During her recent election campaign, Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley pledged to raise Alberta’s minimum wage from $10.20 an hour to $15 by 2018, which would make the province’s minimum wage the highest in the country — by far.

Not so fast, objects economist Ron Kneebone. In a National Post commentary a week after the election, Kneebone argues that raising the minimum wage will do little to fight poverty. He suggests other, less achievable, policies.

Notley’s platform also included a pledge to raise corporate tax rates, review oil and gas royalties and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Not so fast, objects economist Jack Mintz. In a National Post article published the day after Kneebone, Mintz asks, “how many times can you skin the cat?” If Notley raises corporates taxes, capital will take flight, he predicts. “Some companies are planning to shift profits out of Alberta if the rate goes up to 12 per cent,” he says, as if profits don’t already leave the province because the energy sector is mainly foreign owned.

A third promise Notley made was to promote the upgrading and refining of Alberta’s natural resources within the province to deliver better value to Albertans.

Not so fast, objects economist Trevor Tombe. In a National Post commentary six days after Mintz, Tombe calculates that oil and gas extraction adds more value per job than refining. But the real comparison should be refining in Alberta compared with refining — and adding value — elsewhere.

Aside from being economists, having serious problems with NDP proposals and getting major play in the National Post, Kneebone, Mintz and Tombe share something else: they are associated with the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy (SPP). Mintz is school director, Kneebone director of the tax and economic growth program, and Tombe an economics department academic who publishes frequently through the SPP.

In just one month, the SPP had taken three swipes at Notley’s platform.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

And there will be more to come because the SPP isn’t just a degree-granting academic institution, it’s also an industry-supported think tank embedded within the university.

Like all industry-backed think tanks, the SPP’s purpose is to produce research that supports the industry and the free market. If Notley strays too far afield from industry consensus, rest assured the SPP will be on her case.

Industry’s Big (Reputational) Problem

Canada’s oil and gas industry has had a big problem: it’s the least trusted source of information about energy issues.

This was a key finding of a survey commissioned in February 2015 by Alberta Oil, a magazine, as DeSmog’s Emma Gilchrist points out, “destined for the desks of the energy sector’s senior executives and decision-makers.”

These energy sector executives may oppose minimum-wage and corporate-tax hikes and increased oil sands refining in Alberta, but it’s futile for them to fulminate publicly about Notley’s plans, if the Alberta Oil survey is to be believed.

Only 14 per cent of survey respondents found energy company executives to be a credible source of information on oilsands development, and just 11 per cent trusted industry information about carbon emissions.

Perhaps the tens of millions of dollars Enbridge was spending to promote its pipelines and the millions more spent by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers to persuade Canadians about the amazing benefits of oil sands development were well and truly wasted.

But Alberta Oil’s survey did reveal a ray of hope for the industry. At 53 per cent, respondents regarded the academic community as the most trusted and credible source of information. So if industry executives can’t speak for the industry, perhaps academics can.

The School of Public Policy, Born of Oil Money 

The School of Public Policy was established in 2008 with a donation of $4 million from James Palmer, one of Canada’s leading oil and gas lawyers, Palmer perhaps recognizing industry’s credibility problems. At the time, all three major Alberta political parties were calling for higher royalties.

Who would speak for the industry?

With Palmer’s money the university hired tax specialist Jack Mintz, CEO of the corporate-sponsored C.D. Howe Institute, to head the SPP. Like C.D. Howe, corporate influence in the SPP is heavy. The connections to one company in particular — Imperial Oil — are extensive. (This is not to suggest that industry money can buy supportive academic research, but that academics sympathetic to business and conservative viewpoints are recruited for such positions.)

Mintz himself is an Imperial Oil director and a director of the Imperial Oil Foundation, that doles out $6-to-$7 million a year to organizations in communities where Imperial Oil operates, to build good will. Like all directors, Mintz is obligated to advance the best interests of the company, as former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft points out. “The directors, in exercising their powers and discharging their duties, shall act honestly and in good faith with a view to the best interests of the corporation,” says Imperial Oil’s 2014 Management Proxy Circular. As head of SPP, Mintz’s loyalties seem murky.

Palmer was one of Canada’s most celebrated energy lawyers (he died in 2013), specializing in corporate mergers and acquisitions. He was on the boards of numerous oil and gas companies and for a few years lobbied the federal government for Imperial Oil and its parent company, ExxonMobil, promoting their oil pipeline proposals.

Imperial Oil CEO Tim Hearn had just retired and joined the SPP’s advisory council; his company donated $1 million to the school and another $200,000 several years later. Hearn’s successor, Bruce Marsh, was a featured speaker at SPP’s kick-off conference. Jean-Sébastien Rioux, recruited to lead the SPP’s Master’s program, had previously headed Imperial Oil’s lobbying and public relations efforts.

The school seems a marriage of business, ideology and politics. A decade before it was established, a group of political scientists, historians, and economists at the university emerged as the intellectual backup for neoliberal and social-conservative causes.

Advancing the Conservative Agenda

Dubbed the Calgary School, these academics coalesced around arguments to slash social programs, downsize government, promote business, deregulate the economy, and cut taxes. Led by political scientist Tom Flanagan, the Calgary School had enormous influence on federal policy and politics.

It helped shape the direction of the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance and dominated the thinking of Stephen Harper, who studied under Calgary School professors, selected one — Flanagan — as a close adviser, and picked the student of another — Ian Brodie, who studied under political scientist Ted Morton — as his first chief of staff.

After the school was up and running, the entire Calgary School migrated into its ranks. Brodie became director of research, Flanagan a distinguished fellow and Morton an executive in residence. Economist Robert Mansell, a Calgary School associate who had been one of Harper’s professors, became the SPP’s academic director.

Four SPP program directors, including Kneebone, are, or were, Fraser Institute fellows. SPP receives about $200,000 a year from Peter Munk’s Aurea Foundation, which has emerged in recent years as paymaster to the right through its funding of the Fraser Institute and other neoliberal think tanks.

And there are the political connections. Flanagan is well-known as a mentor to former Wildrose leader Danielle Smith; Morton was a minister of Energy in the Ed Stelmach government; and Jean-Sébastien Rioux was chief of staff to Jim Prentice when he was federal minister of Indian Affairs and Industry.

Given the funding and the lineup of personnel, it’s not surprising that SPP’s research is hostile to Notley’s program.

They’ll be carefully monitoring the NDP’s moves on the energy and environment files. SPP authors have already sounded the alarm that Alberta must get its bitumen to markets in the Pacific Rim as quickly as possible, or risk losing out to competitors. Canada needs to get on with the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain expansion projects as quickly as possible, the authors urge.

A paper by Trevor Tombe about “the facts” on Canada’s energy trade presents as one fact the claim that promoting energy trade “requires lowering investment barriers and creating a predictable and stable investment climate for foreign direct investment,” certainly not the capital flight that Jack Mintz threatens.

Notley will be looking across the legislative aisle for clues to opposition strategies. She should also be looking over her shoulder to the School of Public Policy for the “research” and policy that will provide the real opposition to her government.

Image: Industry Minister James Moore speaks at a Calgary School event 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.

After a rough year of collapsing oil prices and the embarrassing dethroning of Alberta’s longtime Progressive Conservative government, the oil and gas industry could use a win. The latest campaign from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) was probably designed to be one.

Alas.

Developed as part of CAPP's ‘Energy Citizens’ movement, the ‘Raise your Hand’ campaign is well-designed and clearly expensive. Online and off, it features smiling multiracial faces with hands raised — overlayed with hand-drawn outlines of patriotic maple leaves. There are cheerful videos, interactive bus shelter ads and an online submission form to stay connected. It even has a hashtag (#ryhcanada), the extremely limited Twitter impact of which must be giving at least one advertising executive an ulcer right now.

As Mark Hume noted in the Globe and Mail this weekend, an ad campaign that attempts to co-opt patriotism for its own ends is hardly something new. NGOs have done it for years. So have McDonalds, Molson's beer and Roots. And yet, as Hume says, “CAPP’s slogan — 'Raise your hand because you are proud of Canada’s oil and natural gas' — doesn’t quite have the same ring as one that urges you to raise your hand against racism, ignorance or disease.”

