In Dawson City, Yukon, you can get a Chinese buffet at Gold Village before picking up a few essentials at the Bonanza Market. A block away, across from the river, you can get some Yukon gold from the Klondike Nugget & Ivory Shop.

Despite the hand-painted signs and old-timey decor, the turn-of-the-century gold rush isn’t just a memory here. Two reality TV shows, Gold Rush and Yukon Gold, chronicle the ongoing search for gold in the region, while unprecedented numbers of mines are digging up riverbeds and wetlands.

The gold rush, it seems, is in full swing: the Yukon Geological Survey pegged total placer mining production at $94 million in 2017, an amount comparable to the peak production during the Klondike.

The name Klondike itself derives from a mispronunciation of the word Tr’ondëk, which loosely translated refers to a part of the river.

And when it comes to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation — from whose territory this bonanza is being extracted — one might assume a major windfall.

Yet that’s far from reality.

According to the First Nation, their share of the gold mining royalties last year was around $65 — not quite enough to buy a tank of gas at the station next to the Bonanza Gold Motel.

“The amount is still in 1906 legislation,” explains Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in chief Roberta Joseph. “It’s still back in the Wild West.”

Indeed, the royalty system laid out in the Yukon Placer Mining Act seems so outdated as to be almost comical:

“There shall be levied and collected on all gold shipped from the Yukon a royalty at the rate of two-and-one-half per cent of its value,” it reads.

“Gold for the purpose of estimating that royalty shall be valued at fifteen dollars per ounce.”

Fifteen.

Dollars.

Per.

Ounce.

That’s like estimating the value of a television at $5.

At the time of writing, the spot price of gold was $1,566 per ounce, 100 times higher than it was a hundred years ago when the legislation was written.

“It’s a joke,” says Lewis Rifkind, Mining Analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society. “The Yukon gets more in campground fees than in placer mine royalties.”

Incredibly, Rifkind is downplaying the discrepancy.

Yukon statistics show the government brought in $26,715 in placer mining royalties in 2017.

Camping fees from non-residents alone amounted to $348,000 — more than ten times as much.

“In the Yukon we’ve been mining gold for over 100 years and we are still dirt poor,” he says. “We have all this wealth, and year after year we give it all away.”

The “royalty” isn’t even really a royalty in the conventional understanding, as in, a levy collected on a resource.

As the Act states, the Yukon’s royalty is only collected on gold dust or bars shipped from the territory — which, when it was written, was probably most or all of it. Today, with jewellers right in Dawson City making and selling products for the ever-growing throngs of tourists, not so much.

Each ounce of gold dust or bars being exported from the Yukon nets the government (and, eventually, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation) 37.5 cents. If it’s sold to gold buyers in Dawson, the First Nation gets nothing.

River rocks are piled high after being sorted and dumped during placer mining operations. Photo: Jimmy Thomson / The Narwhal

Old rusting machinery crowds the road heading into Dawson — but deeper into Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory a new gold rush is growing. Photo: Jimmy Thomson / The Narwhal

‘Ignorance, greed and envy’

The Alberta royalty rate is 200 times higher than that in Yukon; B.C.’s is 20 times higher.

A report from the Financial Advisory Panel in 2017 pointed out that the 37.5 cents per ounce the government gets from placer mining doesn’t even manage to recover the costs of supporting the placer mining industry.

It recommended that the government review its royalty rates and maybe institute a system like that in Alaska. There, less successful miners pay no royalties and others pay a royalty that reflects modern prices.

The Klondike Placer Miners’ Association retorted with a fiery open letter from its president, Mike McDougall —  which was sent to The Narwhal in response to an interview request — blaming “ignorance, greed, and envy” for the public desire to up the royalty rate.

The association received $120,000 in transfers from the Yukon Government in 2017-18, according to the advisory panel report.

Premier Sandy Silver, who has lived in Dawson City for nearly 20 years, ran in the Klondike riding on a promise not to raise the royalties — and steadfastly stuck to it.

“The placer miners are a pretty powerful lobby,” according to Rifkind.

But it’s more than that, he says. There’s a happy old-timey gold panner on Yukon licence plates. People like to refer to placer mining as “the Yukon equivalent of the family farm.”

Placer mining is ingrained in the territory’s culture and collective psyche, and it’s a way for small-scale operators to get into mining without facing the extreme costs associated with starting a larger mine.

“Sometimes we in the environmental movement tend to overlook that,” he admits.

Growing disturbance

That $65 the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in received last year came with real costs to the environment.

“You basically have to destroy the stream that the gold is in,” Rifkind says.

The rounded riverbed stones piled high into miniature mountains along the Klondike Highway tell the story of how that damage comes to be: placer miners scoop up the rocks and gravel from current and historical riverbeds, sort through them for gold, and dump the waste rock, or tailings, as they move along.

“Such mining can gut invaluable riparian areas and can severely and permanently damage streams, devastate fish, and threaten human health,” wrote the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre in a letter to the B.C. Auditor General last year.

“It can interfere with traditional hunting, fishing and gathering practices and infringe Indigenous rights.”

A 2002 study found that as many as five per cent of Yukon streams have been affected by placer mining, which “has resulted in extensive changes to stream channel morphology and stability.” Digging up the river kicks up silt, choking and smothering downstream plants, insects and fish. Fish have trouble moving, feeding, reproducing and growing in water with even low amounts of sediments hanging in the water.

“There are some creeks that have been disturbed to the point where there’s not an ability to use it for drinking, or spawning for fish,” Joseph says.

The so-called “Yukon equivalent of the family farm” often takes the form of large-scale, irreversible disturbance to the landscape. Photo: Sebastian Jones / Yukon Conservation Society

Placer mining also disturbs the habitat of the riverbanks, the fragile and extremely productive riparian areas that the Environmental Law Centre says house two-thirds of Canada’s rare and endangered species.

And they don’t just come back. The same 2002 study found that vegetation had a hard time growing once placer mining had moved through because of the lack of fine sediments.

Any return to normalcy, it found, “could take many decades to centuries.”

The growth in the industry in recent years — driven in part by high gold prices as well as the notoriety from the reality TV shows — is unprecedented. The Yukon Geological Survey counted 25,219 placer claims in good standing in the territory, “which is the highest number of claims dating back to 1973 when our records were initiated.”

