account the perspective of anyone who may be subjected to those laws,” Stanley writes.

The antidote to demagogic propaganda is what Stanley calls civic rhetoric. It’s an attempt to share the perspectives of a group whose members have been silenced, such as scientists or Latinos, or what he describes as “the tool required in the service of repairing the rupture.“

One of the most striking lessons in his book, How Propaganda Works, is a piece of advice on what we can do personally about the dark art of propaganda.

Stanley writes: “In the face of the complexities we’ve discussed, perhaps a reasonable way to adhere to ideal deliberative norms, for example, the norm of objectivity, may be to adopt systematic openness to the possibility that one has been unknowingly swayed by bias.”

To my mind, the best way to fight propaganda is to become savvier about how it works to undermine public trust. It strives to polarize and activate what social psychologists call “my side bias.” It’s not just that we don’t want to become victims of propaganda. We don’t want to inadvertently contribute to its darker purpose, which is to divide us into warring tribes. Authoritarian propaganda creates unyielding one-sidedness and it also creates enemies.

We can inadvertently reinforce this polarization by acting like the enemy the demagogue needs or defuse it with a more pluralistic reaction that shows concern for the problems Trump supporters struggle with.

As George Orwell wrote: “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself.”

Photo: Alisdare Hickson via Flickr

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

This article originally appeared on The Tyee.

Imagine if you lived in a nice quiet community of about 30 people, and the Chinese government got permission to plunk a $20-billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on your doorstep.

Holy snapping duck shit! Chances are you’d want a pretty strong say in whether that could or should happen, under what conditions, with whose permission — and you’d want a very clear, objective analysis of the costs and benefits, and the risks, to you, your family, your neighbours, not to mention the physical place that would be so massively disrupted by such a project — you know, the place you currently call home.

Most of us don’t live in nice quiet communities of 30 people — or maybe we do. On my residential block in East Vancouver, I’d say that (based on the census’s estimated average of 2.6 people per household in Vancouver) there are 30 people on my side of the street alone. Maybe you live in an old apartment building with 30 people in it total; maybe a condo with 30 people on your floor. Anyway, 30 people isn’t a lot, but $20 billion is, and right now, on Digby Island — right across the harbour from Prince Rupert in northern B.C. — the tiny community of Dodge Cove is staring down a project that would pretty much destroy it.

It’s become a “sacrifice zone” — yet another bucolic corner of the world at risk of being flattened on the anvil of progress.

“This community has a right to exist unmolested,” says Des Nobels, Dodge Cove resident, long-time fisherman, diligent regional politician and a tired man with a tether whose end he is very close to arriving at. “They (the company planning the project) says we’re their only problem, and we assured them we’ll be as big a problem as possible.”

The company that wants to pipe fracked gas to Digby Island — home to the Prince Rupert airport, Dodge Cove’s motley lot, and barely a stone’s throw from the City of Prince Rupert itself — is Aurora LNG. Aurora is a joint venture between Nexen Energy and INPEX Gas British Columbia Ltd. INPEX is Japan’s largest oil and gas exploration and production company, and its B.C. subsidiary fracks shale gas in the Horn River, Cordova and Liard basins in B.C.’s northeast. Nexen was a Canadian company till it was bought in 2013 by CNOOC Ltd., China’s national oil company.

Nexen and INPEX want to build a pipeline to an LNG plant and export terminal they intend to build on Digby Island, near the mouth of the Skeena River. If that has a familiar ring to it, maybe that’s because Malaysia’s national oil company, Petronas, wants to do pretty much the same thing, terminating on nearby Lelu Island — where a mighty resistance has already been joined by some members of the Gitwilgyoots tribe of the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation. Petronas already has qualified with controversial approval to build its project (First Nations, and others, are contesting the permit in court). Aurora doesn’t have an environmental certificate yet but it is working hard to get one — and it could be mere weeks away from succeeding.

“Aurora has been very good at flying under the radar,” Nobels said.

While much of the media chatter about pipelines in B.C. has been about Enbridge’s Northern Gateway project (permit denied), Petronas’s Pacific NorthWest LNG (approved), Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain project (approved, also being fought in court), and Shell’s recent decision to shelve its Prince Rupert LNG project due to market conditions, Aurora LNG has been quietly undergoing an assessment by B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office. Through what the boffins call a “substituted process,” the federal government takes a back seat, deferring to Christy Clark’s gas-loving government to objectively examine the pros and cons of the deal and impose whatever conditions it deems necessary if the project passes muster.

These approval processes typically cost millions of dollars. Aurora’s proposal has been in review for more than two years now, and in addition to the proponent and its galaxy of high-priced experts, more than 100 interested parties — the province, the feds, First Nations, local governments, a “full suite of the agencies” according to the EAO’s project assessment manager Sean Moore — have been poring over Aurora’s plans as part of a technical working group. Its work will be completed on July 8. By Labour Day, Aurora could be approved.

“It’s a pretty rigorous review,” Moore told me.

It’s a stitch up, says Nobels. “The province can do anything it wants.”

Behold The Allure of the Energy Megaproject https://t.co/Tnq3veVhG9 @Gillwave @TheTyee @discoursemedia #AuroraLNG #bcpoli #bcelxn17 pic.twitter.com/BjbPqk2pqO

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 21, 2017

The EAO review perforce includes consultation with First Nations, paid for by the federal government, which announced last December that its Participant Funding Program transferred $364,560 to the province to help seven First Nations groups evaluate Aurora’s project. The Gitga’at, Gitxaala, Kitselas and Kitsumkalum First Nations each got $54,040 from the government for the process, while Lax Kw’alaams and Metlakatla received $67,550 apiece, and the Métis Provincial Council of British Columbia got $13,300. The people of Dodge Cove? At first they were told there was no money for them. Then on the last day of February they were told they could have $12,000, but it couldn’t be applied retroactively to work they had done in the consultation process. The public comment period closed nine days later.

“An afterthought… an afterthought — if we were thought of at all,” says Nobels, He doesn’t begrudge area First Nations getting funds to participate in the project review, but in the case of his community “we basically volunteer our time, search for inconsistencies with what little technical knowledge we have, call in favours from friends… it’s an extremely onerous and lengthy endeavor which takes its toll on people who aren’t versed in all of this.”

Moore said he “cannot comment on the fairness or adequacy of how governments choose to fund public consultation processes” — that’s a policy issue, and the EAO’s policy is that it doesn’t fund public interest groups. He says local communities can rely on “all the agencies that are looking out for their concerns,” but concedes “there is probably a trust challenge.”