Hume writes that the campaign could have been more successful, had it not been launched in the same week as a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, which reminded “Canadians — and especially British Columbians where two new oil pipelines are proposed — what happens when one of those .001-per-cent accidents happen.”

I’m not so sure.

While the campaign is not a failure on par with the spectacular collapse of BC Ferries ‘#NameAFerry’ contest, its inability to spark public enthusiasm is not surprising. Even without the Santa Barbara oil spill, it’s reasonable to wonder if pipelines and patriotism fit together as naturally as the industry would have us believe. After all, it’s hard to raise our hands in blind allegiance when the failures and questionable behaviour of industry executives are so hard to ignore.

• Raise your hand if you remember that two years after it became public, CNRL is still unable to stop a slow leak at its Cold Lake in-situ drill site.
• Raise your hand if you recall how Plains Midstream — the Canadian analogue of Plains All American (the company whose failed pipeline spilled all that oil in Santa Barbara) — was fined $1.3 million for two giant pipeline spills in Alberta and was recently ordered to undergo an independent review of their safety procedures?
• Raise your hand if you remember how the industry leaders in oil and gas fought hard to keep employing temporary foreign workers, limiting opportunities for those smiley Canadians featured so prominently in their advertising?
• Raise your hand if you’re doubtful of the capabilities of Western Canada Marine Response Corporation touted by CAPP in the campaign after its slow response to Vancouver's relatively minor English Bay oil spill?
• Raise your hand if you saw the news this week that federal Industry Minister Greg Rickford spoke to an October 21, 2014 closed-door meeting of CAPP executives encouraging them to "work harder and spread the message of the oil industry?"

I could go on.

If recent polling is correct, 72 per cent of Canadians want to see more jobs created in the renewable energy industry. Fifty-eight per cent of Canadians go even further, wanting to see oil and gas use phased out in favour of renewable solutions. And even the Harper government has publicly acknowledged that climate change demands at least a little immediate attention.

So to the folks at CAPP and their marketing agency of record, may I humbly suggest an edit to your ask? Something a little more measured, a little more Canadian.

Raise your hand if you acknowledge that while oil and gas and other extractive industries are a big part of the Canadian energy mix now, they don’t have to be forever. That pipelines fail and transporting oil and gas is inherently dangerous. That if Canadians want to meet our climate goals without having to buy carbon credits from other countries, we need to start investing more in renewables.

Raise your hand if you agree we all deserve a more nuanced conversation about Canada's energy future.

Image Credit: CAPP

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No one admits to recording Richard Berman’s address to a room full of energy executives in Colorado Springs in June 2014, but it’s an eye-opener.

One unnamed industry executive recorded Berman’s remarks and was offended by them. He provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to the New York Times. DeSmog picked up the story the following day.

If the oil and gas industry is going to prevent environmental opponents from slowing down its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to use dirty tricks, Berman told the executives, whose companies specialize in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

At least four companies with Canadian fracking operations were in Berman’s audience — Devon Energy, Encana Oil and Gas, Ensign Energy Services and Newalta.

“Fear and anger have to be part of the campaign,” he said. “You got to get people fearful of what’s on the table” (what they might lose if environmentalists win) “and then you got to get people angry over the fact they are being misled” (by environmental groups).

Energy executives need to “think of this as an endless war,” he cautioned. “And you have to budget for it,” he warned, as he made a pitch for $3 million to run ads attacking environmentalists in a campaign he calls “Big Green Radicals.”[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Berman is founder and chief executive of Berman and Co., a Washington-based consulting firm that sets up non-profit front groups to attack unions, public-health advocates and consumer, safety, animal welfare and environmental groups.

He admitted that people are always asking him, “How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?” His reply was designed to reassure. “We run all of this stuff through non-profit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us. We’ve been doing this for some 20 years now.”

TransCanada’s Dirty War in Canada

Too bad the Edelman PR agency couldn’t guarantee the same anonymity to its client, TransCanada Corp., in its campaign to discredit critics of its proposed Energy East pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to refineries and export terminals on the Atlantic coast.

Documents released by Greenpeace Canada in November 2014 reveal a plan much more ambitious (and likely many times more costly) than Berman’s Big Green Radicals. But the framing is similar; where Berman says “Think of this as an endless war,” Edelman says “It is critical to play offence … We are running a perpetual campaign.”

The plans call for mobilizing 35,000 supporters (in the works), setting up an online hub (accomplished), extensive advertising (happening), researching the pipeline’s opponents (in the works), and recruiting allies and third-party voices (not known).

A week after the documents were made public, TransCanada cancelled its contract with Edelman, its anonymity blown. It’s not known who took over for Edelman, but someone has to do it — the war must go on.

An Anti-Environment History

The endless war began in 1962 when Bruce Harrison, then “manager of environmental information” for the Manufacturing Chemists Association, masterminded the industry’s campaign to discredit Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s book that raised the alarm that DDT and other pesticides were poisoning wildlife and endangering human health.

In their campaign to discredit Carson, Harrison and his colleagues, PR executives from Shell, DuPont, Dow and Monsanto, used the emerging practice of “crisis management,” which has been described as a mélange of “emotional appeals, scientific misinformation, front groups, extensive mailings to the media and opinion leaders, and the recruitment of doctors and scientists as ‘objective’ third-party defenders of agrichemicals.”

Substitute online hubs, Twitter and Facebook for extensive mailings and you have the blueprint for today’s campaigns.

Everything else remains the same.

Carson died of cancer two years later; Harrison went on to become a general in the endless war as a leading light in anti-environmental PR.

The war crossed the Canadian border in the late 1980s to attack environmentalists who were resisting clear-cut logging of B.C.’s old-growth forests. Inspiration for this ten-year-long campaign, dubbed “War in the Woods,” came from the Bellevue, Washington-based Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, whose name says it all.

The centre was funded by oil, chemical and timber companies, including B.C.-based MacMillan Bloedel, whose logging of pristine old-growth forests on the west coast of Vancouver Island was attracting growing opposition.

Leading the counter-attack were the centre’s Allan Gottlieb and Ron Arnold. Gottlieb was a fundraiser for conservative causes while Arnold was the strategist, like Rick Berman adept at setting up front groups. They created the “wise use movement,” a medley of industry groups held together by two principles: private property rights should have primacy over the public interest, and access to public lands for resource use and exploitation should be unrestricted.

Arnold liked “wise use” as a label for the movement: it is short and fits into a newspaper headline, and it is ambiguous enough to mean just about anything. But behind the soothing ambiguity is the iron fist. In his book, Ecology Wars, Arnold wrote, “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement” — total war, in other words.

In 1988, Gottlieb and Arnold brought 250 groups to Reno, Nevada, to start a movement that would oppose the environmental movement. MacMillan Bloedel flew some executives and the mayors of Port Alberni and Port McNeil to the conference to listen to speeches about how to do battle with “preservationists.”

As Arnold told the timber industry:

“The public is completely convinced that when you speak as an industry, you are speaking out of nothing but self-interest. The pro-industry citizen activist group is the answer to these problems. It can be an effective and convincing advocate for your industry. It can utilize powerful archetypes such as the sanctity of the family, the virtue of the close-knit community, the natural wisdom of the rural dweller… And it can turn the public against your enemies… I think you’ll find it one of your wisest investments over time.”

He recommended that Canadian timber executives organize grass-roots organizations that could be “an effective and convincing advocate for your industry.”

“Screw The Environment. We Need Jobs”

The executives and mayors went back to B.C. with a plan to draw the residents of resource towns into the fray. A year after the Reno Wise Use conference, a “coalition of people whose livelihoods depend on trees” held a provincial conference to launch a grassroots campaign to oppose the environmental campaign. Logger Mike Morton, an alderman in Ucluelet, a Vancouver Island logging town, stepped up as a spokesman.