Rifkind says the government has been doing a good job of keeping on top of the growth in mining, enforcing its existing laws. But those laws, he says, don’t go far enough to mitigate the damage inherent to the industry.

“The actual placer mining activities recently have been quite well enforced and monitored, but it doesn’t get away from the fact that it’s still placer mining.”

According to the Klondike Placer Miners’ Association, there were 159 active placer mines in the Yukon as of last year. Joseph estimates that 85 to 90 per cent of them are in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory.

“They think this is place they can come and get rich,” she says.

‘Mined areas are even more unique’

A sign overlooking the Klondike River describes the rapid change that took place in the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in traditional territory when the gold rush began:

“Within two years, Tr’ochëk had changed beyond recognition. Gone were the fish racks, salmon traps and cooking hearths. Now there was a dense clutter of tents and cabins, a sawmill, a brewery, saloons, stores and the one-room cribs of prostitutes.”

Today the renewed frenzy is once again making its mark on the landscape. In the Indian River wetlands south of Dawson City — where half the territory’s placer gold comes from — the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in say their territory is becoming unrecognizable.

“Peat and fen wetlands that took thousands of years to develop are now at risk of being wiped out in only a few years,” the First Nation wrote in a letter to Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations.

They are asking for a study of the cumulative impacts of placer mining before another project is approved.

“The river and its tributaries were heavily staked by placer miners in the 1980s and 1990s; today, licensed operators in the valley are among the top producers of placer gold in the Yukon.”

The letter stresses that cumulative impacts haven’t been taken into account by individual licence application processes, and now, an as-yet unmined part of the wetland is being considered for mining.

Individual developments, taken together, have been transforming the Indian River wetlands for decades.

As they are, the wetlands produce clean water, habitat for game animals, endangered species and other wildlife, flood control, sinks for pollution, as well as cultural values like hunting, fishing, trapping and tourism. It’s the only major wetland area in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory.

“We consider that the overarching benefits of intact wetlands…to the many within the Dawson community, including First Nations citizens, outweigh the financial gain to the few private industry operations mining gold from wetlands,“ reads a letter to the Yukon Water Board asking for a public hearing to discuss the current mine proposal.

According to the First Nation, the Indian River itself used to be salmon habitat. Salmon no longer spawn there.

Reclamation of wetlands is unproven and expensive, and in its submission to the water board, an engineering firm hired by the proponent said as much.

“The expectations…have to be tempered with what is physically achievable and what is economically feasible for family-based Yukon placer mining operations,” the firm wrote, referring to oilsands mining projects, where attempts at rebuilding bogs and fens has yielded mixed results. “It would be incredibly expensive, frustrating and imprudent to attempt to reclaim post mined sites to peat land wetlands given the high likelihood of failure.”

Security is rarely collected against the costs of cleanup in case a company is not able or willing to complete the remediation — but Rifkind says remediation in many cases would be an extreme undertaking regardless given the way placer mining turns ecosystems quite literally upside down.

“It’s almost impossible to do effective reclamation,” he says.

Stuart Schmidt, a local supporter of the placer mining industry who describes growing up hunting and trapping in the Indian Creek area, wrote a letter in support of the project for the water board.

“I understand the concern expressed by many people who feel that there is enough mining in the Indian River Valley and that it should come to a stop,” Schmidt wrote. “They argue that the Indian River is unique. That is true, all areas are unique but the mined areas are even more unique.”

Lawsuit could be considered

The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in say they are in the midst of negotiating with the Yukon Government to update the Placer Mining Act.

Legislative reviews that were promised as part of devolution, which concluded in 2003, have not resulted so far in any update to the Placer Mining Act or the royalties associated with it.

When the government declined to update the royalties, it instead updated the way it splits royalties with the First Nations. That brought the total amount of royalties, to be divided among 11 Yukon First Nations, to $36,110.71. To sweeten the deal, the government kicked in a one-time “gesture” payment of $600,000, also to be split between all 11 First Nations.

After years of sitting alone at the bargaining table, and without any progress on an actual increase in the returns on placer mining and an evaluation of its cumulative impacts on the land, Joseph says the First Nation may consider legal action.

“The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in have given up millions and millions of ounces of gold,” Joseph says. “When we have an agreement we all have to be acting in good faith to ensure that we all benefit in good faith.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested that legal action is being considered by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation. The First Nation has clarified that it is not currently considering a lawsuit but that it may consider such action if the Yukon government does not pursue further changes to the Placer Mining Act.

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Hans Matthews spent much of 2012 criss-crossing Alberta and B.C. as a member of the federal-provincial panel conducting hearings on the contentious Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.

Those emotional hearings eventually overshadowed the proposal itself, leading then-natural resources minister Joe Oliver to accuse “environmental and other radical groups” of hijacking the process to “stop any major project, no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.”

Central to the controversy was opposition from First Nations along the route, many of whom felt they hadn’t been properly consulted during the development of the proposal. It was a social and political mess, all for a project that eventually died anyway. But Matthews, now the president of the Canadian Aboriginal Minerals Association, says it didn’t need to be that way.

“By embracing aboriginal knowledge, communities’ knowledge, it would have been a more balanced and fair process,” Matthews told The Narwhal.

Indigenous ways of life not contemplated by current system

That idea has come to the fore yet again with the Federal Court of Appeal’s rejection of the permits that allowed Kinder Morgan to proceed with its expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. In its decision, the court cited a lack of meaningful two-way consultation with First Nations in the planning process, along with other factors.

“Canada was required to do more than receive and understand the concerns of the Indigenous applicants,” wrote judge Eleanor Dawson in the court’s written decision. “Canada was required to engage in a considered, meaningful two-way dialogue.”

In other words, Canada pushed ahead with its own process, pausing only now and then to collect some feedback from First Nations. For the sake of those affected, the governments in charge, and even the project itself, it is now clear that that was not the right approach. But it didn’t have to be that way.

A new concept is emerging in the world of environmental decision-making: that it’s not enough for governments to loop Indigenous groups into their environmental assessments, and that instead Indigenous peoples should be able to conduct their own processes that run parallel to the non-Indigenous-led assessments.

