It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Fossil fuel companies claim they’re helping fight climate change. The reality is different.
Imagine Rip Van Winkle as a climate-conscious investor. If Rip had fallen asleep after the Paris climate agreement was drafted in 2015 and woken up today, he might conclude that the fossil fuel industry is rapidly transforming itself to prepare for a carbon-constrained world. ExxonMobil TV ads tout its investments in algal biofuels, Chevron offers electric car charging at gas stations, BP spots on National Public Radio boast of turning garbage into fuel, Shell has acquired a British utility company that now sells only electricity from renewable sources, and the American Petroleum Institute claims to be leading the world in cutting greenhouse gases. Big Oil also helped design a proposal it could get behind to establish a carbon price in the United States: BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell pledged $1 million each in support of the Climate Leadership Council’s “carbon fee and dividend” proposal, and ConocoPhillips pledged $2 million. If Rip were influential in Washington, he would be barraged with digital ads for the Climate Leadership Council’s plan.
But Rip would also be confronted with troubling news of heat waves, drought, flooding, and wildfires, all of whose increased frequency and severity is attributable to climate change. He would learn that a Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that what it termed “rapid and far-reaching” transitions would need to be made across major sectors of the global economy if we are going to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target set at the Paris Agreement. Climate science tells us that carbon dioxide emissions must reach what is called “net-zero” (no more carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere than is actively withdrawn from it) for temperatures to stabilize at any level, which means that we must reach net-zero by roughly mid-century to stabilize at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And, most alarmingly, he would learn that behind the fossil fuel companies’ climate charm offensive, they are betting that global temperatures will rise well above the Paris Agreement targets. For example, in ExxonMobil’s 2019 Outlook for Energy, the company projects no reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector through 2040—and no date at which emissions reach net zero, implying indefinite warming. And ExxonMobil is not alone: Only 13 percent of the energy companies that follow the disclosure framework recommended by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures are even testing the resilience of their business strategies in a scenario where global warming is kept below 2 degrees. A Transition Pathway Initiative survey of 50 oil and gas companies conducted earlier this year found that only one company (the Italian multinational oil and gas giant Eni) had made a public commitment to reduce its emissions to net zero by any date—and Eni’s commitment covers only the modest direct emissions from the extraction, processing, and refining of its fossil fuel products, not the much larger emissions that result from the burning of those products.
One of the few exceptions to this alarming state of affairs came earlier this month, when the Spanish energy multinational Repsol broke from the oil and gas industry pack by pledging to achieve net zero emissions from its operations and the use of its products by 2050—with intermediate decarbonization targets in place for 2020 to 2040. Repsol has thrown down the gauntlet to its competitors, putting into stark relief the yawning gap between their climate claims and actions. Repsol’s announcement should awaken Rip and other climate-conscious investors to reality: Until now, none of these companies has been doing nearly enough, fast enough, to align their business models with the Paris Agreement that they claim to support. As the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow concluded: “The fact that global greenhouse gas emissions, and oil and gas company capital expenditures on exploration and production, keep rising signals a fundamental limitation of the current shareholder engagement strategy.”
So, how should Rip and other climate-conscious investors focus their efforts as the remaining carbon budget dwindles?
Let’s start by taking a look at climate change, corporate accountability, and the roles of fossil fuel companies and shareholder advocacy, back in the heady days of the adoption of the Paris Agreement—and again today.
What a difference four years has not made. On the whole, the nations of the world have not followed through on the ambitions surrounding the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015. Add to that the mounting urgency of the climate crisis, and the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, and one can see why greater attention is being focused on actions by cities, states, and corporations. National governments aren’t the only ones making decisions that will determine whether the world achieves the Paris goals.
Among corporations, major fossil fuel producers have the most influence over our collective success or failure in avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Many major oil and gas companies make the claim that they support the Paris Agreement.
But how far are the emissions cuts promised by the major oil and gas companies from reaching a point consistent with the Paris Agreement goals? And how does the advocacy of their industry groups undermine or even contradict these companies’ stated declarations to the public? (The American Petroleum Institute, for example, has been going all-out in its efforts to gut a federal rule about the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas).