Morton became chairman of Share the Clayoquot Society and the following year, executive director of Share BC, an umbrella organization for 22 local “share our forest” and “share our resources” groups (“share” meaning preserve a small portion of the land and “manage” the rest) set up by the forest industry.

Forest executives were able to turn the disaffection of rural and resource industry workers, farmers and small business people into anti-environmental sentiment. Woodworkers were losing their jobs, but not because of the actions of environmentalists. They needed to look to their employers, who were replacing thousands of workers with automated equipment and exporting raw logs instead of processing them in the province.

Environmental opposition built to a climax in the summer of 1993, when 850 people were arrested for blockading a road used by MacMillan Bloedel in its logging operations in Clayoquot Sound. It was billed as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Eight months later, in March 1994, 20,000 woodworkers and residents of timber-dependent towns massed on the B.C. legislature lawn to decry a B.C. government-commissioned land-use proposal for Vancouver Island that would protect 13 percent of the island’s land base. “Screw the Environment. We Need Jobs,” their signs read.

Labeled the “yellow ribbon campaign,” it was Share’s crowning achievement.

After eight years leading Share, Mike Morton had a new job as director of communications for the BC Liberal caucus. When the Liberals under Gordon Campbell won the 2001 election, Morton became director of communications for the premier, a post he retained after Christy Clark became premier.

By then the war in the woods was over but the war in the Alberta oilsands and in B.C.'s mines was well underway. 

Image Credit: Screenshot of an image of environmentalist Bill McKibben from a "Big Green Radicals" video by the Richard Berman-connected Enviromental Policy Alliance

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“Speak the truth, but not to punish.”

These are the words the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh told DeSmogBlog and DeSmog Canada founder, president and contributor James Hoggan one afternoon in a conversation about environmental advocacy and the collapse of productive public discourse.

Over the course of three years James (Jim) Hoggan has engaged the minds of communications specialists, philosophers, leading public intellectuals and spiritual leaders while writing a book designed to address the bewildering question: “why, when we know so much about the global environmental crisis, are we doing so little?”

Hoggan recently recounted some of the insights he has gained into this question when he spoke at the Walrus Talks “The Art of Conversation.”

He begins with the basic axiom shared by cognitive scientist Dan Kahan, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.” From that the logic follows – if we’re serious about resolving our environmental problems, we are going to have to attend equally to the state of our public discourse.

In Canada, says Hoggan, we face particular challenges when it comes to polluted pubic conversations, especially with the heightened tenor of rhetoric regarding environmentalism and energy issues surrounding the oilsands and proposed pipelines.

"The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign," he says, "has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively."

You can watch a short video of Hoggan’s talk on The Walrus, or read the transcript below:

Good evening, I’m Jim Hoggan. I wanted to start by saying I’m not speaking here as the chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, but as the author of a book that I’m writing called The Polluted Public Square.

In this book I’m on a personal journey to learn from public intellectuals. I travel from Oxford, to Harvard, to Yale to MIT; I had tea with the expert on public trust in the House of Lords dining room; I spent a week with the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh; I traveled to the Himalayas to interview the Dalai Lama. So I’ve spent three years on this journey. Originally I thought I was writing a book for other people, but I realized as I was going through this that I was actually writing a book for myself.

The book is about this question of public conversations and the state of public discourse. And the specific question I asked all of these people, was “why is it, in spite of all this scientific evidence, from experts in atmospheric, marine and life sciences, are we doing so little to fix these big environmental problems that we’re creating? And why isn’t public discourse on the environment more data driven? Why are we listening to each other shout rather than listening to what the evidence is trying to tell us?"

One of the first interviews I did was with a Yale Law School cognitive scientist named Dr. Dan Kahan. He had part of the answer for me. He said, “just as you can pollute the natural environment, you can pollute public conversations.”

He said that healthy public discourse is a public good that is every bit as important as the natural environment; that we should be willing to protect, consciously protect, the state and the health of public discourse; and that we were in Canada and the United States suffering from he called a ‘social pathology.’

And this kind of healthy public discourse, or healthy attitude to public discourse, is certainly something that we’re not paying much attention to in Canada these days.

In 2012 – let me take you back to something the Conservative government would probably rather we all forgot about – in early 2012 some folks in the oil and gas industry launched a PR campaign with this message: ethical oil is like fair trade coffee. It’s like conflict-free diamonds. It’s morally superior.

In 2012 the oil and gas industry worked closely with the Conservative government to convince Canadians that British Columbians who opposed tankers on the coast of B.C. were extremists working for American business interests.

Now, environmental activists have been polluting the public square for a long time: they’ve called the oilsands heroin, they’ve called it blood oil, they’ve called oil companies environmental criminals engaged in crimes against humanity.

Now who would have thought that this level of rhetoric could be raised any higher? But it was.

Senator Mike Duffy called B.C. charities “un-Canadian.” The minister of environment accused them of money laundering. The PMO called them “foreign funded radicals.” Senator Don Plett said, where would environmentalists draw the line on who they receive money from? Would they take money from Al-Qaeda? The Taliban? Hamas?

So in 2012, as Terry Glavin put it, suddenly we had sleeper cells of Ducks Unlimited popping up across Canada.

Now I’m not suggesting equivalency here. These environmentalists have the evidence of climate change on their side. They’re arguing against the inaction from an industry that’s in a lot of trouble as the world realizes that their product is changing the climate. And they haven’t done a very good job of handing that trouble.

I met a guy in Harlem at a coffee shop. His name is Jason Stanley and he writes for the New York Times and teaches philosophy of language and a class in democracy and propaganda at Yale. And he said that when oil from Fort McMurray is called ‘ethical oil,’ or coal from West Virginia is called ‘clean coal,’ it’s difficult to have a real discussion about the pros and cons. He explained that these kinds of improbable assertions, where words are misappropriated and their meanings twisted, are not so much about making substantial claims, but they’re about silencing.

He called them linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others.

He said Fox News engages in silencing when it describes itself ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there’s not such thing as fair and balanced. That there’s no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda.

Canada’s public square is polluted with a toxic form of rhetoric that insinuates that there are no facts, there is no objectivity, and that everyone is trying to manipulate you for their own interests. Our belief in sincerity and objectivity itself is under attack. So when everything is mislabeled and you can’t trust anything that anyone says, why bother with the public square?

The American linguist Deborah Tannen puts it this way: when you hear a ruckus outside your house at night, you open the window to see what’s going on. But if there’s a ruckus every night, you close the shutters and ignore it.

The ethical oil, foreign funded radicals campaign has made Canadians less able to weigh facts honestly, disagree constructively, and think things through collectively.

Now how you clean up the public square – my book is 120,000 words – that’s a big question for a seven-minute speech.

But let me say this: “I’m right, your wrong. Let me tell you what you should think” is not a great communications strategy.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me that, and also said it doesn’t work because we all think we’re right. Haidt argues that people are divided by politics and religion, not because some people are good and others are evil, but because our minds were designed for ‘groupish righteousness.’ Morality binds and blinds us. Our righteousness minds were developed by evolution to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth. Haidt suggests we step outside the self-righteousness of what he calls our moral matrix, and look to the Dalai Lama to see the power of moral humility and that we take the time to understand the values and worldviews of people we strongly disagree with.

I also interviewed Ted-prize winner Karen Armstrong who developed the charter for compassion. She put it this way: we must speak out against injustice, but not in a way that causes more hatred. She told me, remember what St. Paul said: charity takes no delight in the wrongdoing of others.

So my time’s up, but I just want to say one more thing. Since the 60s I’ve been reading Eastern philosophy and following particularly Zen Buddhism. So a little while ago David Suzuki and I were lucky enough to spend an afternoon with the famous Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And he kept saying to David, people don’t need to know more about destroying the planet. They already know they’re destroying the planet. You need to deal with the despair. So I kept listening to him and it sounded to me like he was saying we should go meditated.

So I said to him, “in Canada, Canadians expect the David Suzuki Foundation to speak up on behalf of the environment. You’re not saying we shouldn’t be activists?”