A recent report by the Firelight Group, a consultancy founded to support the rights and interests of Indigenous communities, found Indigenous environmental assessments “rely on and protect Indigenous culture, language, and way of life in ways existing government legislated systems have either never contemplated or are still not accommodating.”

How is Indigenous assessment different?

In a traditional assessment, Indigenous peoples have some opportunity to contribute to the process and to be heard. But the decision is ultimately up to a government that may not share the worldview of the affected Indigenous communities.

“That means that people are engaged, but if they are busy on another file, or not meaningfully engaged or unable to get their point heard, then they are not able to be equal decision-makers or use their own set of values, worldview and Indigenous law to drive the process forward,” author of the Firelight report, Ginger Gibson, told The Narwhal.

“Indigenous EA [environmental assessment] means Indigenous governments are setting the terms, they’re conducting the review with their worldview and their Indigenous laws — they’re making decisions about the project themselves.”

“It’s a fundamental difference,” Gibson added.

The result is an assessment that from the get-go is steeped in the ideas that are not as well recognized in Eurocentric processes.

“You’re probably going to get a more realistic, pragmatic approach,” Matthews said.

“It would be a community-driven process from the very beginning.”

Indigenous assessment isn’t brand new

The report, which includes three case studies, highlights one example of a fully independent Indigenous impact assessment of a proposed LNG plant that was conducted by the Squamish First Nation in B.C.

The First Nation conducted the assessment after determining the scope themselves.

As opposed to the British Columbia government process, which only allowed submission of archaeological evidence, Indigenous law was incorporated throughout the Squamish-led assessment, as well as the First Nation’s knowledge and culture.

Eventually the First Nation-led process ruled in favour of the project, attaching 25 conditions including some that would mitigate the impacts on cultural practices such as hunting and fishing.

“This more holistic approach is much more conducive to — and reflective of — the type of communal decision-making of many Indigenous people,” the report concluded.

Matthews says this approach allows Indigenous communities to feel their values are being respected by potential developments.

“It’s also a matter of showing respect for the people that have occupied and used the land since time immemorial,” he said.

Gibson says no matter what the outcome of the assessments, the result is a more robust look at the proposed project.

“They are sometimes reaching similar decisions, sometimes reaching different decisions,” she says. For example, both the Tłı̨chǫ government, in the Northwest Territories, and federal government reached the same conclusion, to approve a proposed cobalt-gold-bismuth mine in the First Nation’s territory.

“Our finding from our research is that each process is always better because of the parallel review. There’s more information, there’s more known about the project, there’s more unearthed about the impact on Indigenous people — and there’s a stronger buy-in to the outcome of the process.”

What would this mean for Indigenous-Canada relations?

The history of Canada and its dealings with Indigenous communities on resource issues is fraught with missed opportunities for fulsome conversations.

The Gwich’in of the Northwest Territories and Yukon are a prime example of this lack of engagement.

“There was a lot of oil and gas development and we really didn’t have a say in what was happening,” said Jordan Peterson, deputy Grand Chief of the Gwich’in Tribal Council, which commissioned the report from the Firelight Group.

“We haven’t always been fully consulted or engaged or involved in these processes.”

The Gwich’in Tribal Council is particularly concerned about the Porcupine caribou herd, a vital cultural and economic resource that, like all caribou, is sensitive to the kind of habitat fragmentation and disturbance oil and gas development can create on the landscape.

Peterson and Matthews agree that Indigenous-led environmental assessments would be one way to bring Canada and First Nations, Métis and Inuit closer together, and undo some of the impacts of colonial processes.

“By engaging communities in the assessment process, you’re meeting the goals of free, prior and informed consent,” Matthews says, contributing to the federal government’s stated goal of complying with UNDRIP and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.

“Ninety-nine per cent of the time it’s an aboriginal community that will have some impact from a resource project.”

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We’re a few weeks past what was a roller-coaster of an election in Ontario, ushering the Progressive Conservative party into power and placing the New Democrats as the official opposition, being sworn in this Friday.

The PCs were clear in their campaign: this government will focus on making life more affordable for average rural and urban Ontarians and on creating jobs in the province. These are worthy aspirations, ones that we share, but so far we’re seeing a push for changes that could end up being more costly for Ontarians.

On environment and transportation, the new government will need to realign several of their current plans if they are committed to achieving their goals of making life more affordable and creating jobs.

Cleaning up our air in the lowest-cost way

The new PC government has committed to protecting the environment and coming down heavy on polluters. We agree polluters should pay — this is what carbon pricing does in over 70 jurisdictions across the globe. It’s only fair that operations producing air pollution, including carbon pollution, pay a price or reduce their emissions. The current made-in-Ontario cap-and-trade system is a form of carbon pricing and has been operating successfully since early 2017.

The system ensures lowest-cost pollution reduction, while encouraging business innovation. The dollars collected from polluters have gone into programs to reduce emissions, including to homeowners for retrofits to save on energy bills, to companies for truck retrofits, and are funding infrastructure Ontarians want and need, like transit and cycling infrastructure. There was serious pushback from homeowners who had cost-saving renovations underway when the new government recently cancelled the popular retrofit program.

As one of his first acts after the election, Premier-designate Ford has announced his intention to cancel Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, making his priorities clear. What he hasn’t been clear about are the costs to Ontarians that will certainly result: businesses are wondering how they will be compensated for the credits they’ve already purchased, which will cost the government — and in turn, taxpayers — dearly in payouts, litigation, or both. Western Climate Initiative (WCI), the market that Ontario is a part of, has already closed off the rest of the market to trades from Ontario, meaning businesses that hold credits have no one to sell them to.

The Ontario government has even more to lose by repealing cap-and-trade without proposing an alternative to address carbon pollution. Under this scenario, the federal government will apply their own carbon pricing option (the “backstop”) and decide how to return the money to the province, without input from Ontario. Why throw away a custom-made pricing system designed to address Ontario’s unique competitiveness concerns for an off-the-rack one?

Premier-designate Ford has said that he’ll challenge the federal government’s authority to apply the federal carbon price. This is unlikely to yield a successful outcome. A legal opinion prepared for the Government of Manitoba in 2017 concluded that the federal government has the right to apply the carbon pricing backstop. If the government goes down this road, Ontarians will be on the line for the costs of litigation in the order of $30 million.