Shareholder proposals for 2020. Now that this year’s UN climate conference in Madrid is finished, shareholders in US-based oil and gas companies are turning their attention to 2020. Shareholder resolutions must be filed by mid-December of 2019 for consideration at the 2020 annual general meetings of ExxonMobil and Chevron. While most are not binding on company decision-makers even if they win a majority vote, shareholder resolutions have become a cornerstone of investor strategies to engage with major oil and gas companies over climate change, lobbying, and political spending issues.
For example, the current trend in climate risk reporting began after a decisive vote by ExxonMobil shareholders in favor of a 2017 resolution that called on the company to report annually on what climate change policies (set by governments) and technological advances (in the marketplace) designed to keep the global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius would have on the company’s business. This year, the Climate Action 100+ initiative, backed by 370 investors with more than $35 trillion in combined assets, secured an agreement from BP to support a shareholder resolution requesting the company to set out a strategy consistent with the Paris Agreement. With BP’s board supporting the resolution, 99 percent of shareholders voted for it: Unfortunately, neither the company nor its shareholders seem to appreciate—or at least are willing to acknowledge in public—that such a strategy must include a credible plan for achieving net zero emissions. In other words, the company and its shareholders approved the resolution without (apparently) accepting its necessary implications.
Regrettably, the success of public pension funds, faith groups, and other socially responsible investors in using shareholder resolutions to force publicly traded companies to plan for climate change has provoked a backlash. And that backlash has provided fuel to a long-simmering effort to quash shareholder democracy. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has just announced a new rule that would make it much harder for shareholders to file proposals on climate change and other environmental, social, and governance issues with publicly traded US companies.
Curtailing shareholder rights has long been on the wish list of industry groups such as the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the US Chamber of Commerce, which pushed for the rule change with a well-funded disinformation campaign. The National Association of Manufacturers—which includes BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron among its members—houses the misleadingly named Main Street Investors Coalition, which leads the lobbying campaign for this SEC rule change. The Sierra Club is suing the SEC for information about Big Oil’s involvement in its decision-making process on climate-related shareholder proposals.
Principles and practices for climate-conscious investment in fossil fuels. The Oxford Martin Principles provide a scientific framework for engagement between climate-conscious investors and companies across the global economy. Drafted in 2018 at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, UK, these principles build upon the science of long-term climate change, focusing on how investments contribute to the global stock of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions. They complement other measures, such as carbon footprinting. These principles are premised upon two cold, hard, scientific facts: First, net emissions of carbon dioxide must fall to zero for temperatures to stabilize at any level. And second, for temperatures to stabilize at about 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, we must reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions roughly by mid-century—as well as make deep reductions in other heat-trapping gases, such as methane.
With these goals in mind, a climate-minded investor should look for companies to commit to net-zero emissions by a specific date, outline a business model consistent with that target, and establish quantitative mid-term milestones that allow users to assess progress. To boil things down further: Fossil fuel companies must commit to achieving net zero absolute carbon dioxide emissions by midcentury—and conduct all activities in ways that are verifiably consistent with this commitment.
To meet this core task, three methods of measuring progress, or metrics, are needed. They include disclosure of absolute emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from company operations and the use of company products until carbon emissions reach net-zero; disclosure of mid-term targets; and consistent, verifiable actions that support fair and effective climate policies—including the accurate portrayal of climate science in all communications.
Let’s look at each of these metrics, one-by-one.
Disclosure of absolute emissions and emissions intensities. Companies must disclose the absolute emissions of heat-trapping gases from the use of company products as well as from the company’s extraction, refining, processing, and transportation of fossil fuels. The commitment to net-zero emissions by midcentury must encompass not only emissions from company operations but also emissions from the end-use of their products as well. Many fossil fuel companies have begun to set targets for reducing global warming emissions from their business operations—in other words, the greenhouse gases emitted from exploring for, extracting, processing, and bringing fossil fuels to market. But reporting on just this side of the ledger is not enough: Roughly 80-to-90 percent of fossil fuel companies’ carbon emissions result from end-users burning fossil fuel products.