Yeah, just maybe. Especially when the province writes, as it did in early February, warning the North Coast Regional District that proposed amendments to Dodge Cove’s Official Community Plan — the only land-use process that gives voice to local interests — “appear to attempt to prohibit key elements of the proposed LNG facility development, in an attempt to render the project infeasible.” It warns that the province has entered into agreements that “provide the proponents with the exclusive right to move forward with the planning necessary to build LNG export infrastructure at their proposed facility sites.”

Brian Hansen, assistant deputy minister and lead negotiator, energy and LNG initiatives in the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, claims in a nicely ironic twist that the province is not being properly consulted with by the community, even though — when it comes to planning processes — “(the province) can do what they damn well want,” Nobels says.

In other words, there is a manifest lack of fairness any time big oil and gas, or mining, or logging, or any resource extractor with a commodity lust and some capital, comes to town. This is not exactly breaking news. For decades now, the Dodge Coves of this province — be they on Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, in the Great Bear, the Kootenays, the Cariboo, the Chilcotin, up north, on Burnaby Mountain, wherever — have been where the David and Goliath battles between industry and community have been inequitably joined.

The technical tables are always stacked against communities, which is why local activists end up resorting — in ways that offend the order of the bureaucratic, technocratic and legalistic mind — to public sympathy. Which is why they end up being called activists in the first place, because industry and their government sponsors prefer to restrict all activity to processes they control. Going outside the process to engage a battle for hearts and minds retains its potency for people who feel that the system renders them impotent. But while this route offers those who resist industrial projects a channel to protest, it also offers industry and governments powerful opportunities to deceive.

Primping the wares

Like pornography, the imagery that proponents of industrial development use these days to primp their wares is soulless, plotless, spotless, and hairless. (Mmm: note to self: that’s a good name for a law firm, or maybe a corporate communications consultancy). These days no proposal for an industrial project that threatens our environment comes without videos or television ads extolling the proponent’s almost childlike reverence for nature, its almost custodial sense of duty to nurture the ecosystems it is about to befoul, its solemn vow to mitigate any “disturbance,” its prophylactic commitment to safety, its championing of the benefits to everyman — the worker, and his or her dependents — and of course an almost prayerful obeisance to the betterment of Indigenous people.

See what I mean? This is Pacific Northwest LNG's rendering of its spotless industrial plant on Lelu Island.

Enbridge’s campaign ads for Northern Gateway were like Dove soap commercials, its depictions of the B.C. coast more suited to promoting a 10-day wilderness adventure in the Great Bear than what its project was actually going to do there, which was to bring tar sands oil to tidewater and clutter our waterways with tankers. Its scripts presumably were written by robots, since it defies belief that an actual human could come up with tripe like, “The first step in making things better is to be sure that it’s not at the expense of making other things worse.” That would be almost Hippocratic if it weren’t so utterly moronic.

Aurora LNG has produced some YouTube bling of its own, including animation of its Digby Island facilities (albeit set to music that would kill even the healthiest libido) that makes the place look like a university campus or a small airport with nice, tidy outbuildings fed by clean white pipes, which rather airbrushes the degree to which these plants are dirty, noisy, dangerous industrial sites that destroy local habitat and pollute the air with, among other things, greenhouse gases that we are supposed to be reducing. Meanwhile, the animation showing the impeccably choreographed arrival and departure of massive LNG tanker ships seems to favour blue skies and waveless and windless ocean conditions for which B.C.’s north coast is not exactly renowned. And of course whenever newspapers or television stations run stories about LNG plants, they illustrate them with company handouts of lovely neat, clean, almost always bright white buildings and pipes and tanks and rustless ships berthed at glistening docks. Is there not a photo editor left in Canadian journalism who might think to find an image of what these facilities actually look like when they are operating?

Meantime, after taking Aurora’s “facility tour” on YouTube, you can “meet the team” before viewing another video about your “neighbour of choice,” which might seem a bit ripe to people on Digby Island. Who is choosing whom, exactly? But what’s really curious about all these manipulations is that, other than letting viewers meet the team who are duty bound to say nice things because they are on the payroll, the illustrations seldom depict even cartoon people doing actual work at an actual LNG plant — surprising, given that every sales pitch about LNG features the promise of good, local jobs. Perhaps my favourite entry in the unintended irony category comes courtesy of Pacific NorthWest LNG, the Canadian front for Petronas, which has been at pains to promise jobs and other benefits to local First Nations, all the while assuring everyone that its planned operations on Lelu Island and nearby Flora Bank pose no threat to wild salmon. Check out their Current Opportunities page, scrolling down to look at the background image, with its echo of Toni Onley’s coastal scenes, complete with a fishboat christened — this is cute — Lelu. Note that the spotless boat has neither skipper nor crew, which probably wasn’t intended to be a comment on current or future job opportunities for local fisherfolk.

Aurora, unnaturally

Word has it that Petronas might move its loading docks away from Flora Bank to nearby Ridley Island, an already industrialized site. Lelu will still be flattened to make way for the gas plant — assuming Petronas goes ahead at all, market conditions being what they are.

Over on Digby Island, meantime, some of the locals probably feel like the ghost crew of the good ship Lelu. In the public comment period that ended March 9, almost 800 comments were posted, an overwhelming number (773 against, to 25 for) registering their opposition to Aurora’s plans. Many of the comments were generated via computer-assisted campaigns run by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Committee, the kind of formulaic write-in responses that governments tend to discount as being biased and unscientific. Many commentators, however — including a number of people from Digby Island for whom that last-minute $12,000 came too late — posted detailed, sophisticated and often heartfelt critiques of the project.

To read all 800 or so comments, which I did, is to detect an air of fatalism in some of the responses, and a clear sense of distrust and despair at a process triggered by a proposal that came out of nowhere and that, even if it never gets built, has placed an unconscionable burden on a few people who have nothing else to draw upon except their love of place. One resident calls it a “death sentence” for the community, and another talks of “falsifying” of information presented on maps displayed at project open houses that didn’t even show there was a community of Dodge Cove on Digby Island. “It is ridiculous to wipe an over 100-year-old community off the maps to present to the public a pretty picture of where Aurora LNG wants to build,” the writer said. (In my reading of the comments, there was one Dodge Cove resident who thought the arrival of industry might bring with it a more reliable water supply, so community opposition is not unanimous.)