Instead of putting resources into fighting the federal government on the backstop, we invite the new government to work with the current cap-and-trade framework while making changes to address any concerns.

Tackling gridlock and providing housing options

It’s clear that Ontarians and businesses in urban regions are looking to their new government to tackle gridlock, as commuting is a growing problem that is keeping workers in their cars and away from their families, and making it harder for businesses to recruit the right people. Transportation is the biggest source of carbon pollution in Ontario and a serious threat to Ontarians’ health. Conditions like cardiovascular disease are caused by the toxic substances that people breathe in when cars and trucks burn gas and diesel in their streets.

In urban areas, there’s no question that transit is the cheaper way to get around. However, frequent and reliable transit in Ontario’s biggest cities isn’t available to enough people yet.

In the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), the PC’s central idea on transit is to take over responsibility for subway infrastructure from the City of Toronto and add $5 billion in new subway funding. We welcome the recognition that Ontario needs continued transit investment, but it’s important to ask how many people $5 billion in capital funding will serve: subways cost vastly more per kilometre to build than other kinds of transit, take longer to build, and require much higher levels of ridership to be financially viable. The recent 9-km subway extension from Toronto to Vaughan alone cost about $3 billion, so it’s hard to see how a useful network could be built with $5 billion if only spent on subways.

To serve the rest of the region, $600 million from already-secured cap–and-trade revenue (again, funds collected from the biggest polluters) was directly earmarked by the previous government to help deliver and electrify two-way, all-day GO service (and other transit modernizations). GO expansion would give residents of communities like Waterloo Region, Hamilton and Markham the choice to use GO Transit throughout the day. If the new government is committed to cancelling cap-and-trade, it will need to find a way to replace the funds for these improvements.

To support transit viability and increase affordable housing supply, this government should work to accelerate development around transit by removing barriers for projects that fit with existing provincial policy. For example, the province could work with municipalities to speed up the right kind of development around transit and ensure family-friendly units are built. Compared to urban sprawl, which requires costly new roads and sewers, development on under-used land in existing communities reduces the property tax burden on residents across the municipality.

Keeping goods moving and supporting businesses

Goods movement is a backbone of Ontario’s economy, getting products to market and providing the things we need for daily life. Ontario exported nearly $200 billion in goods to the U.S. in 2017, and transportation and warehousing employs 340,000 Ontarians. The volume of goods moving by truck in Ontario is growing swiftly, fuelled by rapid economic and population growth: between 1990 and 2014, road freight activity in Ontario grew by 242 per cent. Trends like online shopping, just-in-time delivery, congestion and technological innovations are changing how and where goods move around. The trucking industry has to adapt to these realities.

Since fuel and maintenance account for about half of operating costs for most fleets, reducing fuel use is very important for business. It’s also important from a pollution perspective, since freight is now the source of just under 10 per cent of Ontario’s carbon pollution, and growing.

Building on the programs that exist to help businesses innovate and become more competitive, the PC government could champion efficient freight. As a first step, they should keep in place the provincial program that currently supports businesses, including family-run trucking companies, to retrofit their fleets to use less fuel (the Green Commercial Vehicles Program). Despite its strong support from the trucking industry, it will be lost unless the cap-and-trade system is kept in place or new funding is allocated. The government should also move forward with plans to establish a Strategic Goods Movement Network for the GTHA and better support municipalities who are leading the way on freight.

The next few months will have a lot of change in store for the province. Ontarians are looking to their new government to continue to safeguard their economic well-being and act with prudence in the best interest of all Ontarians. Early indications mean a course correction is necessary.

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As President Obama heads to the Arctic to discuss climate change, just mere weeks after approving Shell Oil’s bid to drill for oil in the treacherous Chukchi Sea, a very different group is sounding the alarm over the dangers of a warming climate. That group, surprisingly, is Wall Street bankers.

Citibank has released a new report showing that taking action now against the growing threat of climate change would save an astonishing $1.8 trillion by the year 2040. Conversely, the report says that if no action is taken, the economy will lose as much as $44 trillion during that same time period.

As Think Progress points out, the Citibank report takes into account the potential lost revenue from leaving resources in the ground — including 80% of coal reserves, half of the world’s gas reserves, and a third of global oil reserves — and still concludes that the global economy would see a net gain.

This report offers a very stark contrast to the typical talking point that we hear as to why we can’t take action on climate change — that action would simply cost too much. 

But this is not the first time that financial leaders have warned about the financial dangers of climate change.

Earlier this summer, a group of current and former Wall Street executives and former U.S. Treasury Secretaries warned that a 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures could result in property losses in the state of Florida totaling $23 billion by the middle of this century. On top of the economic losses from property being underwater, the Southeast would also begin to see an alarming rise in yearly deaths due to extreme heat, with some estimates putting the yearly death toll as high as 35,000 people a year.  Agricultural losses could be as high as 20% of current yield.

If Wall Street understands the threat of climate change, even if only in terms of dollars, then this begs the question as to why they continue to fund climate change denying politicians.

Since 2014, Wall Street banks, real estate firms, and insurance companies — all industries that have expressed enormous concern over the financial threat of climate change — have poured an astonishing $507 million into political campaigns and lobbying activities.  62% of this money went to Republicans.

The reason that Party split is significant is because we have more climate change-denying members of the House and Senate then at any other point in time, and nearly every single one of them are members of the Republican Party.  According to an analysis by Think Progress, 53% of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives deny that climate change is real, and 70% of Republicans in the Senate refuse to admit that climate change is real.

If they want to be taken seriously, and if they want their financial concerns addressed by politicians, then Wall Street bankers need to immediately stop the flow of corporate campaign cash that is going to climate change deniers. As long as those people hold seats of power in Washington, D.C., then we will continue to see action stalled year after year.

Image source – Huffington Post UK.

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This is a guest post by Kai Nagata, energy and democracy director at the Dogwood Initiative. 