(And we should take a moment here to note that fossil fuel companies have been attempting to shift the blame, by branding end-use emissions as “customer emissions”—as if to wash their hands of their product once it’s sold. But like consumers of tobacco products, consumers of fossil fuels use them exactly as the manufacturer intends them to be used.)
Major oil and gas companies take a variety of positions when it comes to their sense of responsibility for the emissions resulting from the use of their products. Repsol’s net zero target includes all product-related emissions, and Shell has set modest emissions-intensity reduction targets encompassing the use of its products. But BP and Chevron, meanwhile,reject the very notion that they bear any responsibility for these emissions.
Why is it justifiable to hold fossil fuel companies, instead of their customers, primarily responsible for bringing emissions from their products to net zero? The answer is threefold.
First, the products that they extracted and put into commerce are contributing the majority of global industrial carbon dioxide emissions driving disruptive climate change. This implies what ethical philosopher Henry Shue calls a “general, forward-looking responsibility to ‘do no harm.’”
Second, it didn’t have to be this way. Research shows that major fossil fuel companies knew at least 50 years ago that unabated burning of their products would change the Earth’s climate. And nearly 40 years ago, internal corporate and industry discussions identified alternatives to simply dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, including carbon capture and storage—but these companies failed to adapt their business plans.
And third, the fossil fuel companies have a well-documented history of involvement with spreading climate disinformation and seeking to block climate action, as exemplified by a 1998 internal memo written by a team convened by the American Petroleum Institute. Major fossil fuel companies consequently have what Shue terms a “special, backward-looking causal responsibility to ‘clean up your own mess.’ ”
Disclosure of mid-term targets for implementing and investing toward net-zero. If investors are going to assess the climate plans of companies, then it is absolutely necessary for companies to disclose their mid-term targets for reducing their carbon emissions. Consequently, shareholders should require that companies set, publish, and report on progress toward targets for reducing both the companies’ absolute emissions and their emissions intensity (carbon dioxide emissions per unit of production). Otherwise, it’s too easy for companies to game the system. For instance, while increasing the volume of its oil and gas production, a company could achieve a modest emissions intensity reduction target by making its operations and its products less carbon-intensive: A somewhat larger amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere divided by a much larger volume of oil and gas produced would result in a lower emissions intensity. Conversely, a company could reduce its absolute emissions through spinoffs and restructuring that would make it difficult to trace emissions back to the ultimate corporate owner of the polluting assets. That is why investors need to track both absolute and intensity metrics: Neither system of measurement stands alone.
For example, while Shell says its ambition is to reduce the global warming emissions from its operations, energy usage, and use of its products by 50 percent by 2050, Shell also plans to spend $30 billion per year during the period of 2021-to-2025 on average investments in oil and gas infrastructure and exploration. Crucially, Shell cites no plans for any accompanying equivalent investment in carbon capture and storage, the only option available for the large-scale disposal of carbon dioxide other than dumping it into the atmosphere. (As is typical of the industry as a whole, Shell’s investment in carbon capture technology is dwarfed by its investment in exploration for new fossil fuel resources.) There is enough fossil carbon stored in existing fossil fuel reserves to take the world well beyond 2 degrees Celsius. So, to comply with the Paris Agreement, companies would need to dramatically redirect their investments. For every metric ton of fossil carbon identified in a new oil or gas field, the industry must, at a minimum, identify options for the permanent geological storage for 3.7 metric tons of carbon dioxide—and invest to ensure that storage capacity is available on time. This will likely entail a dramatic redirection of investment away from exploring for new fossil fuel resources towards carbon dioxide capture and disposal. If fossil fuel companies aren’t doing so—and they aren’t even remotely close—then they are planning on letting their products take the world past two degrees.
Consistent, verifiable actions that support fair and effective climate policies. The third reason that it is essential to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for bringing emissions from their products to net zero lies in the companies’ past and ongoing conduct. Even as some fossil fuel companies have begun to acknowledge climate change and claim to support climate policy, many still do not back up their words with consistent action. In other words, fossil fuel companies have a habit of saying one thing while doing another.