Aurora has done much to burnish its image. It even sounds innocuous. After all, Aurora is the Roman goddess of the morning. It’s also the name of the princess in Sleeping Beauty. It’s a town in Ontario. It’s a naturally occurring electrical phenomenon, as in borealis. And now, on the north coast of B.C., it is an unnaturally occurring industrial phenomenon that could also lighten the night sky, yet another flickering green light in Christy Clark’s gas-lit casino economy.

Will it happen? If getting a passing grade from a B.C.-led environmental review seems like an awfully low bar, perhaps low gas prices will function as a brake on Aurora’s plans. But Des Nobels isn’t so sure. “CNOOC have the supply, they are the market, they own the ships, they have all the capital in the world. The Chinese want the gas, they want to take it home and do things with it.”

If Aurora gets its permit, Nobels said the people of Dodge Cove can look forward to another couple of years of invasive exploration and site assessment and four to five years of construction.

“The net effect of all of the impacts will probably be enough to drive most of us out.”

And then those settlement-free maps will prove to have been prescient — there’ll be no problem community of Dodge Cove after all.

Image: Province of BC

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“Clean coal.” “Ethical oil.” How could fossil fuels that produce pollution which sickens, kills, and hospitalizes tens of thousands of Americans each year end up sounding so … desirable?

Jim Hoggan, founder of DeSmog, watched these industry-funded campaigns — and an increasingly toxic public discourse around climate change — unfold in the U.S. and Canada and wondered the same thing. 

As Hoggan told an audience of earth and climate scientists at the American Geophysical Union conference today, “These campaigns are not so much about persuasion as they are about polarization, about dividing us.”

When he first founded DeSmog in 2005, Hoggan thought that the reason people denied the legitimacy of climate science was because they just didn’t have enough information or didn’t have the right information.

But the more he examined this issue, he realized it wasn’t about misinformation. It was primarily about disinformation.

Hoggan has described this process he underwent while writing his book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot:

“I wanted to find out how misinformation campaigns work, how we came to a time when facts don’t matter and how we can start having real public conversations again. So I began to explore how these tendencies arise, what spurs us to become close-minded, aggressively vitriolic and most importantly, what we can do about it. I also began to analyze how we can become highly effective communicators, deflect over-the-top advocacy and make our arguments more convincing …

I’m Right and You’re an Idiot explains why facts alone don’t lead people to the right decisions; how language is manipulated; how people’s voices are “stolen” or silenced and what that means for democracy. It explains why modern messaging fails, why we are susceptible to misinformation and how trust networks are destroyed.”

He realized that the strategy of those putting out anti-science propaganda is to pollute the public discourse. They accomplish this by arguing that there are no clear facts and no objectivity. 

Instead, they argue that “everyone is just trying to manipulate you for their own interests.”

If you thought climate scientists were trying to manipulate you, why would you listen to their alarming reports about melting sea ice and acidifying oceans? Why would you vote for elected officials who prioritize taking actions to address climate change?

As Hoggan pointed out, the organizations denying the science of climate change — like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heartland Institute — don’t have to completely convince the public that climate change isn’t real in order to kill political will on the issue.

They just have to sow the seeds of doubt about climate science, which President-elect Donald Trump has echoed in his false statements that “nobody really knows” if climate change is happening.

Unfortunately, climate science deniers have been fairly successful in introducing that doubt and slowing down progress on addressing the causes and impacts of climate change.

These kinds of divisive tactics move Americans into so-called “tribes” with others like themselves — Republicans, Democrats, urban, rural, people of color, whites. 

Hoggan described how our brains have evolved to form these teams of “us” versus “them” and how that informs the decisions we make about something like the degree to which humans are causing climate change, an issue that is more politically polarized than ever.

Divided as we are, what kind of hope is there that facts and unity, rather than disinformation and division, will prevail?

As social scientists have shown, facts don’t change minds. That means people on every part of the political spectrum need to instead focus on attempting to sincerely listen and understand each other.

“This is about rebuilding trust and learning to talk about these problems in a way that really matters to people,” said Hoggan. 

In the course of researching his book, Hoggan interviewed Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who left him with a message that reverberates with empathy, a sentiment not often found in the antagonistic public discourse of today. 

“Speak the truth, but not to punish,” said Hanh. 

In other words, once people stop vilifying the “other side,” they leave themselves open to realize that “the other side” is composed of real people who have actual concerns and even shared values.

That is the point, a place of mutual respect and trust, where we can return to real conversations about real issues that affect us all. Like climate change. 

Main image credit: James Hoggan speaks at AGU, by DeSmog

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This is an excerpt from DeSmog founder Jim Hoggan’s latest book, I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse, published by New Society Publishers.

I first began reading the works of linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff about 15 years ago and I was struck by the Berkeley professor’s now famous ideas about what he calls frames. In public relations our stock in trade is messaging, because our role is to create understanding by combining maximum clarity with supreme brevity. We work in the world of sound bites and elevator pitches that are designed to be short and pithy, and we rarely have the time or budget to delve into frames or deeply moving narratives.

When I started writing I’m Right and You’re an Idiot I wanted to better understand the difference between messages and frames, so I would know how frames work and be able to explain how to manage them. I wanted to better understand how they relate to the mechanics of public debate, and especially how frames impact facts and scientific evidence in public discourse, or when shaping opinion.

When we met, Lakoff described frames as metaphors and conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret and understand the world. They give meaning to the words we hear more than the other way around, because words don’t have objective meanings independent of these metaphors. Frames are structures of thought that we all use every day to determine meaning in our lives; frames govern how we act. They are ultimately a blend of feelings, values and data related to how we see the world.

We can’t think without frames, Lakoff explained. “Every thought you have, every word is defined in terms of a frame. You can’t say any word that’s meaningful without it activating a frame.” Frames permeate everything we think and say, so the people who control language and set its frames have an inordinate amount of power.

Lakoff stressed that if you do a bad job of framing your story, someone else will likely do it for you and his comments reminded me of something my mentor in the PR business, Mike Sullivan, once said: “If you don’t tell them, someone else will—and it will be bad.” What Mike meant was if you are an unwilling or ineffective communicator, you leave yourself wide open to someone else doing serious damage.

A frame is a way of looking at the world that is value laden, and like a metaphor it conjures up all kinds of thoughts and emotions. Jackie Kennedy used a frame when she referred to her life as Camelot. “Ethical oil” and “tax relief ” are also frames. Such words evoke subconscious images and meanings, as opposed to factual statements such as “10 million scallops are dead,” a headline that appeared in February 2014 in a Vancouver Island newspaper.