Climate change shouldn’t be a left-wing versus right-wing political issue. I might take some flak for saying this, but “progressives” who claim only they have the correct ideas to fix the world are guilty of terrible hubris. And for "conservatives" to align themselves uncritically with global oil corporations betrays either intellectual laziness or cowardice.

All of us have a moral obligation to leave things better off for our kids. We might have different priorities or policy ideas, but at the end of the day we have to share this country — and parliament. And whether you believe in climate change or not, its social and economic impacts will eventually affect all of our lives.

The choice we face is whether to hunker down into polarized political camps, or reach out and find ways to work together.

This month I attended the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa for the third year in a row. It’s the country’s preeminent annual gathering of conservative activists, academics, campaign experts and candidates — and I look forward to it every spring.

Rex Murphy addressed the crowd at the Manning Networking Conference. Photo: Corporate Knights

People ask me “but you oppose oil tanker projects. What are you doing at a conservative conference?"

Why do conservatives in British Columbia oppose oil tankers? For one thing, they believe the integrity of our democracy is more important than the profits of Chinese state-owned oil companies — or a bunch of ex-Enron executives in Houston. The same conservatives believe the rights of local people should trump the reelection plans of politicians in Ottawa. And many believe that if we can’t find a way to use our oil safely and fairly, we should leave it in the ground for another day.

There’s nothing conservative about blanketing the sea floor in bitumen because we couldn’t figure out how else to balance a budget. And there’s nothing conservative about building bigger and bigger fossil fuel infrastructure when common sense tells us we need to head in a new direction.

Don’t take my word for it. Look up Bob Inglis, a former six-term Republican congressman from the “reddest corner of the reddest state in America:" South Carolina. Lauded by pro-life groups and the National Rifle Association, Inglis is very conservative. But in 2010 the Tea Party (backed by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch) helped a rookie Republican challenger defeat congressman Inglis in a primary.

Why? According to Inglis, it’s because he started raising the alarm about climate change.

Inglis spoke on a panel at the Manning conference called “Market-based Environmental Conservation.” His argument, delivered in a folksy drawl, was this: as mega-storms, drought and sea level rise kick in, fearful citizens will demand a response. Conservatives can either get ahead of the emissions curve now, or watch their nightmare come to life: big government running everyone’s lives.

Tax polluters now, Inglis says, and you create incentives for companies to emit less carbon. Keep pretending climate change is fiction, and the only option left when things get really bad will be top-down management by the state – the socialist response.

In reality we need a combination of both. We need government policy makers and private-sector innovators pulling in the same direction. Right now we have political gridlock — and emissions keep rising. Getting past that is going to require a bit of Naomi Klein, a bit of Bob Inglis.

It’s a myth that conservatives don’t care about the environment. Our province is full of good-hearted gun owners in big pickup trucks who spend a lot more time outdoors than the typical Gastown activist. These hunters and anglers, farmers and ranchers know that humans have a duty to steward the land. They agree with Preston Manning that “conservatism and conservation come from the same root.”

One of Manning’s friends, former Conservative cabinet minister Monte Solberg, explained this worldview to conference-goers in terms I found quite moving:

“That’s the milieu I grew up in: Conservatism and conservation. Conservatism was about human flourishing, families and faith, markets and individual freedom,” said Solberg, who grew up in rural Saskatchewan and Alberta.

“But it was also about stewardship of the land, respect for nature, and an acknowledgement that our surroundings and the kind of communities we grow up in matters, because our communities shape us. That’s a conservatism that is integrated and whole, and it’s still the conservatism I believe in.”

Glacier Lake in Banff National Park. Photo: National Parks Conservation Association

Solberg advocates conservation projects as a bridge between political solitudes. You know, like sloshing around in waders planting marsh grass or counting birds. Whether you think climate change is “hokum,” as Solberg puts it — or the biggest problem ever to face humanity — we need to roll up our sleeves and get used to working together.

“Restoring wetlands, forests and prairie does much more than just create habitat for animals, or clean the air, land and water, or mitigate flooding, or provide water for livestock, or give us new places to camp, hunt and fish,” says Solberg. “Wetlands, prairie and trees naturally sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide.”

Is that enough to fix the whole world? Perhaps not. But conservation is something people can get behind no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. And going for a hike sure beats shouting at each other from different ideological silos. I think Solberg is offering a worthwhile idea that could make it easier to tackle more difficult tasks later on, like drafting collaborative legislation.

So, progressive comrades, I’m tired of hearing that “Stephen Harper is destroying Canada.” It may feel satisfying to say around the dinner table or brave to post on Facebook, but it just makes Conservative organizers chuckle. If your goal is to elect somebody else, you’re going to have to convince people who voted for a Conservative MP in 2011 that their representative has done a poor job on their behalf and no longer deserves their support. That conversation has to start with mutual trust and respect.

Conservative friends, if you think letting global energy companies write their own rules is responsible governance — well, you’re just being taken advantage of. Alberta tried that and look where they ended up: public finances a mess, nothing in the Heritage Trust Fund, treaties broken, water polluted and reputational damage worldwide (ironically now restricting market access in the U.S. and Europe).

If we’re going to ride out the next few decades without major disruption to our lives due to climate change, burnable fuels will need to be conserved. Each province will need a plan for how to ration out that fossil energy long enough to power the transition to cleaner sources of power. And we’ll need a strategy to integrate those policies at the national and continental level.

Waiting around for the perfect solution is not an option. We have to find whatever common ground will be supported by a democratic majority of citizens at the local level and start from there. Don’t worry, saying the words "climate change" doesn’t make you a pinko: look at Bob Inglis. And taking inspiration from Monte Solberg doesn’t make you a progressive traitor.

At the end of the day, energy use is not a left-right issue. You can still read Ayn Rand by the light of a photovoltaic cell — just as people enjoyed Das Kapital next to their coal-oil lamps.

Image Credit: Typhoon Halong via NASA

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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.

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Canadians give more of their time to the non-profit sector than to organized politics.

While only 10 per cent have volunteered on a political campaign in the last five years, 55 per cent report having volunteered for a non-profit in the past year. An even larger proportion, about 58 per cent, report being involved with a non-profit community group.

Due to several troubling indicators of the health of Canadian democracy, my non-profit group Samara developed the Democracy Talks program to understand Canadians’ experiences with politics and the barriers they face to political participation.