Misrepresentation of climate science and climate risks is getting fossil fuel companies into legal trouble, drawing parallels with the litigation against the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. ExxonMobil, for example, was recently sued by the Massachusetts attorney general for misleading investors and engaging in deceptive advertising to consumers—including “greenwashing” campaigns that portray the company as a clean energy innovator. The environmental law organization Client Earth has filed a complaint against BP, saying that the fossil fuel company’s global ad campaign is misleading consumers by falsely claiming that the company is focused on renewable energy and climate solutions.
Given the fossil fuel industry’s history of deception, disinformation, and intimidation, the burden of proof rests on these companies to dispel skepticism. Instead, many continue to earn distrust. For example, the oil industry—led by Climate Leadership Council founding member BP and other companies that claim to support a price on carbon—bankrolled the successful campaign against a proposed carbon fee in Washington state in 2018. Investors must insist that a fossil fuel company making a net-zero commitment back it up with consistent, verifiable actions, including accurately representing climate science in its communications, supporting fair and effective climate policies, ensuring that its lobbying matches its stated positions on climate science and policy, and publicly disavowing positions and actions taken by affiliated third parties that are inconsistent with company positions.
The pressure on them to do so is mounting. In September, 200 institutional investors with a combined total of more than $6.5 trillion in assets urged publicly traded US corporations to align their climate lobbying with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Nongovernmental organizations that engage with business on environmental issues followed with an open letter in The New York Times setting new standards for corporate leadership on science-based climate policy.
Guidance for corporate engagement and investment decisions. These recommendations—along with those of the Climate Action 100+ initiative, which has secured emissions-reduction commitments from companies including BP, Equinor, and Shell—should elevate the issue of climate policy alignment. But short-term, incremental reductions are not enough. These companies are among the few today that are actively investing in plants and equipment that will define the world in 2050. Investors have a right to know how these investments square with net-zero emissions.
If we want to avert disruptive climate change, we must not only reduce emissions, we must fully decarbonize our economy. And decarbonization has a hard and fast deadline. The principles and practices outlined here should also be applied to escalate pressure on laggard companies. (For example, with no-confidence votes in corporate leadership targeting particular board members or the entire board.) They should be used to challenge a company’s refusals to consider shareholder proposals about reaching net zero—including, if necessary, through the courts. And these principles and practices must be used to determine when to give up on an engagement that’s securing only incremental changes, and decide when it is time to divest entirely. Institutions such as Barnard College, the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System, the Church of England, and Legal & General Investment Management are now divesting in ways that differentiate among fossil fuel producers, in order to provide a financial incentive to companies to accelerate their climate actions.
The Madrid climate conference has reminded us of the urgency of climate action by all sectors of society. 2020 will be a pivotal year for shareholders seeking to hold major fossil fuel companies accountable to the science of meeting the Paris Agreement targets. We urge investors to take up the Oxford Martin principles and expect more, question more, and tolerate less from the fossil fuel companies. These major contributors to global warming must swiftly get on board with climate action—or get out of the way.
Kathy Mulvey is accountability campaign director in the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where she guides engagement with major fossil fuel companies, condu...
Myles Allen is a professor of geosystem science at the Environmental Change Institute in the School of Geography and the Environment, and a professor the Department of Physics, both at the U...
Peter C. Frumhoff is the director of science and policy, and chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. An author of multiple Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rep...
Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today
The choices that societies make concerning the treatment of children can bring about the greatest of debates and prompt significant political action. Our research teaches us that the question of a how a child should be treated — what value societies place on children — is not only a modern question, but an ancient one.
As historians whose work is related to understanding the texts of the Hebrew Bible and the world it was written in, we trace clues to understand the lives of children over 3,000 years ago. Through data from archaeology, letters, contracts, laws, material culture, ancient stories and religious practices, we study the children in the ancient lands of the Middle East, in the region now encompassing Egypt, Israel and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
Children experienced violence and vulnerability at the hands of adults. And the same adults wove a child’s religious and economic value into society through laws, religious expression and what happens in homes.