What came to be called Climategate was an international campaign to discredit scientists on both sides of the Atlantic just before the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change. It took the momentum to set targets out of the conference. I was astonished to see how a group of legitimate climate scientists, with stacks of peer-reviewed evidence on their side, could lose debates to a group of people who had none — all because of a lens created by mischief-makers. Clearly, Climategate was a battle of frames versus facts, and the frames won.

The truth is, facts alone don’t change minds, said Lakoff, who wrote a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant, which explains how to frame political debates in terms of values not facts.

He believes that the progressive community contributes to confusion in the public square because of an outdated understanding of reason and consequent lack of persuasive communication. During our interview, he told me that progressives need a mental model that goes beyond cold, logical messaging that’s directly correlated to reality — a model which should embrace metaphors, a marriage of emotion and logic.

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Liberals have an unemotional view of reason that dates back to French philosopher Descartes. Lakoff explained that when conservatives want to go into politics they study business, marketing and what makes people tick, whereas progressives study political science, law and public policy. Progressives don’t study cognitive science, neurology or how the brain works. “They learn a false view of reason that goes back to the 1600s…that says reason is conscious, logical and unemotional.”

It wasn’t long ago that risk communications experts, who study the power of facts, also assumed that giving people more information and evidence would ensure they made better decisions. But research shows facts don’t change minds, at least not in the way we think they do.

Lakoff said cognitive and brain science research has shown that reason is not rational without emotion, without an over-lay of values to make sense of facts. Simply put: frames trump facts.

“We have thousands of metaphors structuring our brains,” he told me. “We think in terms of them all the time and they’re not random, they’re not mythical, they’re things that allow us to get around in the world. We have to use them. Words aren’t neutral.”

They are the structure we use to think.

We should all have a commitment to the truth, he continued, but not let an understanding of facts overwhelm our job, which is to change the brains of people out there. “Every time you argue, you change your brain. Every time you tell somebody something else, you’re changing brains, because everything you think is physical; it’s all in the circuitry of your brain.”

But just speaking the truth isn’t enough to convince people of new ideas. If facts are to make sense and be perceived as urgent, they must be framed in terms of deep, deep values.

George Lakoff ’s advice is short and sweet: To be an effective communicator get clear on your values and start using the language of values. Drop the language of policy. “People do not necessarily vote their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values.” He believes so-called inaction and apathy should warn progressives that the conservatives are winning the communications battle between moral imperatives: “It’s time to decide, either we are all in this together or it’s every man for himself.”

Progressive morality says citizens act responsibly to provide infrastructure, education, health care, transportation and basic research for one another. Progressives constrain stock markets and protect bank accounts. They believe that private profit depends upon public provision. Conservatism is all about personal responsibility. The importance of public services is minimal when compared with the benefits of private enterprise. Conservatives promote stock markets and regulate banks. They believe that human effort creates wealth.

Of course some people are conservative about some things and progressive about others. Lakoff calls this bi-conceptualism. It means you can have both moral systems operating in your brain at the same time, each inhibiting the other from time to time. The more active one is, the stronger it gets, and that’s where language and communication come in. It’s also why media in influences matter so much, as do the ways we communicate.

In politics and social issues, frames are hierarchically structured and at the top of that hierarchy are the moral frames. So the question often is: Is this a frame where citizens care about each other, act responsibly and where there is a robust sense of what’s good for all? Or is the frame telling us that someone believes they have the freedom to access their own self-interest but need not care about the interests of others?

When it comes to environmental issues, Lakoff explained that these conflicting moralities are tied to two very different ideas of our relationship with nature. For progressives: We are a part of nature and dependent on the environment. Nature has inherent value. For conservatives: We are separate from and dominant over nature. Nature’s value is determined by its direct utility to people. Lakoff was quick to note that this is a simplification because most people aren’t ideologues, and bi-conceptuals are generally open to persuasion in either direction. The moderate has no ideology.

Every word is defined by an individual frame. A frame is a neural circuit. A neural circuit is made up of connections of neurons joined together by synapses. When a circuit is activated the synapses get stronger. If that circuit inhibits another circuit, then that other circuit’s synapses get weaker. When the synapses are stronger, it is easier to activate an idea in someone’s mind and therefore easier for it to spread to other issues. “So, repetition is what strengthens synapses. And it doesn’t matter if it is accurate.”

Suppose you’re a conservative, he said, and you want to create a frame that fits your moral system, but let’s suppose it has nothing to do with truth. You may be saying, for example, that cutting corporate taxes will create jobs. We know that’s false. Corporations are making more profits than ever before, are not hiring people because they’re outsourcing work, reaping the benefits of cheap labor in other countries or using more technology. They’re not “creating jobs.” So this is a false statement. But if conservatives call themselves job creators and repeat it over and over, people will think that cutting corporate taxes will create more jobs. The words are like a recurring jingle, stimulating a synapse and creating a thought pattern. That frame is activated over and over, and every time it is reactivated it grows stronger.

I asked Lakoff if it’s possible to set the record straight. Every time we say, “those are not job creators,” do we step into the job creator frame and imprint it again? By outlining facts, even in a logical statement of contradiction, do we always help reinforce the other side’s point of view?

Yes, he said. You lose the persuasion battle when you consistently step into your opponent’s frame; it reinforces their morality and their argument in the minds of your audience. The way to respond is to not mention the other frame. Only mention yours. Always start with your frame and stay in it. Always be on the offensive; never act defensively.

Framing is a system that has evolved because it works for every-day life, said Lakoff. “Free will is not totally free. It is radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world. Those frames and metaphors get there, to a remarkable extent, through repetition in the media.”

Everything you have learned is stored physically in your brain, he stressed. Every frame is in a brain circuit, every metaphor is in a brain circuit, every image is in a brain circuit. Your whole moral system is in your brain. If you hear something that doesn’t fit with what’s in your brain, it will go in one ear and out the other unless you are the type of person who remembers things that don’t quite fit and worries about them. But most people don’t.

Progressives must realize that their old-fashioned view of reason is false — that Descartes and the information injection theory of communication have not panned out.

More information about Jim Hoggan on I’m Right and You’re an Idiot.

Image: George Lakoff/George Lakoff

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A diverse group of experts, scholars, First Nations and civil society organizations recently released a sweeping program that shows just how Canada can transition to a low-carbon society.

