Oil companies and fossil fuel investors seeking further developments in the Alberta tar sands have been dealt another setback with the publication of a report showing producers lost $17.1 billion USD between 2010-2013 due to successful public protest campaigns.

Fossil fuel companies lost $30.9 billion overall during the same period partly due to the changing North American oil market but largely because of a fierce grassroots movement against tar sands development, said the report — Material Risks: How Public Accountability Is Slowing Tar Sands Development.

A significant segment of opposition is from First Nations in Canada who are raising sovereignty claims and other environmental challenges, added the report, which was produced by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) and Oil Change International (OCI).

“Tar sands producers face a new kind of risk from growing public opposition,” Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at IEEFA, and one of the lead authors on the report, said. “This opposition has achieved a permanent presence as public sentiment evolves and as the influence of organizations opposed to tar sands production continues to grow.”

Opposition to tar sands unexpected

Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, added industry officials never anticipated the level and intensity of public opposition to their massive build-out plans.

“Public opposition has caused government and its administrative agencies to take a second and third look,” Kretzmann said. “Legal and other challenges are raising new issues related to environmental protection, indigenous rights and the disruptive impact of new pipeline proposals.”

He added anti-pipeline protests are keeping carbon in the ground, and changing the bottom line for the tar sands industry. 

“Business as usual for Big Oil – particularly in the tar sands – is over,” Kretzmann said.

The report said market forces and public opposition have played a significant role in the cancellation of three major tar sands projects in 2014 alone: Shell’s Pierre River, Total’s Joslyn North, and Statoil’s Corner Project.  

“Combined, these projects would have produced 4.7 billion barrels of bitumen that would in turn have released 2.8 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere,” the 28-page report said. “This is equivalent to the emissions of building 18 new coal plants that would last 40 years each.”

Growing First Nations voices take tar sands story international

“I think it’s pretty inspiring and also uplifting to see the recognition of First Nations that have been very vocal and have articulated their staunch opposition to tar sands expansion in our traditional homelands,” Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a Greenpeace Canada campaigner from the Lubicon Cree, told DeSmog.

Laboucan-Massimo and other representatives from local First Nations like Eriel Deranger from the Fort Chipewyan have been campaigning for years to bring greater awareness to the human health and environmental impacts of rapid tar sands expansion. Laboucan-Massimo said she spent a lot of energy campaigning outside of Canadian borders, speaking to parliamentarians in the U.K., across Europe, as well as to U.S. Congress and the shareholders of major companies.

“We wanted to tell the story on the outside and really put that pressure on the Canadian government to do its due diligence and be accountable to its own citizens,” she said.

“I think that’s a part of what’s been effective in this campaign of accountability, that people not only in Canada but around the world were asking what is happening in Canada? Why is Canada such a climate laggard? Why is the Canadian government not listening to the voices of their own people?”

The growing environmental movement, she said, has been better at incorporating the voices of local First Nations living on the front lines of the tar sands. The movement also now represents a much wider range of social perspectives.

“When we work in coalitions – the environmental movement, First Nations and the labour movement – there’s such a convergence of diverse voices…we’re really starting to see growing public accountability and public opposition being seen and taken seriously.”

She added the future of the tar sands under the Harper government is “tenuous” because “you can see he has a very pro-tar sands agenda,” she said. But, she added, even five or 10 years ago very few Canadians knew what the tar sands were and had little awareness of the switch from conventional to unconventional, extreme forms of energy.

“Now people are quite aware that that’s what been happening and there has been a public dialogue created on that and there has been more pressure on the government to really address the environmental concerns, the health issues and indigenous rights violations. I feel like people really are a lot more aware of these issues now than in the past.”

Keystone XL delay shows tar sands "weakness"

The report says the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is one of the most talked about North American energy and political issues of the era.

“Once thought inevitable, the project and Canada’s plan to expand tar sands production have been confronted by an accumulation of economic and political risks creating a veritable ‘carbon blockade.’”

Project delays are taking a financial and political toll on proposed tar sands projects, the report said.

“The delays and cancellations have exposed the fact that tar sands investments, once thought to be highly lucrative, are showing signs of financial weakness. With growing public awareness and market hesitancy, expansion of tar sands production in Canada will remain contested terrain for the foreseeable future.”  

The report also noted that the tar sands sector faces a growing constellation of risks as project economics become pressured by low oil prices and shrinking revenues, rising costs, smaller profit margins, tougher capital markets, transport constraints, environmental challenges and protectionist legislation.

Nine of 10 leading tar sands producers in Canada have underperformed the stock market in the last five years, it said, adding industry experts have recently downgraded their outlook for future tar sands production.

“Tar sands pipeline campaigns are a recent example of how public advocacy efforts can alter capital investment decision making,” the report said.

“The Keystone XL campaign has managed thus far to delay a final governmental decision on the project while raising public awareness about the environmental costs of tar sands development.”

“These citizen interventions have resulted in increased diligence by government agencies with public health and environmental mandates, impaired the project development process of the capital markets and mobilized a permanent, political constituency in support of alternatives to tar sands expansion.”

The report noted there was an expectation that the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline would receive necessary approvals quickly when it was originally proposed in 2008 and be up and running by late 2011.

“Time and events changed this storyline,” the report added. “By 2011 Russ Girling, the CEO of TransCanada, said ‘There is no way we could have ever predicted that we would become the lightning rod for a debate around fossil fuels and the development of the Canadian oil sands.’”

According to a report in the Guardian, Canada has staked its energy future on a massive expansion of tar sands, which hold the world’s third largest reserve of crude after Saudia Arabia and Venezuela.