It’s hard, I’ve been trying to think of how I could describe the way he looked at me. But it was with this kind of silence and deepness that I can’t remember having anyone look at me like that before. So he looked at me and he said, “speak the truth but not to punish.”

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The province of Alberta has recently released a development plan for public schools that enlists Suncor Energy and Syncrude Canada in the creation of future Kindergarten to grade three curriculum. Oil giant Cenovus will partner in developing curriculum for grades four to 12.

The oil and gas industry’s involvement in the province’s educational development is creating concern among opposition parties and environmental organizations.

NDP Education Critic Deron Bilous called granting partnership status to industry “appalling.”

“Kindergarten to grade three is a very formative time in a child’s education where their minds are still developing. It is outrageous and appalling to have oil and gas companies involved in any way in developing curriculum for Alberta’s youngest students,” he said.

Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said “it’s definitely very disturbing that the Alberta government would see oil giants Syncrude and Suncor as key partners in designing Alberta’s K to three curriculum. Big oil doesn’t belong in Alberta’s schools.”

He added, “It’s time that the Alberta government realizes that what’s good for the oil industry isn’t what’s good for the rest of Alberta and especially not our children. While oil may run our cars for now it shouldn’t run our government or our schools. Ever.”

A page from the Alberta Government’s Curriculum Redesign document. Click the image to see the whole presentation.

Canada’s oil and gas industry has taken a notable interest in curriculum design and the general project of ‘energy literacy’ in recent years.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the country’s largest oil and gas lobby body, caused uproar last year when it partnered with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society in the creation of ‘Energy IQ,’ described as “an energy education resource for all Canadians…to engage Canadian teachers and students through curriculum-linked in-class learning tools, and to increase energy knowledge among the general public and community leaders.”

The province of Alberta has recently released a development plan for public schools that enlists Suncor Energy and Syncrude Canada in the creation of future Kindergarten to grade three curriculum. Oil giant Cenovus will partner in developing curriculum for grades four to 12.

The oil and gas industry’s involvement in the province’s educational development is creating concern among opposition parties and environmental organizations.

NDP Education Critic Deron Bilous called granting partnership status to industry “appalling.”

“Kindergarten to grade three is a very formative time in a child’s education where their minds are still developing. It is outrageous and appalling to have oil and gas companies involved in any way in developing curriculum for Alberta’s youngest students,” he said.

Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said “it’s definitely very disturbing that the Alberta government would see oil giants Syncrude and Suncor as key partners in designing Alberta’s K to three curriculum. Big oil doesn’t belong in Alberta’s schools.

He added, “It’s time that the Alberta government realizes that what’s good for the oil industry isn’t what’s good for the rest of Alberta and especially not our children. While oil may run our cars for now it shouldn’t run our government or our schools. Ever.”

Cameron Fenton, national director for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, wrote the partnership was “dangerous” and granted CAPP access to not only young and impressionable minds, but to the credibility of a trusted educational institution like the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.

“What’s potentially more concerning is the role that Canadian Geographic is playing. As a respected educational resource and publisher, their reputation is providing political cover for CAPP to present a dangerous and disturbing narrative and vision of the future of energy and climate change in Canada. Were CAPP to be taking this project forward on their own they would be the subject of great scrutiny by teachers, students and the public, something they probably hoped to avoid by using Canadian Geographic to take their industry spin into classrooms from grade 3 on up.”

Fenton suggests Canadians should keep in mind CAPP’s “dubious distinction of being Canada’s most vocal proponent of tar sands, fracking and other fossil fuel development.” He adds the industry lobby group is the largest in the country and has been a key player in Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, eliminating environmental laws, and undermining climate legislation. They are also a big spender when it comes to oilsands advertising.

Energy IQ only tells a portion of Canada’s energy story, says Fenton, and ignores crucial parts of the conversation, like the calls from reputable energy and insurance agencies to leave 80 per cent of fossil fuel reserves in the ground.

The industry-sponsored curriculum caught its own wave of backlash from students in Vancouver who gathered more than 600 hundred signatures in protest of the materials.

“Propaganda has no place in our schools,” their open letter to Canadian Geographic read. “The content of your program appears to be highly focused on the oil and gas industry, yet it is presented as something that deals with all possible types of energy.”

They continued, “we demand that our education system continues to maintain a progressive perspective when discussing energy-related issues. As such, we, the undersigned, ask that the Energy IQ Program is not used at our school.”

CAPP has led Energy in Action programs in Alberta since 2004 to teach children about the petroleum industry and its role in environmental stewardship. In 2011 Alberta awarded CAPP the Friends of Education Award for the program. More than 59 oil and gas companies have participated in the outreach program which has run through more than 80 schools across Canada.

Image Credit: Government of Alberta via Flickr

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The Harper government has hired an international public relations firm to oversee a $22 million advertising campaign to promote the oilsands and Canada's natural resources sector around the world.

The Canadian arm of PR firm FleishmanHillard won a bid for the initial $1.695 million contract to conduct the first phase of the ad campaign, reports the Toronto Star.

The first phase of the ad campaign will reach the United States, Europe, and Asia this year. If the firm's contract is renewed for 2015, it could be worth up to $4 million, with the remaining $18 million reserved for media buys.

FleishmanHillard, which has previously done strategic communications work and public opinion research for federal departments, has offices in all three targeted markets.

The firm will be developing and producing the ads for print, internet and television, and will be responsible for the drafting and coordination of public relations, advertising and social media strategies, according to Natural Resources Canada.

Natural Resources Canada's request for proposals (RFP) presents a plan for the campaign, focusing on "strengthening Canadas [sic] brand as a global leader in responsible resource development" and "[expanding] market access for Canadian natural resources, primarily energy." The word "responsible" is further underlined in the proposed messages.

While the campaign is to address Canada's entire natural resources sector, the RFP only explicitly mentions oilsands bitumen, pointing out how the latter industry has been "unfairly" targeted by proposals like the European Fuel Quality Directive "in part due to preconceived notions about the oil sands that are not supported by science."

The department suggests the campaign emphasize Canada as a "stable and secure choice" in sustainable energy, "compared to international alternatives," and outline the "unparalleled" investment opportunities in the country's energy sector.

Such messaging was tested in Washington focus groups in April 2013. HarrisDecima submitted a report to Natural Resources in September, which found the groups had a "neutral to positive" response to ads suggesting an increased energy partnership between the U.S. and Canada.

"Overall, it was fairly clear that Canada is held in fairly high regard, even if it is not often considered, and that an element of that high regard relates to Canada being a competent and trustworthy neighbour/partner — both in terms of industrial partnerships and acting responsibly," says the report, which cost $58,000 to commission.

Despite these results, the Obama administration has not yet been forthcoming in providing approval for the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, which faces strong environmental opposition in the U.S. Domestic opposition to various proposed pipeline projects including the Northern Gateway, which would transport crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia, also remains strong.

David Provencher, a spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, said that the ad campaign would ensure a "fact-based dialogue" to "better inform" markets about Canada's resource development.

"The objectives of the ad campaign are to raise awareness of Canada's environmental record and the shared U.S.-Canada energy interest and needs," said Provencher, in a statement.

"The campaign is also intended to raise awareness among decision-makers in Europe and the Asia Pacific that Canada is a secure, reliable and responsible supplier of crude oil, natural gas and other natural resources."

NDP House leader Nathan Cullen, who has voiced opposition to the Northern Gateway project, called the campaign an attempt by the Harper government to "greenwash" Canada's damaged international reputation as an environmentally friendly nation. He also questioned the allocation of public funds to help the energy industry with advertising.

"Of all the industries, I didn't know that oil and gas and mining companies were so impoverished that they couldn't take ads out in newspapers. I don't know why we're subsidizing Shell and Chevron in their efforts to sell oil. I think they're more than capable of doing that themselves," said Cullen.

FleishmanHillard's Ottawa office declined to comment on the campaign.

While the ad campaign's estimated budget is $22 million, Natural Resources Canada noted that the final cost will not be made public until the government releases its 2014-2015 annual report on advertising expenses.