Building on a March 2015 report, Acting on Climate Change: Solutions from Canadian Scholars, a group of academics from Sustainable Canada Dialogues reached out to individuals and groups from across Canada in an attempt to engage society in the question of our low-carbon transition.

The result, Acting on Climate Change: Extending the Dialogue Among Canadians, brings together a broad range of insight from across the social and political spectrum.

The report comes on the heels of an open letter (attached below) to federal leaders, calling for a “national dialogue on climate change policy.” The letter, released by 60 academics with Sustainable Canada Dialogues, states a national conversation is needed “to identify socially acceptable transition pathways to a low-carbon society and economy.”

“We hope each party will enrich its position with ideas put forward by Canadians, before, during and after this election campaign, to restore Canada’s global leadership as a champion for the environment.”

Catherine Potvin, editor of the new report, writes 2015 is an important year for climate intervention.

“It is crucial to elect a federal government that has a climate action target with a coherent plan to achieve it,” Potvin states in the report’s foreword.

“I hope [this report] helps citizens make clear demands on their governments and believe in the future.”

First Nations Rights a Priority Concern

Among the report’s highlights is a submission by the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Sustainable Development Institute that emphasizes the importance of First Nations political sovereignty in government-to-government relations.

“Considering the wide-ranging impacts that climate policies could have on the Aboriginal Title and Aboriginal and Treaty Rights of First Nations, in particular regarding the use of their territories, it is essential that First Nation governments be involved from the beginning in this dialogue,” the authors write.

The importance of First Nations constitutional and territory rights are critical when considering the role the extractive industries play on traditional lands and within the context of climate change.

Government and Industry Need to Seek Opportunities

A submission from the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s president Scott Vaughan questions the capacity for market mechanisms to adequately address the need for urgent climate action.

Vaughan, Canada’s former Environment Commissioner, argues a more intentional collaboration is needed between government and industry to spur low-carbon innovation.

Vaughn points out the “various rigidities” of the oil, gas and coal sectors when it comes to measuring performance and expenditures.

“Climate debates need to turn towards the opportunities,” Vaughan writes, “to accelerate zero-carbon energy options that benefit from a longer tradition of purposeful industrial policy.”

Workers Must be Considered in Low-Carbon Transition

Erik Bouchard-Boulianne from the Centrale des syndicats de Québec (CSQ), one of the largest trade unions in Quebec, said transitioning to a low-carbon economy will bring big changes to each of the provinces. 

“There will be winning sectors and losing sectors,” he said in an interview included in the report.

Bouchard-Boulianne pointed out that Quebec will benefit from a move away from oil, which represents a large portion of the province’s trade deficit. Quebec imported about $18 billion in petroleum products in 2014.

Alternatively, he points out that Alberta, as an oil-producing province, will be hit hardest in the transition.

The key to helping workers throughout this transition is implementing support programs like unemployment insurance and re-qualification training.

Bring Science Back

Science advocacy group Evidence for Democracy argues a low-carbon transition will require both scientific and political leadership.

“Integrity of science and evidence have an important role to play in not only facilitating this transition, but also providing the forecasting and monitoring skills necessary for adaptive management throughout the process.”

Evidence for Democracy recommends the federal government play a central role in reducing carbon emissions, increase funding support for scientists and monitoring programs, fund academic researchers engaged in non-commercial science and produce climate and emissions policies that are transparent and based on best available evidence.

Make it Count for Youth

Generation Squeeze, an organization that advocates for young Canadians, writes a low-carbon society should focus on “leav[ing] at least as much as we inherit.”

That will require the better use and collection of tax dollars, leading to the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies and putting a price on pollution, writes author Paul Kershaw.

“Generation Squeeze recommends that Sustainable Canada Dialogues contribute to telling a broader narrative about generational prosperity and intergenerational fairness.”

Charting Low-Carbon Pathways

The David Suzuki Foundation also contributed to the report, outlining Canada’s various opportunities to cut carbon including reducing the use of coal and prioritizing renewable energy, a sector that now contributes $12 billion to the Canadian economy.

As Canada heads to the UN climate summit, policy makers can look to domestic successes for carbon-reduction opportunities.

“When Canadians head to the polls in October, we are deciding who will represent us at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit and the vision they have for Canada’s role in acting on climate change,” Dr. Mark Stoddart, from Memorial University and one of 60 co-authors of Sustainable Canada’s Dialogues original climate action plan, said.

“Extending the Dialogue Among Canadians provides novel ideas that can inform the next federal government,” he said.

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By now, it’s an almost entirely predictable routine: a celebrity takes a tour of the Alberta oilsands for a day or two and quickly harnesses apocalyptic rhetoric in press conferences to detail the experience. Chagrined industry spokespeople lash out. News coverage dissipates after a few days. Rinse and repeat. Thus far, Neve Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Darren Aronofsky, Desmond Tutu and James Cameron have partaken in the ritual.

Now, at long last, we can add Bill Nye to the already stacked roster, thanks to his recent two-day stint in the area for a climate change documentary he’s working on.

“Producing all this oil that’s producing all this carbon dioxide, that’s not good from a global stand point,” the Science Guy said in an interview with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, which was tweeted by the likes of Bill McKibben and 350.org.

Nye’s statement is very true. Alberta’s oilsands represent fossil fuel development on an unprecedented and highly visible scale. Canada won’t meet its 2020 emissions reduction targets as a result of the growing sector (by that year, the oilsands are expected to churn more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually than all the passenger transport in the country).

But do celebrity visits help push the dialogue out of gridlock?

“Where they can often fail is there’s a really naive and limited zero-or-one view of fossil fuels,” says Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and co-director of the University of Alberta’s Petrocultures research cluster. “Celebrities come up, they see the price of extraction, they see the scale, they’re horrified and they say: ‘Tomorrow, let’s stop using them.’ It’s really not a way to generate a narrative that will get us to where we might want to be.”

The West Versus the Rest

It’s a situation severely complicated by the fact Canada is a federation, not a unitary state, with resource development entirely governed by the provinces. Albertan voters are very proud of that latter fact.

Mary Janigan, author of Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, notes the prairie provinces weren’t birthed with resource control, resulting in decades of spatting due to perceived “constitutional inequality.”

Alberta finally received ownership in 1930 and fiercely resisted infringements on such rights in the years to follow (think of Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed’s labelling of the 1973 oil tax as “the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation,” or the backlash to Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift proposal in 2008).