Making and raising babies
For ancient people in the region we study, the focus on children began before children were conceived. Without modern medical practices, women turned to their medical world, and thus magico-religious answers.
Texts from the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia relate that when women had trouble conceiving, they might use plants, like the mandrake, known to increase fertility, or prepare fertility aids.
After children were born, women continued turning to magico-religious practices to protect the child. Scholars believe fertility figurines found in archaeological contexts attest to mother’s prayers for ample milk supply. Most women would nurse on demand, but breast-feeding contracts tell us that the wealthiest families could afford to employ wet nurses, since even they knew breastfeeding could limit fertility.
Mesopotamian texts contain an intricate series of contracts and laws outlining the years children spent in the wet nurse’s house, and the consequences if the wet-nurse tried to steal the child. These contractual forms are embedded in later Biblical stories.
Group of two women and a child, ca. 1981-1500 BC. A woman is shown nursing her child while another woman dresses her hair.(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Children in the home
The sleepless child was well known to parents. In the ancient world lullabies were used to calm inconsolable infants. For example, in one old Babylonian lullaby written sometime between 1894–1595 BC, the sleep-deprived mother begs the child to fall asleep like one passed out drunk.
Biblical studies professor David Bosworth of the Catholic University of America discusses this in his book Infant Weeping in Akkadian, Hebrew and Greek Literature.
Play was an important part of life. Small perforated discs found in some parts of the region suggest the use of spinning tops.
Mesopotamian texts speak of familiar games, like jump ropes, wrestling, running races and games of hide and seek. But life was not all play for children. For the most part, older girls would help the mothers with domestic activities, while boys would follow in their father’s footsteps. But for a limited few male children, education was an option.
The ancient Babylonian code of law, the The Code of Hammurabi, laws 18 5-191, shows that formal adoptions came with a strict set of rules so the child could be fully integrated into the new family.
Sometimes parents rescinded legal responsibility for a child. One set of texts discusses this as children “thrown to the dogs’ mouth.” In such cases children might be left at the local dump, the “safe-drop” zone for children. These children often entered a life of slavery.
Individual slave sale documents from Mesopotamia, as well as the biblical laws concerning slavery, tell us that slavery was a part of ancient life, but there are important nuances. Not every child slave was chattel. In cases of debt-slavery, a child could serve in another household to pay off a family debt and then return to their own family.
A child’s value was not just part of the physical world, but extended to the spiritual realm as well. Children participated in the household religion in gender-specific ways. A disinheritance contract from Emar notes that children who are disinherited lose the right to care for the gods of the house.
Families deported from Lachish, ancient Israel.(courtesy of Jason Riley)
The death of children
A child’s value does not come without vulnerability. As the youngest and most defenseless members of society, they were not immune to the effects of invading armies. Mesopotamian war records (ca. 880-600 BC) demonstrate rare but violent practices, such as burning adolescents and violence against pregnant Arab women. In best-case scenarios, children were deported with their families.
Heath Dewrell, assistant professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, also notes that the Hebrew Bible records children, foreign and Israelite alike, experiencing violence resulting in death. Troubling texts include the outrageous tale of two female bears mauling 42 children for offending the prophet and references to child sacrifice.
Jar Burial from Tel Dan.(Courtesy of David Ilan, Nelson Glueck School of Archaeology)
Archaeological data shows that the infant mortality rate was 50 per cent in the ancient world, but children who died were often cared for. Sometimes they are buried in jars with the common grave goods indicating their status in the family. And other times they were buried under the household floor, which in a way kept them a part of the household unit.
Ultimately, coming to a greater understanding of children in history raises important questions for how societies respond or not to children’s vulnerability. The challenge of protecting our most vulnerable has not disappeared.
“I am one of the early birds…” Ece Temelkuran told me, “I saw democracy collapse in Turkey and tried to warn the United States, European Countries and Britain about this. I’ve been telling people that what you think is normal, or a passing phase, is part of a bigger phenomenon that affects us all. Somehow though, European democracies feel they’re exceptional – and too mature to be affected by neofascist currents.”