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Jennifer Story of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently interviewed Alex Himelfarb, former chief of the Privy Council and member of the DeSmog Canada advisory board. Himelfarb recently co-authored with his son, Jordan Himelfarb, a collection of essays called Tax is Not a Four Letter Word. In this interview Story asks Himelfarb about the book and his efforts to shift they way Canadians think about taxes. 

Jennifer Story (JS): The sub-head of the book is “A different Take on Taxes in Canada”… different from what?

Alex Himelfarb (AH): Different from the predominant negative view of taxes as simply a burden from which we must be relieved. For decades now that’s precisely how our leaders have talked about taxes. Our tax conversation has become profoundly distorted. What’s missing in this conversation is what we get for the taxes we pay. We are more than just consumers and taxpayers. We are citizens with responsibilities for one another; we undertake to do some things together, things that we could never do alone or that we can do much better collectively. Taxes are the way we pay for those things. They’re the price of living in Canada and the opportunities that provides. Indeed, those opportunities exist because of the sacrifices and taxes of previous generations to build the Canada we inherited.

It’s become a political truism that politicians would have to be nuts to talk about taxes unless they’re promising more cuts. But that fear of taxes is limiting, dangerous. We need to shift the conversation, to recognize that the public services and goods we value have to be paid for and that tax cuts are not free. We cannot have Swedish levels of service and American levels of taxation.

We demand of our leaders to explain how they are going to pay for new services but, equally, we need to demand that they explain the COSTS of their promised tax cuts ­–­­­ to our quality of life, to our democracy, to our economy. Would we be so pleased with the next tax cuts if we knew they came with worsening traffic congestion, increased risks to food safety, longer wait times for health care, less help for the jobless and needy, rising inequality and environmental degradation? We seem only to talk about what government costs and not about what it gives.

Too much is at stake to let our identities as “consumers” and “taxpayers” supplant our citizenship and commitment to the common good.

(JS): You already knew more than your average citizen about taxes and the public good. What, if anything, were you surprised to learn during the editing of this book?

(AH): We worked with people who have much greater tax expertise. We learned a lot about the technical aspects, new kinds of taxes. But the biggest thing we learned is how profoundly this anti-tax conversation now dominates.

Of course, a minority will never be convinced, and we will always have legitimate disputes about the right amount and mix of taxes. But the majority does value what their taxes buy. Nonetheless, they worry about how government spends, inevitably  circling back to the problem of waste. Why would I want to pay taxes when so much is wasted?

Let’s be clear, I have never known a political leader who promoted more waste, less efficiency. Politicians are always reluctant to raise taxes and they all want to get as much bang for their revenue as possible.  Some governments are better at this than others, but over the past few decades, all governments have sought to get the best results at the lowest costs. Yet perceptions of wasteful spending persist.

In part, concern about government waste is a proxy for differences in values. What we call waste is often spending we don’t much like (say, the arts from the right, or military spending from the left). That’s the stuff of elections as we try to choose a government that reflects our priorities.

But here’s the thing: we can’t pick and choose a personalized, made-to-order government profile in the way we personalize our latest mobile device. We cannot unbundle government the way we are proposing to unbundle cable services. No political party, no government will be a perfect reflection of our personal preferences. In a pluralistic society, sometimes we pay for things we don’t like. For a democracy to work we must get beyond our personal desires, engage on what the country needs now and for the future, sometimes even set aside our private desires for a larger purpose. There will always be some spending we just can’t fathom, but much of that isn’t waste, simply disagreement on what the country needs and on the role of government. Sometimes we are part of the minority. Those tensions are built into any democracy. It will always be so.

Yes, waste, pure and simple, happens. All of us have shaken our heads at some example of inexplicable spending. All governments do, and ought to, work at reducing waste and increasing efficiency. But no organization, public, private or in-between, is or ever will be perfectly efficient, nor does the evidence support that private is necessarily more efficient than public.  We are talking about imperfect systems made up of perfectly imperfect people. Those desperate to prove government is useless will always find some example. While it is certainly the job of leaders to ensure that waste is minimized, our fixation on government waste is vastly exaggerated, and undermines even the minimal amounts of trust we need to find collective solutions to problems we can’t address on our own.

Former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page reminded us regularly that any promises that tax cuts would be paid for by reducing waste are bogus – the numbers never add up. The screaming headlines about waste mislead us. Studies in the U.S., even before the major downsizing of the ’90s, found big numbers but which added up to a very small percentage of spending.  Same here in Canada. The vast majority of tax dollars are spent on things the majority of us care about: infrastructure, environment, health and safety, health care, education, social assistance, child development. The gravy just isn’t there.

Tax cuts inevitably affect public services. The evil twin of tax cuts is austerity, ongoing and seemingly endless. In Canada, austerity has been implemented in the slowest of motion and so the consequences are less visible than, say, in parts of Europe. But they are real nonetheless, felt first by women and youth, and the most vulnerable. Austerity, it seems, makes us meaner. Next in line are the politically easy targets – civil service, teachers, unions. It seems that bashing bureaucrats is always good politics whatever the consequences.

But of course in the end we all pay the price in rising inequality and the erosion of essential institutions, infrastructure and the environment. This erosion happens so slowly it’s hard to attribute to the tax cuts. Government just slowly gets worse. Ironically this is used to justify further tax cuts. Witness recent proposals to eliminate EI because it now serves so few people so badly. The Post Office. What next? When we lose trust we can’t solve problems together. We look at traffic gridlock and instead of saying, ‘let’s build transit solutions’, we conclude, ‘government doesn’t work’.

Extreme inequality further undermines trust – those at the very top become increasingly effective at convincing us of the dangers of taxes – after all they don’t need many of the public services the rest depend on – and those at the bottom won’t want to pay if they think the game is rigged. Extreme inequality erodes our ability to come to a common view, to build a shared sense of the common good.

Perhaps the most enduring consequence of austerity is that it stunts the political imagination. Previous generations could imagine universal public health care, public pensions, the National Child Benefit. But now our first response to the dreamers is ‘ya, but how would we ever pay for it?’ This breeds a kind of fatalism, declinism –growing doubt that we could make things better together, that we could ever hope to solve the big problems, inequality or climate change.

If I track the last fifteen years, all the tax cuts, federal taxes as percentage of GDP are four points lower, each point worth about $20 billion. Imagine what we could do with that, or even a portion. The two cents of GST that the Conservative government cut in its first couple of years cost about $14 billion per year, slightly more than the surplus they inherited. Think about how much more resilient we would have been without those cuts when the recession hit, how much more we could have helped those hardest hit, without so much added debt and without turning to austerity as though it were inevitable. We chose the path we are on.  We can choose something better.  

(JS): You are fundamentally an optimist … what evidence do you see to be optimistic about the future as it relates to taxes?

(AH): To some degree, optimism is a matter of disposition. But it’s also a philosophical choice. If we have a choice between hope and despair, why would we choose despair? If we believe nothing is possible, then we don’t act. When we think nothing is possible, well, nothing’s possible.

But in practical terms, I see some signs – perhaps I want to see them – that people are ready to turn a corner. Municipal leaders in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Halifax – just to cite a few – seem ready to discuss more ambitious visions for their cities and grapple with the revenue tools they’ll need. Maybe it’s easier to build trust locally.

Bill de Blasio, the Mayor-elect in New York City, won on four priorities: addressing inequality, taxing the rich, raising the incomes of the lowest public sector earners, and limiting police powers. Various jurisdictions are raising the minimum wage. When the State of Missouri’s Republican legislature recently passed a tax cut, the Democratic governor vetoed it, and he seems to be winning the debate. We simply can’t keep squeezing and let inequality go unchecked. We will turn this around. The question is how much pain will we endure before we do that.

(JS): You said at the Toronto book launch that not all the authors would agree about some things. What are those areas of tension you found and how were they resolved?

(AH): Who gets taxed, what’s the best mix – all debatable. But they agree 100% that we have a distorted conversation and that’s doing damage. They agree we need to transform how we govern and tax reform must be an essential part of that transformation. And they agree that there’s no free lunch; we all must pay our fair share.