“The people of the West may not remember the history,” Janigan says. “I’m sure a lot don’t. But it’s become part, I would argue, of the identity of provincial pride. You can see people bristling when the idea of a national carbon tax is raised, because the provinces do own their resources and control them. The National Energy Program (NEP) settled that once and for all.”

It’s a backstory celebrities who visit the oilsands don’t tend to take the time to explore. As a result, statements from people like DiCaprio that “we must fight to keep this carbon in the ground” can often be met with hostile headlines like “Back off our oilsands, Leo.” Every attack seems to solidify already polarized positions.

Much-Needed Public Attention

Unfortunately, the visits are often the only way to generate noteworthy dialogue on the matter.

Mark Meister — professor and chair of the department of communication at North Dakota State University and author of “Celebrity Culture and Environment” in The Rutledge Handbook of Environment and Communication — says celebrity environmentalists can bring much-needed public attention to an issue that politicians and other prominent figures often ignore.

There are three types of celebrity environmentalists, Meister says. There’s the celebrity conservationist, like DiCaprio; the conservationist turned celebrity, like David Suzuki; and celebrity politicians like Al Gore.

Of the three, Meister says he’s partial to the conservationist-turned-celebrity type — a category which Nye falls fairly neatly into as a mechanical engineer and science educator — as they often have a stronger scientific background and therefore more legitimacy to speak on technical issues.

Still, celebrities often oversimplify complex issues. And organizations on the ground like the Pembina Institute and Petrocultures are confronted with the challenge of translating momentum generated by celebrity soundbytes into public pressure for tangible policy outcomes.

Harnessing Celebrity Momentum

Amin Asadollahi, oilsands program director at the Pembina Institute, points to many such policy ideas, including investments in renewable and clean tech sectors, diversification of the economy and incentivizing industry to reduce emissions with carbon pricing. Those alone are intricate subjects often beyond the purview of celebrities.

Szeman is concerned with an even headier set of questions, noting the reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuels (as G7 countries recently pledged to do by 2100) will necessitate a radical restructuring of how society prioritizes things like mobility, leisure and consumption.

In other words, the transition will require the exploration of completely new narratives about communities and economies, as opposed to lowest-common-denominator conclusions that oil is evil. These ambitions helped inspire “What Comes After Oil?,” a public roundtable hosted in August and organized by Szeman’s Petrocultures research cluster.

Attracting a sold-out crowd of 200 people to the Art Gallery of Alberta, the event featured contributions from academia, industry and government. Many of the exchanges were very fruitful, Szeman says, with thoughtful perspectives expressed by the panel and audience. He chalks such successes up to the way the issue is presented to people.

“When you say to them not ‘should we use oil or shouldn’t we’ — which I think is how celebrities often do it — but say ‘OK we’re an oil society, we’re a petroculture, we’ve made the kind of bad mistake of connecting ourselves to a non-renewable resource that has a significant environment impact’ there’s a kind of discussion that begins to emerge there that I don’t think happens otherwise,” he says.

The Next Steps

It’s a style of diplomacy that’s also been sought by the Alberta government’s recent climate change open houses, with hundreds of citizens showing up to the two events hosted in Calgary and Edmonton (those who weren’t able to make it have been invited to fill out online surveys).

Szeman says such popularity may suggest celebrities have contributed in positive ways despite a lack of nuance, with more citizens paying attention to the issues than ever before. When it comes down to it, celebrity visits are brimming with flaws, but they may be better than nothing at all.

“If we’re gong to make environmentalism — and particularly climate issues — a significant one, celebrities have a vital, important and I would say obligatory role to play,” Meister concludes. “Are we going to be able to depend on our politicians to bring legitimacy and a voice to this issue? I don’t know. Celebrities can grasp a lot of our public attention if the public sphere sees their work and the environment as significant.” 

Image: Bill Nye the Science Guy visits Fort McMurray. Photo by Mike Hudema via Twitter.

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This is a guest post by Tzeporah Berman, Adjunct Professor York University Faculty of Environmental Studies and longtime environmental advocate. A shorter version of this piece originally appeared on the Toronto Star.

The debate over energy, oilsands and pipelines in Canada is at best dysfunctional and at worst a twisted game that is making public relations professionals and consultants on all sides enormous amounts of money.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information routinely show our own government hiding scientific reports or meeting secretly to craft PR strategies with the companies they are supposed to regulate, while millions of dollars are spent on ads trying to convince Canadians that the oilsands are like peanut butter and that without them our hospitals will close. *(See change notice at end of article.)

On the other side we march, we rally and we point fingers creating a narrative of exclusion and moral high-ground while acting as though a low carbon transition is going to be a walk in the park.

Enough.

Recently the people of Alberta voted for a change and got a progressive majority government that is not only acknowledging the urgent need to address our climate challenge but is also committing to a new partnership with First Nations, many of whom are in court over the impacts of oilsands expansion to the their Treaty rights — to wildlife, air, water and a safe climate.  And then this month our Prime Minister Harper was forced to acknowledge the critical need for the decarbonisation of our economy.  

It’s time for a new, honest conversation in Canada.

It’s time to recognize that the oilsands are, in fact, a technological marvel that took great Canadian ingenuity and acumen. It’s also time to acknowledge that when we began the exploration of the oilsands we did not know what we know today.

We didn’t understand the cumulative impacts on our disappearing caribou populations, the toxic impact on our lakes and fish, the human health impacts of air and water pollution. We didn’t know that carbon trapped in our atmosphere would create climate impacts as severe as we currently face — the droughts, the floods, the wildfires, the rising intensity and frequency of violent storms. Now we do.

Keeping Canada’s total emissions within a carbon budget that is consistent with our climate commitments while allowing oilsands production to grow as projected would require extraordinary disruption and hardship in the rest of the country.

In order for all of us to see this challenge as a collective challenge, to truly work together and not just move around the deck chairs on the Titanic, we need to face some simple but hard truths:

Basic math shows us that it would mean that every single vehicle in the country has to be electric and run on renewable energy. Or that British Columbia, all the Atlantic provinces and the territories have zero emissions. Honest math shows us that since 1990, Alberta has contributed 73 per cent of Canada’s GHG emission growth, and Saskatchewan 29 per cent, while both Ontario and Quebec have reduced emissions.

I can already hear the arguments for inaction “But Canada’s emissions are only a small part of global emissions."  

Yet Canada is one of the worlds top 10 polluters and, when taking into account emissions from land use and forestry, the World Resources Institute ranks Canada as the highest per capita polluter in the world. 