“But the huge amounts of water and solvents needed to extract oil from bitumen dramatically boost greenhouse gas output and, on latest production forecasts, will increase Canada’s CO2 emissions by 56 megatonnes by 2020,” the Guardian said.

Image Credit: People's Climate March by Zack Embree

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This post is the second in a series. Read part one at Learning from the Opposition, Part 1.

So far we’ve covered two of the main sources of opposition to meaningful action on climate change: the corporation and the state. Although it can be tempting to take this analysis and blame greedy CEOs or corrupt politicians, the problem runs deeper than having the wrong personalities in power. Regardless of who sits in the boardroom or sleeps at 24 Sussex Drive, corporations and governments will always do what is necessary to keep global capitalism functioning—unless they’re compelled to do otherwise.

Our political leaders and captains of industry will only recognize the social and ecological limits of economic growth if the environmental movement makes them impossible to ignore.

While scientists can be muzzled and the facts on climate change can be obscured by industry PR campaigns, mass movements are not easily dismissed. The key question is how to increase the size and strength of the environmental movement. In the hopes of contributing to a movement growth strategy, it’s worth looking at some common criticisms of environmentalists to see what’s standing in the way of bigger numbers.

The best place to gauge popular discontent with any progressive social or political cause is the online comments section of a conservative newspaper like the National Post. For anyone who has spent time drifting through the arguments that accumulate there, the charges leveled against environmentalists will be familiar: they’re hysterical doomsayers, deluded idealists and insufferable elitists. 

Granted, these criticisms tend to rely on slander over substance. But behind the insults are some recurring themes that reflect genuine political discontents worth paying attention to. Below are four categories reflecting some of the most common complaints against the environmental movement, and a few thoughts on how to overcome them.

Catastrophism

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Perhaps the most common accusation is that environmentalists are prophets of doom on endless repeat. Each new threat to the rainforest, each new discovery of a pollutant in the water supply, or each new set of projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is announced as a clear sign of the impending total collapse of planetary life support systems.

The problem is that no matter how true these warnings are, the apocalypse has yet to arrive. Particularly for Canadians in urban areas who are insulated from the impacts of pollution, environmental degradation and climate change, few of the dire predictions lead to any perceptible changes. The continuation of normal life works like a daily rebuttal to the threat of catastrophe.

This in turn causes greens to rely on a kind of I-told-you-so strategy: eventually the world truly will become unsuitable for human habitation, and then we’ll have been proven right. But smug satisfaction is cold comfort on a warming planet. 

The trick here is that climate change is every bit as urgent as it’s made out to be. The task then is to find a way to articulate that urgency in a way that drives people to action rather than apathy. The facts about what kind of world we’re facing after a 2-degree average temperature increase should not be glossed over or made more palatable. Instead, they should be presented in a way that avoids pointing fingers and builds solidarity across social divisions. 

Old-Fashioned Elitism

Another obstacle preventing the growth of the environmental movement is the perception that environmentalists are urban snobs who don’t understand where the gas in their cars comes from. This particular trope is a familiar import from our neighbours to the South, where the culture wars have come to function as a stand-in for genuine politics. Democrats are said to be latte-sipping devotees of fine dining, while Republicans work hard, watch NASCAR and repent on Sundays.

The cultural contours are similar in Canada. Too often the social vision of the environmental movement rests on an easy demonization of those who fall outside of the typical environmentalist constituency of highly educated urbanites. The blame for carbon emissions gets placed on suburban commuters or workers in resource industries, while downtown paper pushers in air-conditioned offices imagine themselves to have already gone green.

Rather than a personal issue of modifying a few consumption habits, climate change needs to be seen as a systemic problem to be solved collectively. That means articulating a politics that speaks to people in logging towns and office towers alike, while recognizing that we’re all implicated in a social and economic order that runs on fossil fuels.

Self-Loathing Naturalism

Another unflattering picture of environmentalists is that of the idealist in despair who sees the human species as a cancer spreading across the Earth and destroying everything in its path. This view is usually accompanied by a kind of soft nihilistic longing for the destruction of urban civilization and a return to something more like a subsistence lifestyle.

This perspective rests on a strange foundation that imagines nature without humans existing in a perfect state of finely tuned equilibrium. It sees technology, the development of agriculture and the construction of cities as crass violations of the natural order. But aside from gnashing our teeth and cursing our fate, it offers little guidance on how to respond to the climate crisis.

A more useful response to environmental degradation locates the problem not with humans per se, but rather with an economic system that reduces the natural world to commodities in the pursuit of profit. By championing a vision of economic organization that responds to human needs rather than the dictates of private profitability, the environmental movement stands a better chance of appealing to those who don’t see the human condition as an affront to nature.

Accidental Austerity

Finally, the last complaint on the list is directed at those who advocate for voluntary reductions in personal consumption as the way forward. As the cliché has it, this call tends to broadcast most loudly from those with expensive phones, sleek hybrids and a taste for local organic delicacies.

For those living in the gentrified districts of major urban centers, such tasteful restraint in consumption habits is relatively attainable—provided one can afford it. But for low-income families, reduced consumption is just another way of saying not getting enough to eat.

Without a clear understanding of inequality and differential access to consumer goods and social services, this kind of degrowth politics can sound an awful lot like austerity—that is, cuts imposed on those who can least afford them. The environmental movement is at its best when it calls not only for reductions in consumption, but also the redistribution of wealth and power with the aim of creating a green and just society. 

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.