A number of Democracy Talks participants explained that the social aspect and participatory nature of working with community groups makes them much more inviting than political offices or parties. In contrast to the frustration or power imbalance they’ve felt with political organizations, they feel welcomed and encouraged by community groups to make a difference on their chosen issue.

According to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer the non-profit sector is the most trusted sector in Canada, with 73 per cent of people saying they put some level of trust in non-profits. Only 58 per cent felt the same way about government. Given the confidence non-profit community groups enjoy, and the fact that many are formed around issues that are inherently political (such as neighbourhood safety, the environment or international development), non-profit community groups are well-positioned to help their members engage in political issues. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

By bringing discussions about politics into their programming, community groups can normalize such discussions for their members and reinforce the idea that political participation is socially acceptable and desirable. As community groups continue to provide these opportunities, the members who take part become more likely to translate their discussions into political engagement.

A recent American study clearly shows the impact that the non-profit sector can have on citizen engagement — in this specific case, on voter turnout.

In the 2012 general election in the U.S., the group Non-Profit Vote studied voter registration and found that turnout for those who had been registered by a non-profit was significantly higher than turnout in the general population — 74 per cent vs. 68 per cent. The group also found that because of non-profits’ reach and roots within communities, they were particularly good at mobilizing segments of the community who are usually underrepresented in politics.

It is well known that personally asking someone to vote is the most effective way to influence them to do so. However, because underrepresented groups are often seen as having a low propensity to vote, political parties tend to ignore them when registering voters. Non-Profit Vote’s study shows that non-profit community groups can effectively step in to fill this pivotal role.

Citizens Engaged With Non-Profits More Likely to Vote

Through Democracy Talks, we met two individuals whose experiences capture the impact that community groups can have on democratic engagement.

Uzma Irfan is a Pakistani-Canadian who has lived in Malton, Ontario, for 14 years. Today, she is a leader in her community and works with local city councillors and MPPs on a wide variety of initiatives. Yet she told us that only one year ago she felt “hesitant to talk to political leaders [due to] a lack of confidence.” Her turning point came when she joined a local group called the Malton Women Council. The council provided her with training, and trusted her with opportunities to represent their needs in high-level meetings with her political representatives. Now she says she can “talk to politicians easily.”

James Wattam had a similar experience. He joined an Engineers Without Borders campus group at his university in Saskatchewan, where he received specialized training in interacting with MPs. He says the training made him “more comfortable with raising [his] voice.” James now serves as the campus group’s vice president of advocacy, regularly meeting with MPs throughout the province and pushing forward Engineers Without Border’s international development goals.

Through their non-profit community groups, both Uzma and James learned the skills needed to engage with organized politics. Further, in both cases the non-profit group has provided them a platform from which to constructively contribute to public policy development. Their experiences illustrate an important pattern noted in Samara’s public polling: 73 per cent of those who report having been active in a non-profit group in the past 12 months also report that they voted in the last election. By contrast, just 62 per cent who had not been active with a group said they voted.

One Conversation at a Time

To be in the room during a Democracy Talk is to witness the impact that one conversation can have.

The comfortable spaces that community groups provide combined with a deep knowledge of issues that interest their members allows them to create empowering opportunities for those who might otherwise be frustrated, intimidated or hesitant to get involved.

Most research on the role of community groups in increasing political engagement has been done in an American context, while attention in Canada has largely focused on increasing voter turnout. The fact that turnout levels remain low indicates, however, that traditional approaches to mobilizing voters are not working as well as we might hope.

It is for this reason that Democracy Talks works with non-profit community groups on political education and mobilization between elections, starting with something as simple as an invitation to talk about politics.

In the coming years, Samara will work closely with community partners, settlement agencies, ESL teachers and campus groups to continue to facilitate conversations that open up the world of politics to Canadians who are too often left out of political discussions.

The proportion of the Canadian public engaging in public policy and politics over the past 30 years has been on the decline. By tackling the roots of citizens’ disengagement by connecting with citizens through non-profit groups, hopefully it won’t take another 30 years to turn things around. 

Alison Loat is the executive director and co-founder of Samara, a charitable organization dedicated to increasing political participation in Canada. Find out more about Democracy Talks online or contact John Beebe at john.beebe@samaracanada.com.

This article originally appeared in The Philanthropist.

Image Credit: Zack Embree

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This is guest post by Dr. Patrick Stokes, professor of philosophy at Deakin University. It originally appeared on The Conversation and is republished here with permission.

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what’s an opinion?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Ms. Dorey has no medical qualifications, but argues that if Bob Brown is allowed to comment on nuclear power despite not being a scientist, she should be allowed to comment on vaccines. But no-one assumes Dr. Brown is an authority on the physics of nuclear fission; his job is to comment on the policy responses to the science, not the science itself.

So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion?

If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.

But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.

On Monday, the ABC’s Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from – you guessed it – Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was “accurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups.” But this implies an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise. Again, if this was about policy responses to science, this would be reasonable. But the so-called “debate” here is about the science itself, and the “choice groups” simply don’t have a claim on air time if that’s where the disagreement is supposed to lie.

Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: “there’s evidence, and there’s bulldust,” and it’s no part of a reporter’s job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise.

The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of “openly calling for censorship of a scientific debate.” This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all – or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it “confuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue.” Again, two senses of “entitlement” to an opinion are being conflated here.

So next time you hear someone declare they’re entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you’ll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.

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The Antarctic ice sheet is falling into the ocean, $1.1 trillion of investments are at risk due to a carbon bubble and the U.S. President is saying climate change is already affecting his country — by all accounts, you'd think the debate over global warming would be settled once and for all.

Yet it rages on. Recent polling shows public concern over climate change has fallen in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia over the last several years.

If there’s agreement among the world’s experts, why on earth is their disagreement among the world’s non-experts? And why is that disagreement so deeply polarized?

In a recent public lecture about polarized public discourse, DeSmog Canada founder and president Jim Hoggan posed the question: “Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?”

This is not a rhetorical question.

This type of question, however, does tend to be posed rhetorically, perhaps with your hands being thrown up in desperation, moments before walking away. But it’s a question that matters, because so long as we’re just shouting at one another, we fail to make progress on the world’s big issues.