The hard truth is the oilsands are the fastest growing source of emissions in Canada and Environment Canada projects with current technology and development plans oilsands emissions will more than double over the next decade.

The path to decarbonisation does not come from expanding the fossil fuel industry. I have met many in industry who argue that if Canada doesn’t expand the oilsands, the oil will just come from somewhere else. Not only does that argument deny the impact of disruptive technologies (electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, etc.) will have on demand for oil, it is also an incredibly low bar for moral leadership.

Might as well mine and drill more even though we now know the majority of the world’s scientists and the World Bank have warned we need to stop expanding fossil fuel production because if we don’t someone else will. Is this the best we can do in a time of global crisis?

Isn’t that kind of like trying to justify selling arms to corrupt governments? “Look if we don’t sell it to them someone else will.”

The more pipelines we build, the more projects we bring online the greater the challenge we are creating for ourselves. We need to do everything we can to avoid new infrastructure that locks us in longer to a fossil fuel economy. Our leadership will inspire others and contribute to greater market certainty for renewable energy, electric cars and other innovative technologies.

Yes many of us still use gasoline to fill our cars, we fly in planes and we will continue to for many years. We need to recognize that that will not change overnight and the oilsands will not shut down tomorrow.

There is a long and difficult road in front of us of retraining, of building new clean energy infrastructure, reducing oil demand through efficiency, scaling up public transportation and electrifying transport.

That will take time and we need to ensure that people are not thrown out of work and we do not destabilize capital markets. That requires serious transition planning and it’s not going to be easy or comfortable. It is in fact going to be messy and complicated. We are going to all have to let go of our black and white ‘truths’ and be willing to muck about in ‘grey’ together.

I believe Canadians are up for the challenge. That we have the ingenuity, the knowledge and the creativity to lead a new path forward.

In fact, I suspect that for the majority of Canadians, debating solutions, timelines, the pace and scale of the transition out of the oilsands over time, having the real, hard honest conversations, will be a relief.

* This article originally included a reference to ads trying to convince Canadians that the oilsands are as toxic as peanut butter. Those ads actually compared the consistency, not the toxicity, of oilsands to peanut butter.

Image Credit: Pembina Institute

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Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to participate in discussions about climate change threats and environmental issues with people across private, public, governmental, and research sectors. Whether at an island retreat in Puget Sound, a corporate conference at a resort or in the halls of our esteemed universities, the same questions get asked: How can we get people to care more? How do we motivate people? What’s it going to take?

What if these are the wrong questions to be asking?

Let’s consider this question by first reconsidering the context.

Environmental issues can generate huge anxieties that make them hard for many people to contemplate. Climate change in particular taps into all sorts of cognitive dissonances and feelings of guilt, leaving many people feeling overwhelmed about their role in the problem and solution. This anxiety is often managed through an array of brilliant (usually unconscious) strategies, often both privately and socially, that help us avoid pain, discomfort and conflicts.

Assuming we can agree on these things, the questions we should be asking are: How can our well-established insights into loss and cognitive dissonance guide new approaches to reaching people? How can our understanding of the way anxiety impacts our psyche and conduct inform the way we engage, message and campaign for a more sustainable future?

Psychology and sustainability may seem like strange bedfellows but more than 100 years of psychoanalytic research reveals a lot about how people use unconscious processes to manage anxiety. If I am feeling rather down about the prognosis of our planet, I like to ask myself: “What would a good therapist do?” Does a therapist berate the patient for being scared, reticent or a bit stuck? Does a therapist offer cash incentives for changing behaviors? (I hope not.) One of the first things a (good) therapist does is create what’s called a sense of safety and containment. They can do this by acknowledging their patient’s conflict, suffering and struggle, by helping the patient feel “seen”. Then – and only then – do they form an alliance with the patient to work together in a collaborative, participatory way towards change.

How this translates into engaging people more widely and creatively can be surprising. For starters, acknowledging that people use unconscious strategies for managing anxiety changes the ways we consider (and research) how people think and feel about our world. Analysis needs to go beneath the surface to explore where people feel stuck in conflict and anxious. Second, a psychoanalytic paradigm asks not whether people care or not but focuses onwhere care may exist but may not have permission to be expressed.

This approach can infuse our engagement work, whether in research or strategy, with a mood of curiosity as opposed to frustration and irritation at how wasteful, greedy and short-sighted societies can be. And this mood of curiosity and inquiry can lead us into some unexpected behavior change strategies – particularly through conversation.

The power of conversation may be the most profound insight we can gain from those on the frontlines of the therapeutic professions. Conversation changes people. As Rosemary Randall’s development of Carbon Conversations demonstrates, it’s very simple – if we want people to change, we have to listen to them. Humans are designed to learn, be changed and process information in the act of conversing. In this context, engagement can move beyond the creation of “Green Teams” and champions, into a far more dynamic evolution that creates contexts for creative participation. This means letting go of some control and being open to seeing what emerges when we invite people to contribute (a concept usefully offered by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott) and exercise their agency.

What all of this amounts to is a radical reframe, a shift from a focus on motivating, persuading, cajoling and gamifying to inviting, enabling, facilitating and supporting. This is about giving people permission to care. As deeply social beings, we need some permission, we need to feel safe. Now, more than any other time, we need to start practicing a new form of engagement that presumes there is more care than can be contained – it just needs some help being channeled.

This article originally appeared on Climate Access.

Image Credit: Mark Stevens via Flickr

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This week’s episode of DeSmogCAST covers the fallout of the U.S. midterm elections and what a GOP-led Congress will mean for climate action and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Hosted by DeSmogBlog contributor Farron Cousins, our DeSmog cast – featuring Carol Linnitt, Brendan DeMelle and Steve Horn – also takes a look at fracking bans in several U.S. states, the hilarious success of the #KMFACE campaign, and the importance of community organizing in the face of growing fossil fuel influence in our lives. We discuss Chevron’s ‘Fuel Your Schools’ campaign currently taking place in schools around Vancouver’s lower mainland.

DeSmogCAST is a weekly newscast featuring DeSmog writers, experts and invited guests who discuss breaking stories and engage in analysis of politics, energy and environment issues in the U.S., Canada and around the world.

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.

Eight years ago, climate communications expert George Marshall picked up a copy of The Independent from his doorstep on a Saturday morning. Looking at the front cover of that magazine, he said, got him thinking about the “peculiarities” of climate change.