We will have to be smart in how we tax and, to be fair, progressive. By progressive I mean three things: those who benefit most should pay the greatest share; those who do most damage to the commons should pay most for its repair; and when we have broad-based and seemingly regressive tax measures, as we will, we should mitigate the harm to those least able to pay.

(JS):Imagine you’re sitting in Stephen Harper’s chair. What do you think the number one agenda item should be to improve our tax system for the common good?

(AH): I wouldn’t necessarily lead with taxes. But I wouldn’t avoid the discussion. There’s no way to get to where we need to go without considering taxes. The number one agenda item for me would be to address poverty and inequality. We can’t achieve the trust necessary to move forward together without tackling inequality. We won’t find the collective will to tackle climate change if we don’t tackle inequality.

Here in Toronto, the tale of two cities, the rich and poor, that is the problem. The resilience of our cities demands that we address this. The focus on waste, the gravy train, bloated bureaucracies, this is a conjurer’s trick. Focusing on those ‘problems’ ensures we don’t focus on the real problems. Don’t look there, look over here. Don’t look at that, look at this.

We need leaders to say no to these conjurers’ tricks, to focus on building the cities, the provinces, the country we need.  It is time to change the conversation.  We don’t need to choose decline. We will get the future we are willing to pay for.

Edited to reflect the author's changes on 12/23/13. Image Credit: Kevin Dooley via Flickr.

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Recently DeSmogBlog.com and DeSmog.ca founder Jim Hoggan spoke with Pamela McCall on CFAX 1070 about his upcoming participation in an workshop series put on by The Walrus Talks called The Art of Conversation. 

Jim has written extensively about what he calls the "Polluted Public Square," a concept he is refining for his upcoming book of that title. Jim's expertise in the world of public relations puts him at a particular advantage when parsing out just how public conversations are used and abused to shape public perception, especially on controversial topics. But more crucially, he sees the way the public is disengaging from the social fora our democratic institutions rely upon. The answer to the question Jim has been seeking – why when we know so much are we doing so little? – has to do with a widespread case of social mistrust that points back to the fundamental problem of the polluted public square.

Jim had the opportunity to delve a little more into his research and how it all ties into the upcoming event The Art of Conversation in his discussion with Pamela McCall. Listen below or scroll down for a transcript of the interview.

Pamela: “You’re focusing specifically on empathy and what you call the polluted public square. That sounds fascinating.”

Jim: “The polluted public square is a book I’ve been writing for the last three years. And I’ve gone around the world talking to social scientists and public intellectuals. I went to Harvard and MIT and Yale and Columbia, I even went to the Himalayas and spent some time with the Dalai Lama talking about public discourse and the environment.

The question I was asking people is why is it, in spite of all of this evidence that we have of human impact on the climate and oceans and the environment around us and the destructive nature of that impact, are we doing so little about what these scientists are ringing the alarm bells about?

I looked at public discourse and public conversations and I’m puzzled that public conversations aren’t more data driven. It’s more about shouting and arguing and I think most people kind of turn away from the public square these days because of that. They look at the people who are involved in these issues, especially environmental issues, and they see people in the end zones and nobody’s near the 50 yard line where there’s any possibility of some kind of solution. And so they turn away. So we have very high levels of disinterest and mistrust in public thinking and in public conversations in Canada today."

Pamela: “Why do the people who are shouting and arguing take precedence over those on the sidelines?”

Jim: “Well they’re engaged. You have civil society, you have government, you have business and they have to protect their interests and they have to move interests forward. In the case of government and business you typically have groups of people trying to preserve the status quo. With civil society you have people who are trying to change it. So people get frustrated, they don’t know how to deal with some of these issues – they’re so tough – and so you have business and industry pumping the public square full of a kind of propaganda pollution, I would call it.

If you look at last year some of the stuff we were hearing about ‘foreign funded radicals’ so people who were opposed to pipelines and tankers on the coast were demonized by government and by the oil and gas industry as foreign funded radicals. We have this ‘ethical oil’ campaign, that is such a goofy idea, that has basically dominated the airwaves over the last couple of years with this idea that "ethical oil" from the oilsands is like fair trade coffee.

And then on the other side of things you have some environmentalists demonizing the oil and gas industry and calling the oilsands heroine or suggesting that people who are working for these companies are environmental criminals. And so when you have these very high levels of rhetoric the public looks at this and says, “geesh, you know, it doesn’t look like there’s much of a solution there!” And they turn away and it’s very serious.

I think that just as you can pollute the natural environment you can pollute public conversations. And public conversations and democracies are something that many people – you know, grandfathers and great great grandfathers – fought to protect. And what was it they were fighting to protect? I think it was in part our ability to be able to solve problems together, to have honest conversations, to be able to disagree constructively, work things out with people you don’t agree with. So when we pollute the public square we’re polluting a good that a lot of people have worked hard to created.

We tend to think the worst environmental problem is climate change or whatever but I think this is a bigger environmental problem – that we’re polluting public discourse to the point that it doesn’t work.”

Pamela: “Is it not incumbent upon those on the outside to find the middle ground?”

Jim: “Well I don’t think the there’s a middle ground.”

Pamela: “But is there not room for one?”

Jim: “I think there are solutions. But I don’t think it’s just well you’re a little bit right, you’re a little bit wrong, and so are you a little bit right and I’m a little bit wrong. Some of these things that we’re doing with industry and government are just unsustainable and so they do need to change. So what we need is ways to figure out how we move people forward as opposed to just the constant fighting.

There’s this amazing woman from the United States, a social scientist named Deborah Tannen who wrote a book called The Argument Culture and she said that if you hear a ruckus outside your house you naturally open the window to see what’s going on but if there’s a ruckus outside your house every night you just close the windows and sort of batten down the hatches and you ignore it. Now that is not a good way to run a democracy.

Another way of thinking about it, there’s a guy named Jonathan Haidt who I talked to, a moral psychologist, and he said, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, let me tell you what you should think’ is not a good communication strategy. And the reason it’s not is because we all think we’re right. And so I think when you’re contstantly in the fighting mode things don’t move towards solutions.”

Pamela: “I’m interested in much of what you’re saying and how did you get an audience with the Dalai Lama and what did he say about it?”

Jim: “Well at first they said no. I’m on the board for the Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education and so I’ve got a bit of an in, but at first they said no and eventually I persisted and they said yes. And he was very interesting. He said – and I was talking to him about climate change and the impact of climate change in Tibet that he’s very worried about – and he said that – apparently in wikileaks it came out that he said – he’s more worried about the impact of climate change on Tibet than he was about the relationship between Tibet and Beijing. And I was quite surprised about that and so I asked him if he said it and he said yes.

So then I went on to ask him about this problem of how do we find solutions? How do we move forward on these big problems like climate change? I think he said for 39 years he’s been talking to people about compassion, just over and over again the same thing, and he only feels that just now people are starting to listen. I think what he was saying is there’s a need for patience and persistence, and that in Tibet he said they have a saying that goes, “fail once, try again. Fail again? Again try. Nine times fail, nine times try again.”

At the end of the interview we were standing up and he reached over with his finger and touched my forehead. He said “we sometimes think that the Western mind is more sophisticated, but I think the Tibetan heart might be stronger. Maybe if the Tibetan heart, or the Eastern heart, and the Western mind work together we could solve these problems.”

I think there’s something there, that respecting other people, bringing more empathy into public discourse would go a long way to moving us towards the tables that may build the solutions to some very tough problems that we’re facing.”

Pamela: “Jim how do we turn things around when the shouting and the arguing, as you postulate, has usurped reason?”

Jim: “One of the things I’ve learned is that talking to all these people, is that I would be the last person you’d want to be a know-it-all about this. The way that I see them, these are very complicated problems. Peter Senge just said something to me a couple of weeks ago, I was at a course with him and he’s an MIT Business prof, and he said the success of any intervention, the most important determinant of the success of any intervention, is the inner state of the intervener. And I think that’s right.

It’s taking the board out of your own eyeball before you work on the sliver in somebody else’s. I think it starts there. And I think that we bring a lot of baggage to the public square, that self-awareness and a sort of deeper thinking about our own intentions and our own baggage is probably the first step.