So let’s take the question seriously — it deserves it and it just might get us somewhere.

Cultural cognition: we're all running in cultural packs

Sometimes, arguments aren’t really at all about what they appear to be about. So-called "debate" on environmental or economic policy, for example, can at times be more about articulating competing perspectives than it is about "debating" how we might make progress on important issues.

"Debates" like this can (and arguably do) remain on an entirely superficial level.

But if we’re not engaging in real dialogue, then what are we actually doing?

According to experts at Yale University, we’re engaging in the practice of “cultural cognition.” Simply put, cultural cognition refers to our tendency to conform our beliefs to the cultural packs that we run with. What we might be doing in a “debate” is actually articulating the position our cultural group has on an issue.

This becomes really interesting, according to the folks at Yale, when we’re looking at issues of scientific consensus — that is, issues that aren’t really up for debate.

Debates are as much about culture as about science

Climate change, the disposal of nuclear waste and gun control are all contentious issues that rely heavily on scientific research. Yet, these issues are also largely cultural, and of significant political importance. They tend to be issues for which there is high scientific consensus and low public consensus.

So, how can we better understand the deep running undercurrents of cultural polarization that happen as a result of "cultural cognition?"

According to Dan Kahan, a Yale law and psychology professor who works on the university's cultural cognition project, we’d need to explain how we develop our viewpoints, not based on the research of experts and scientists, but in response to our community, as a means of identifying with our social group.

In a recent paper, "Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk," Kahan and his colleagues outline how individuals develop opinions on scientific matters by identifying trustworthy experts. But just who passes the test of being a trustworthy expert varies widely between groups with opposing worldviews.

“We hypothesized that scientific opinion fails to quiet societal dispute on such issues not because members of the public are unwilling to defer to experts but because culturally diverse persons tend to form opposing perceptions of what experts believe,” the report states.

Overall, this leads to a sort of group-think confirmation bias.

“Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept as a result of a cultural availability effect that influences how readily they can recall instances of expert endorsement of those positions.”

A little more plainly, this means that sometimes we’re a little overzealous in our endorsements of those we like. If the right person says it, we’re a little too quick to listen. If it came from "our side," we’ll tone down the criticism.

We listen to the science — when it agrees with us

And it gets more interesting. Kahan ties the tendency to agree or disagree with scientific consensus into deep and opposing worldviews. He divides these into two basic camps: those holding "hierarchical and individualistic” views and those holding “egalitarian and communitarian” outlooks — more or less the groups falling on one side or the other of the left-right divide.

But, even more interesting than that, there was no argument to be made that groups on the "left" were any better at discerning scientific consensus than groups on the "right."

As Kahan’s team found, both groups diverged from scientific consensus and expertise (scientific opinion endorsed by the National Academy of the Sciences) “in a pattern reflective of their respective predispositions.”

It turns out, “both hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians are fitting their perceptions of scientific consensus to their values.”

That means taking a stand on issues like environmental policy is more a matter of personal identification than scientific “fact.”

For this reason, our belonging to a group (which, of course, we all do) can be problematic. We might buy into a group’s entire ideological system, rather than retain an open and nuanced view of a contentious political issue.

Maybe hold off on drinking the Kool-Aid

And, to make matters worse, groups often have internal inconsistencies. And what happens then, when we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and have adopted a wholesale perspective on an issue, instead of recognizing that a single group can be right on some things and wrong on others?

Advocating for any given environmental policy shouldn’t have to mean you immediately agree with every other supposedly progressive grassroots opinion emerging from that group.

That’s an important distinction: you can say one thing, without saying all those other things. You can advocate environmental policy change without joining the entire club.

Why does that matter?

When we think of polarized debate, we picture opposed extremes talking past one another in a state of logic schism. Two groups, missing one another’s point, and depicting one another in an adversarial light.

How much of your thinking is done for you?

But there is another side to polarization. It’s not just about the two sides repelling one another; it’s also about what happens to each side individually. And it’s about us, as individuals.

The issue is one of how the individual sits within group mentality. Clearly, we share both a cultural and evolutionary propensity for grouping ourselves together. This has, and continues to, serve us well in many regards. But group mentality has a particularly adverse effect: if you’ve already decided which side you’re on, then a lot of your decisions are already made.

A lot of your thinking is done for you.

So, back to that original question: “Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?”

It’s not just because two sides are talking past one another. The problem with this image is that, in it, we fail to take responsibility for our own shortcomings, as if we were saying: "We’re right, but they’re just not hearing us!"

The challenge of overcoming “cultural cognition,” then, lies in our intentional open-mindedness and also our careful communication.

Keeping an open mind is for our own sake: so our thinking doesn’t become stagnated, so that we can remain open to those big ideas when they finally come to us.

If current climate science is any indication (and yes, we’re aware that we’ve chosen to identify with the world’s most prominent scientists), the stakes are high.

Photo: Screen grab from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Climate change debate

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This past week was, in the continually escalating climate change war, one of great disconnect, confusion and uncertainty.

While there is no doubt that humankind finds itself in the middle of a much-needed transition away from the business-as-usual model of burning fossil fuels, powerful and manipulative forces continue to resist a growing movement to use greener, cleaner energy.

Many of those sinister forces are headquartered, or operate in, the United States which boasts the world’s greatest economy while being the second worst emitter of greenhouse gasses after China.

So it came as a shock to many mainstream media outlets this week when the third U.S. National Climate Assessment report said Tuesday that climate change is already negatively affecting the United States and the future looks even more dismal if coordinated mitigation and adaptation efforts are not immediately pursued.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” notes the massive NCA report.

Looking at impacts on human health, water, energy, transportation, agriculture, forests, and ecosystems across the country’s eight major regions, the report painted a bleak picture for the U.S. and the rest of the world if governments don’t quickly agree to aggressively fight climate change at the domestic and international level.

After all, the saying goes, an atmosphere overheated and polluted by emissions from oil, coal and gas doesn’t respect national borders. This is one fight we all share and the chickens are coming home to roost.

An urgency to act did not escape the eye of The New York Times editorial board which, after reading the NCA report, zeroed in on just three regional climate change catastrophes in the making.