In bold letters the headline read “The Melting Mountains: How Climate Change is Destroying the World’s Most Spectacular Landscapes” and inside it outlined how alpine tourism is at risk with roughly 50 years left before a warmer climate begins to claim the snowpack.

Marshall said what really struck him was what he saw next. “It was the Saturday newspaper, so I picked it up and out falls the travel supplement. The travel supplement is dedicated to visiting those spectacular places before they go, entirely by the medium of international flights.”

“There’s something peculiar in this and I had a long conversation with my wife about it: how there’s this disconnect between the concern expressed on the first three pages and the hedonism expressed in the travel supplement.”

He laughed, “What did Oscar Wilde say? We all kill the thing we love.”

George Marshall: Compartmentalizing Climate

Marshall works as director of projects at the Climate Outreach Information Centre in Oxford and manages climatedenial.org, a website dedicated to understanding psychological responses to climate change.

His first book, Carbon Detox: Your Step by Step Guide to Getting Real About Climate Change, was met with a lot of positive fanfare when it was published in 2007. But facing these new complexities of climate change led Marshall to write his second book: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, just released three weeks ago.

Marshall says around this same time he had the poignant experience with his Saturday edition of The Independent, The Guardian newspaper wrote an article on the 25 places to visit “while you still can.” These stories, he said, are framed in the narrative of climate change and of a vanishing world.

The way we cope with this information, Marshall suggested, is by placing conflicting narratives and antagonistic facts into different bins in our mind.

“The other thing that is interesting to me is this idea of compartmentalizing as metaphor for the way the human brain operates. That the brain is divided into these supplemental parts and each part sort of sits in one hall and doesn’t talk to the other.”

Marshall said he got thinking about the editors of The Independent who knew that their readers would be interested in climate change, but maybe also in a holiday at a ski resort.

These things aren’t incompatible in a publication, Marshall said. And neither are they incompatible in an individual.

Marshall says he’s fascinated now by these information juxtapositions he sees everywhere, like a magazine stand on a street corner that displays multiple magazine covers.

”You can see the way high-carbon consumption patterns are arranged around environmental apocalypse. Again like the newspaper, like they’re separate supplements, yet there’s a conversation going on between them,” he said.

“When we look at these things we manage to build barriers and frames around them. We divide these, again, into different compartments and zero in on them on the basis of our interests.”

Marshall said he began to focus in on the question of why he might zero in on a climate change cover, while others will be compelled in another direction. How do we make those decisions, about what we will attend to, and what we will not?

“The thing which interests me very strongly with climate change is this balance of attention and dis-attention. In the book we call it ‘why our brains are wired to ignore climate change’ but it's the word ignore that’s really short hand for dis-attention,” he said.

“What is that mechanism by which we can pay attention to some things and dis-attend others whilst being entirely conscious of the fact that we’re doing it?”

Climate Change and Multivalence

There is no authoritative story that climate change will tell, Marshall said. And that’s because climate change, more so than many other issues, is multivalent.

“It is not just something which is in the future or uncertain,” Marshall explained. “It is in the future, in the present and the past.”

Marshall said a lot of other climate psychology or theories of climate denial emphasize the future-oriented elements of climate change, or how addressing it is going to be expensive, or uncertain, or will require sacrifice.

But Marshall says there are other competing issues that could be all of these things and be conceivably less difficult to deal with than climate change. Think about a giant meteor hurtling towards earth, he said. If we know it’s going to strike in 50 years, that’s significant. That tells a narrative.

But because climate change is so multivalent, because it tells so many narratives, “it is as near to certain or uncertain as we choose it to be.”

We “pick the narrative” of climate change, Marshall said, and because of that, we can use this particular issue to tell ourselves any number of stories.

“Climate change exists for us primarily in the form of ‘social facts’ – constructed narratives based on our values and worldview.”

“So,” as an issue, Marshall said, climate change “is exceptionally open to biased interpretation.”

“It presents an incomplete narrative that calls for biased completion.”

Climate Change is the Perfect Crime

When we’re looking to diagnose a problem, we often search for a culprit, according to Marshall. But in this sense, climate change is a crime that not only has no clear culprit, but no clear intent.

“We’re all – and I say this as we’re in a room of affluent Westerners – responsible for climate change,” Marshall said, adding, “I’m not intending to cause harm. None of us are.”

Even so, climate change has been constructed in an enemy narrative, but without a clear suspect and without a clear intent.

“We are constantly trying to insert enemies into the frame of climate change,” Marshall said, and getting nowhere in the meantime. A pervasive cultural guilt is displaced onto individuals, many of whom feel powerless in the face of large systemic problems.

What has taken the place of productive conversations about responsible management is what Marshall calls a “negotiated silence.”

The absence of meaningful debate about climate action at the United Nations is a prime example of such a silence, Marshall said. And the inability to tackle climate emissions at their source is the troubling result.

“There is nothing comparable when it comes to any other international resource issue,” Marshall said, pointing to the strict regulation of drugs as an example.

“Every stage is considered,” Marshall said, when it comes to drug control.

Fisheries management is much the same, he said.

“Just think about fisheries: you have fish harvesting controls, not fish stick consumption control,” he said.

“A negotiated silence means no one is having that conversation,” leaving a discussion about climate change to fall off the rails.

“If you get a misaligned narrative, that puts the enemy emphasis in the wrong place” he said, “it’s very difficult to detach it.”

We become locked into certain narratives, Marshall said, to the exclusion of alternatives.

Breaking the Partisan Divide

A crucial part of breaking out of failed narratives about climate change, Marshall said, is “breaking through the partisan divide.”

He said there may be ways forward that are “uncomfortable” but they deserve our consideration. This is especially so when it comes to working with people of different worldviews.

When it comes to the particular way forward, Marshall is candid about his own limits: “I don’t know if I have the right answers, but I think I’m asking the right questions.”

But one thing Marshall is fairly certain of is that we won’t make progress by having information wars with our ideological counterparts. When it comes to divided perspectives on climate change, simply presenting scientific facts won’t cut it, he said.

“When you go outside your immediate domain,” he said, “there’s a lot we can learn from other people.”

George Marshall is speaking at the University of British Columbia in Woodward IRC 5 on Wednesday, September 10, 2014 from 12:30pm to 2:00pm. A live webcast can be followed at http://sustain.ubc.ca/wired. For more information visit the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

Image Credit: George Marshall at the University of Victoria. Photo by Carol Linnitt.

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.