And then I think remembering that you could be wrong. The idea is to realize that we all have this tendency to slip into self-righteousness and it’s much easier for us to see the wrong doing in others than in ourselves. Going back to some of those basic lessons that we learned from our Mom and Dad and the church and the synagogue, those are really important human lessons about how to interact with each other.

I don’t think that pointing your finger, pointing in someone’s chest, and then trying to tell them what they should be thinking about – which sounds funny but if you really look at the kind of stuff that you hear people saying, it’s kind of like that – that doesn’t help, I don’t think. We are not going to solve these problems on our own and we’re going to have to work with people and try to figure out how to have more constructive relationships with people, not that we just disagree with, but that we just don’t like. And we need to figure it out.

People like the Dalai Lama have been working it a long time and I think there’s wisdom there, in empathy.”

Pamela: “I find also it underscores the apathy, the kind of research you’re doing. It explains why people will stand on the sidelines and be overwhelmed.”

Jim: “That’s right, but I would caution about thinking about it as apathy because the research shows that people aren’t as apathetic as they are disinterested and mistrustful and believing they can’t make a difference.”

Pamela: “Does that not lead to apathy though?”

Jim: “Well I think apathy means people don’t care. I think people do care, it’s just that they think they can’t do anything and it’s reinforced by what you just said, that the people in the end zones have no intention of trying to compromise, of reaching some kind of arrangement. So they turn away. They know they’re could maybe go and do something but the guy across the street may cancel out whatever they could do. They go and but a Prius and the guy across the street goes and buys a Hummer and if he doesn’t, somebody in Beijing will. So the problems are just so big that when they look around they don’t see any intention on the part of leaders to really do something.”

——

The Art of Conversation is taking place in Victoria at the Belfry Theatre on September 16th. 

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This is a guest post by sustainable energy economist Mark Jaccard, originally published in the Vancouver Sun and reposted with permission. More of his writing can be found at markjaccard.com.

George Orwell used parody and caricature to expose the propaganda lies of the fascists and communists who threatened humanity in the mid-20th century. Today, his talents are badly needed to counter the propaganda of corporate executives who seek self-enrichment by accelerating the burning of the coal, oil and gas here and abroad.

The world’s leading scientists agree that carbon pollution from burning these fuels is rapidly heating the planet, which will cause massive species extinction and great harm to humanity through increased droughts, storms, floods and ocean acidification. We should not be building new coal mines, oilsands plants, oil pipelines and coal ports unless the users of these fuels capture and store the carbon pollution (which is technically feasible).

The obvious necessity is to stop expanding carbon polluting infrastructure while using trade pressure and diplomacy to work with like-minded jurisdictions in preventing this expansion in all countries. We won’t convince the Chinese to burn less oil and coal if we’re trying to sell them more and burning more ourselves. Difficult as this global task is, there is no other way to prevent the harm scientists predict, some of which is already happening.

This scientific reality creates a challenge for people still bent on increasing carbon pollution for self-enrichment: they need to convince us that the bad they are perpetrating is somehow good. They need to apply the doublespeak that Orwell exposed so effectively in books like 1984 and Animal Farm.

Janet Holder is the senior executive at Enbridge responsible for the Northern Gateway pipeline that will expand oilsands production and carbon pollution — in other words that will harm our children. Her opinion piece on Aug. 7 makes sure to say the opposite: “we cherish our extraordinary natural environment and hold very strong convictions about protecting it for our kids and grandkids.” She then explains that her corporation is making sure no oil is spilled on land and sea. She avoids mentioning the devastation to that very land and sea that hers and similar projects would cause through increased carbon pollution and climate change.

Orwell would not be surprised. He would understand that the very person who might — if she succeeds — become the most responsible in B.C. for causing harm to our children and grandchildren would not present herself that way. As he observed, “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue.”

He would also not be surprised by the litany of false rationalizations used by the promoters of carbon pollution. They tell us “we’re not going to stop using gasoline tomorrow.” In fact, we need to start phasing out the burning of gasoline today so that we won’t be using it in 30 years. Expanding oil infrastructure goes in the wrong direction. Instead, we should be regulating or pricing carbon pollution and using other vehicle and fuel policies to gradually convert our transportation system to some combination of zero-emission electricity and biofuels. And corporations like Enbridge, if they truly had our children’s interests in mind, would be leading the charge in calling for these policies and promoting non-polluting options.

Another false argument is that we need the jobs and tax revenue from oil pipelines and other carbon polluting projects. But should we accept the idea that we can only create a wealth-producing economy in the short-term by destroying our environment and economy in the long-term? Humans have an enormous capacity to generate economic well-being, some of it based on extraction of natural resources in ways that don’t lead to carbon pollution, much of it based on the non-extractive ingenuity unleashed by market economies.

For example, Denmark has the same standard of living as Norway, yet possesses none of its oil. Should we believe that if Norway had forgone exploitation of its oil resources (which it is now deliberately slowing) that its people would today be significantly less well off than their Danish neighbours?

And 10 years ago, BC Hydro believed that we needed to burn natural gas and coal to generate electricity. But in the mid-2000s, our government enacted a zero-emission electricity policy that led to the cancellation of gas and coal projects, and their replacement with generating plants using wood waste, hydropower and wind. These created more jobs and the lights are still on.

The carbon polluters have the self-interest motive and the resources to convince us, and perhaps themselves, that white is black and bad is good. We desperately need another George Orwell.

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George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He is a columnist at The Guardian, and author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among others. His latest book is Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the ­Frontiers of Rewilding, which tells the story of his efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living.

I sat down with Monbiot to talk about why he keeps up his activism, where he differs from other environmentalists in areas such as nuclear power and why climate change deniers do what they do. Below is the second of our two-part conversation.* Read the first part here: George Monbiot: Climate, Junk Science and Zombie Myths.

***

James Hoggan: Are you discouraged by the kind of chaos that seems to come out of the climate change debate; the deniers and the arguments among environmentalists themselves? Why do you continue to do what you do?[view:in_this_series=block_1]

George Monbiot: It is a good question. There are several reasons why I carry on. One, I cannot abide bullshit.

There is something that just drives me mad about seeing other people getting away with talking rubbish and not being corrected on it. And that applies to a lot of fields. This is why I’ve got into so much trouble with other environmentalists over my position on nuclear power because I realized after a while, that the mainstream environmental story we’ve been told about nuclear power was complete nonsense. And that all this stuff about a million people being killed by Chernobyl, and the peculiar dangers of internal emitters and all the rest of it, had no scientific grounding whatsoever and it was as poorly based in science as anything we hear from the climate change deniers.

Now, I have absolutely no interest in alienating half of the environment movement, which is what I’ve succeeded in doing, but it was just seeing bullshit and bullshitters out in the open without any effective correctives that just made me see red. I felt I had to do something.

JH: We have all this evidence that says we should be doing something about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and we’re not. Do you think environmentalists are part of the problem?

GM: Well, I still regard myself very much as being part of the environment movement. I think it’s the only show in town. It’s the only thing that stands between us and some pretty nasty stuff. I think, in some respects, most environmentalists have got it wrong about certain issues for the same kind of reasons as other people get things wrong, that people believe what they want to believe, what’s convenient to believe, what doesn’t conflict with their other beliefs.

The world is a complex place and it’s very hard to have a set of consistent beliefs without any internal conflicts because actually, there’s lots of countervailing forces and lots of conflict out there. Nothing is very straight and cut-and-dry in this world. Sometimes, I think we can be an impediment, but by and large, environmentalism is the only thing that stands against the Exxons and the Koch Brothers and other such people.

JH: What can we do about climate change denial?

GM: The first thing we have to recognize is that denial is not confined to any particular issue. Denial is a fundamental part of the human condition. It’s a necessary survival strategy because we’re the only species that knows that our death is coming.