Singling out the “the climate-change deniers in Congress and industry allies” for contributing to climate change, the editorial noted the southwestern part of the country is expected to get drier, see increased wildfires and reduced agricultural harvests. The eastern seaboard, meanwhile, will have more destructive storms and higher sea levels. And forests will die in Alaska while more permafrost melts, speeding up the release of greenhouse gasses such as methane.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.

Observers were saying the report may give President Barack Obama more power to deal with climate change, the environment and energy issues through administrative amendments during his last 2.5 years in office. Indeed, the White House issued a media release saying the report underscores “the need for urgent action to combat the threats from climate change, protect American citizens and communities today, and build a sustainable future for our kids and grandkids.”

Two days later, the Carbon Tracker Initiative said investors could lose more than $1.1 trillion worth of investments to potentially unburnable fossil fuel deposits if governments act to fight climate change by agreeing the deposits need to stay in the ground.

The report identifies oil reserves in the Arctic, oilsands and in deepwater deposits at the high end of the carbon/capital cost curve. Projects in this category “make neither economic nor climate sense” and won’t fit into a carbon-constrained world looking to limit oil-related emissions, Carbon Tracker stated in a press release.

In addition, the report emphasized the high risk of Alberta oilsands investment, noting the reserves “remain the prime candidate for avoiding high cost projects” due to the region’s landlocked position and limited access to market.

“Our analysis also shows that if demand for oil is not substantially reduced we are clearly heading for a level of warming far in excess of 2°C,” the report said, “which reveals that there is no free lunch here for investors.

“Either policy and technological tipping points will reduce demand in line with our analysis or we will face levels of warming described as catastrophic by many.”

Speaking of potential catastrophes, Queensland on Thursday approved what would become the largest coal mine in Australia despite fears that an accompanying port could damage the Great Barrier Reef which is already seeing corals dying from climate change developments.

If that approval — which still needs to be given the go-ahead by the national government before the $16-billion mine can be built — seems strange, it’s also worth knowing that almost 80 per cent of Queensland is now dealing with a prolonged drought that some are linking to climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

Lastly, but certainly not least, Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance company, now wants insurers to incorporate future climate change scenarios into their business models since damage from extreme weather-related events have cost a reported $200 billion over the past 10 years.

On Thursday, Lloyd’s released a report saying that extreme weather cost the insurance industry more than $127 billion in 2011 alone, making it the record year for natural catastrophe.

Trevor Maynard, leader of Lloyd’s exposure management and reinsurance team, said climate change is expected to continue to happen even if strong action is taken to cut greenhouse gases.

“The urgent need to mitigate carbon emissions remains as critical now as before,” Maynard added.

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When Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner Keith Stewart filed an official complaint with Elections Canada, he did a lot more than question the implications of the Ethical Oil Institute’s collusion with the Conservative Party of Canada: he called national attention to the corrosive effect oil money has had on Canadian politics in recent years.

“At the broadest level,” Stewart told DeSmog Canada via e-mail, “we are trying to rebalance the playing field between money and people power in Canadian politics. You can never eliminate the influence of money on politics, but you can limit it and make it more transparent.”

Greenpeace’s request for an investigation is based on the fact that corporate donations to political parties are banned in federal politics — yet money raised by the Ethical Oil Institute appears to have been spent on advertising and other activities developed and implemented by people directly involved in the Conservative Party of Canada. The institute does not disclose its funding sources, but its website states it does “accept donations from Canadian individuals and companies, including those working to produce Ethical Oil.”

Stewart’s request outlines the revolving-door relationships driving pro-oilsands communications strategies from Fort McMurray to Ottawa and how deeply those relations are embedded in the political soil. The institute was founded in July 2011 by Alykhan Velshi, who left Jason Kenney’s political staff to create Ethical Oil. He returned within a few months to a senior position in the Prime Minister’s Office.

A Greenpeace map of the overlapping relations between Ethical Oil and the Conservative government. Click to enlarge.

Ultimately, the request to investigate the Ethical Oil Institute’s use of contributions to carry out a Conservative agenda has to do with uprooting the pernicious influence of oil on Canadian democracy.

“We are trying to prevent the oil patch from pouring money into an Ethical Oil-led, pro-Conservative ad campaign in advance of the 2015 federal election,” Stewart said.

According to Stewart, Ethical Oil “is trying to import a U.S. model of establishing fake grassroots groups” to lend cultural legitimacy to an “elite agenda.” In this case, he said the campaign is designed to make the protection of oil interests — in the face of a warming world — seem “somehow in the interest of the average citizen.”

“It’s dishonest and destructive,” he said.

Ethical Oil responded to the complaint by claiming “EthicalOil.org does not give any money to any political party, nor has Ethical Oil campaigned in any election,” even though Greenpeace’s charge is leveled at the Ethical Oil Institute, not against the website EthicalOil.org — which is just one aspect of the institute’s work.

The Ethical Oil Institute is behind arguments such as Canada’s oil being like fair-trade coffee and foreign-funded interests lurking behind Canada’s environmental movement. The accusations have been instrumental in the ongoing audits of Canada’s most prominent environmental charities, many of whom were targeted in Ethical Oil attacks.

“Ethical Oil is trying to hide the corrosive effect of oil on our politics by telling Canadians that the poor little oil companies are being picked on by big mean environmentalists,” Stewart said.

Yet, as Stewart lays out in his letter to Elections Canada, the work of the Ethical Oil Institute has been in lockstep with the Conservative party to influence public opinion on oil development and mischaracterize environmental groups.

“Their attack on environmental charities is a blatant attempt to silence those who are critical of the Harper government agenda on oil and the environment and to block a national conversation on what kind of an energy future we want,” he said.

Ultimately, Stewart said, Canada needs to start taking climate science seriously, a move impaired by the work of groups like Ethical Oil.

“I’d like to see the government take the latest reports from the IPCC and boil them down to what this means for Canada in terms of possible impacts and what opportunities are there for us on an energy pathway that is consistent with avoiding the worst impacts of climate change,” Stewart said.   

“We could then take these on the road and have the kind of community-led discussions that have happened before on the issue of national unity, which could help build consensus on what we need to do.”

Image Credit: Greenpeace Canada

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