I believe that knowledge could destroy us if we weren’t adept to denial, to pushing things out of our minds so we can carry on with our day-to-day lives. Otherwise, we will just sit there like puddings waiting for a train to try to hit us. We would succumb to total despair, which would be crippling. This is a huge psychological burden to bear, the knowledge of our own death.

George Marshall, who is an effective climate change activist in the U.K., has made an interesting comparison between climate change and death. He believes that, for both, it’s seen as something that is a long way off. Even though climate change is happening now, the connection between our action and the reaction, the implication of that, is drawn-out over a long period. So, you can smoke like a chimney today and won’t die today as a result of that, but you might well die in 30 years time.

That distance allows you to forget the fact that that smoking is going to kill you.

Climate change is very much like death. That’s why we’re very adept at not seeing it and not dealing with it.

JH: What gives you hope that we might reach some kind of collective awakening to address this big environmental issue of climate change?

GM: I’ve seen three phases of environmental interest and activism.

The first one was in the late 1980s, between about 1987 and 1989-1990. The second one was immediately following Hurricane Katrina, which lasted for about nine months or so. The third one was between about 2007 and 2009. We weren’t able to sustain any of them.

There was a massive flush of enthusiasm worldwide for doing something about environmental issues and yet, it was gradually crushed and pushed down by the interests of the 1%, by the oil companies, by the Koch Brothers, by these people who really did not want to see any action taken to protect the environment because that would impede their profits. What we have not learned is how to sustain those actions, to keep them going and that’s what we desperately need to work on.

We need to find a way of turning that great wave of enthusiasm, and anger, and hope into something that carries on year after year after year, and trumps the short-term issues which blind us to the massive importance of the long-term issues.

The human failing is that we’re pretty short-term in our approach. If we’re well fed now, or if we see a particular issue coming at us right now, that’s the thing we concentrate on.

How do we change that?

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to change human nature, not to the degree that we can actually turn ourselves into being creatures that prioritize the long-term over the short-term.

To me, hope lies in the political dimension, in our effectiveness as citizens and our rediscovery of the motives that drove our political ancestors – the people who created the mass movements which got us democracy in the first place, which ended slavery, which ended colonization and imperialism and all the other things which have been great advances for humankind. If we could do it in the past when life was much more oppressive, and we had far less leisure time, and we had far less money and all the rest of it, we should be able to do it today.

Read the first part of this interview, George Monbiot: Climate, Junk Science, and Zombie Myths.

* This is an abridged version of the interview

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.

George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He is a columnist at The Guardian, and author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among others. His latest book is Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the ­Frontiers of Rewilding, which tells the story of his efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living.

I sat down with Monbiot to talk about why junk science is becoming an accepted part of the public discourse around climate change, creating what he calls “the phenomenon of zombie myths.” Monbiot also talks about why some media outlets continue to report on climate change without all of the facts. Below is the first of our two-part conversation.*

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James Hoggan: What do you think about the state of public discourse around climate change?[view:in_this_series=block_1]

George Monbiot: Well, it seems to be the one area in which you can persistently get away with junk science. Now, in any other area in the mainstream media, if for example a newspaper says, “HIV is not connected with AIDS,” like The Sunday Times did for a while, the response by scientists is so strong and so effective that it has to roll back and retract that position, which is what it did, thankfully, because it was a grossly irresponsible position.

If you say, vitamin C cures cancer, for example, as certain newspapers have done at certain times, then, they too are effectively forced to roll back in the name of sound science, good science. But if you say climate change that we’re currently experiencing is caused by sun spots or cosmic rays or volcanoes or any of the other bullshit explanations, which are spread far and wide, you can, if you’re a newspaper like The Daily Mail in the UK or if you’re a television station like FOX News in the US, say it again and again and again and come up with a million different variants on it and never effectively be held to account for the nonsense that you’re promulgating.

JH: What is it about climate change that is so different to the other issues?

GM: The difference is that there is a huge amount of money at stake – money belonging to some very powerful corporations that continue to exert a great deal of influence within the media. They have a large array of public relations weaponry at their fingertips and they’re able to keep this junk science story bubbling for years and years and years. However many times it’s refuted, however effectively it is refuted, it doesn’t die. It’s what those of us interested in climate change call the phenomenon of zombie myths. The zombie climate change myths just keep coming up. No matter how many times they’re killed, they still keep standing up and walking.

JH: I’m the PR guy, so I’m used to spin. But I’ve never seen a situation where the people with essentially all the facts on their side lose to an opponent that virtually has no facts.

GM: It makes me feel impotent, to be honest. If we look clearly at the UK situation, just to give you an example, it’s almost as bad as the US, but not quite. You’re getting a newspaper like the Daily Mail, which will say, “There’s been no global warming for the past 15 years and we are, in fact, about to enter a new ice age.” Then you’ll get scientists saying, “This is the most demonstrable nonsense.” I’ll write in the Guardian, saying the Daily Mail should be ashamed of itself promulgating this junk science and it won’t make a damn bit of difference. It just bounces off like an arrow shot at a tank. Then they’ll keep repeating the same nonsense again a few weeks later. I have not seen that in any other field. I’ve not seen any other scientific issue where people can just keep banging it out, and banging it out, and banging out, utterly impervious to correction from the scientists who are the experts in the field.

JH: Can you discuss this more around the idea of confirmation bias – where people favour information that confirms their beliefs? Does that explain it?

GM: It’s one of the things that explain it. The Internet has contributed to this. Strangely, the Internet was supposed to expose us to a whole lot of different points of view. The problem is we have a tendency as people to form communities with those who have similar viewpoints. And the Internet allows us to form effectively closed communities in which we only hear the voices of those who agree with us. Some people might deliberately go into opposition blogs to troll or something, but they’re not going to listen to what the people are saying, they’re just going to try to shout them down.

But you have someone like Lord Monckton who will attract certain followers who will listen to what he’s saying and they will not listen to what the climate scientists are saying. And he will then go on to various nutty television stations, whether it’s FOX News, or Prison Planet, or any of the other slightly unhinged right-wing, pro-corporate stations and he will say something nonsensical and all his followers will hear that. And because they haven’t got any conflicting influence, they will believe that that is the truth. And then, when somebody says something that doesn’t fit that framing, which is out of that box, they’ll say, “That’s mad. That’s crazy. Because we aren’t familiar with it, and that is what must be wrong.”

This is a self-reinforcing process that takes place everywhere. Even we, environmentalists, are prone to it and we have to be very wary of it.

JH: I’d like your thoughts on what you might call agenda journalism and the problem of confirmation bias. Don’t columnists like George Will have higher level of responsibility for ensuring accuracy regardless of their bias?

GM: Well, I think in a way, it’s worse than that. I don’t think he’s making things up. I think he is just taking without any examination, without any skepticism, without any creativity at all. He’s just accepting what other people are telling him. And he’s got no skeptical distance that says, “Is this right or is this wrong, where is the science here, where is the evidence to support this position?” He’s just not doing it. Now, that is the most basic failing that a journalist could make.

Like all of us, he is entitled to his own opinions; he is not entitled to his own facts.

And I’m a columnist of a left-wing persuasion, and so, I will look at some facts and I will draw conclusions which fit into my own framing and that’s what we all do. Every person on earth does that, but what I’m trying to do is, first of all, to make sure I got my facts right. My position is that, if your opinions are not supported by the facts, you have to change your opinions. I mean apart from the ethical issues, why waste your life on promulgating bullshit? I mean, what a terrible waste.

JH: Have you always been as passionate about the environment as you are today?

GM: Yes, from when I was a very small child, I was intensely concerned about the planet. I don’t know where it came from. It didn’t really come from my upbringing. It was just something that was of enormous importance to me. I was fascinated by the natural wonders of the world, by wildlife, by everything to do with the natural world; geology, weather, whatever it might be. For me, it has always been something whose preciousness is apparent, whose wonders are apparent. And we’ve just got to get this right, and we’ve got to make some very hard and very difficult choices in order to get it right, but we cannot make those choices unless we get our facts right.

Read Part 2 of this interview here: George Monbiot on Environmentalist: “I Cannot Abide Bullshit”

* This is an abridged version of the interview.

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.