Ece has seen this all before. In her incredible 2019 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, she notes, “We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.”
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (with three million twitter followers). In this exclusive interview, we discuss the dangers of populism, authoritarianism and fascism, and why we need to act now.
[Ece Temelkuran]: Today, there is less time to understand the differences between nationalism, populism and authoritarianism. In Britain, democracy is literally crumbling at the hands of a strange guy with funny hair! People simply aren’t recognising the dangers that lay ahead, so there’s not enough time to get into definitions
One truth is that you cannot really know what populism is until you experience it. Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity. Nationalism as we know, comes from the phenomena of nation-states – and it’s quite ironic therefore that we are now talking more and more about the failure of nation states and the failure of supranational and international institutions as well… and meanwhile neo-nationalism is on the rise.
It’s not about the maturity of your democracy, it’s not about the strength of your institutions either…. Once the cancer of authoritarianism gets into the veins and organs of society, it’s not easy to get-out – they have this very specific way of paralysing political mechanisms and dismantling the fundamental human logic.
There’s not much time left for British democracy; to tell you the truth, I would never have anticipated one of the world’s oldest democracies being shattered at such speed, with almost no resistance… I am really shocked and appalled.
Q: Why are nationalism and populism creeping back into our world?
[Ece Temelkuran]: The Second World War taught us a specific aesthetic of fascism. We always imagine that Nazi uniform, and the kind of futuristic authoritarian settings we see on Netflix and HBO. In our culture, we see the uniform and the militaristic as the representations of authoritarianism and fascism.
Today, right-wing populism, authoritarianism and neo-fascism are coming from different places. Reality TV stars, strange men, and people who otherwise would be considered national jokes. Many of today’s right-wing populist leaders are political figures that nobody really took seriously from the beginning. Nobody expected that neo-fascism could take hold with swagger, in such a laid-back manner.
To understand why these phenomena are creeping back into our world, you have to look for the roots. Neoliberalism has- since the 1970s- imposed this idea that the free-market economy is the best (and most ethical) system humanity can come up with to organise itself. Neoliberalism changed the definition of what human fundamental morals are, and what justice means – and it’s created a new kind of being. It tends to be the extreme examples of neoliberal being that disgusts, appalls and surprises us – but those are also the people who have become the leaders of our world.
The neoliberalist model has been put forward as a solution to which there is no alternative; we’ve crippled the political spectrum, cut the left away, and shifted everything to the right. Politics has become a competition, who can be further right – and who can further deliver numbing of the mind through consumerism – after all… people are only allowed to be free when they consume, and thus we are political objects, not political subjects…
Politics has become entertainment – and people feel like their opinions do not matter any more… this became clear after the Iraq invasionwhen millions of people took to the streets of Europe, and saw that their call for peace meant nothing. Now? people carry this sense of being a political object as a badge of honour – they want strong powerful men to be in charge… they want bold action like the suspension of parliament…. There is an incredible willingness to be shepherded and that’s only because we’ve lost faith in democracy, in politics and ourselves as political subjects.
The de-politicisation of media has also emboldened all of this – the obsession with objectivity has become a substitute for neutrality. The vast majority of the world’s mainstream media have become obsessed with being neutral, and have done so at the cost of forgetting their main job – holding power to account, asking questions to power, and giving a voice to the voiceless. In many ways, the media have become their own class – an elite of sorts… that has cut ties with unions and politics…
Q: Are we seeing the consequences of people not being politically educated and engaged?
[Ece Temelkuran]: The day after the UK referendum, people said, ‘…oh, we didn’t know it was actually going to be counted!’ it was horrible to see that. Those same people are going to have to learn every single detail about politics soon, they’re going to have to learn about the rules of parliaments, the departments of Westminster, how democracy works… they will have to learn to get democracy back in order.
During the 1970s there was a war on politics in our education system – a zeitgeist was imposed such that politics was seen as dirty, boring, unnecessary. It became the norm for people to say ‘I hate politics!’ without realising that is actually one of the most political statements that can be made. If you say ‘I hate politics!’ you are removing yourself from the public sphere, and are rejecting the ability to be a political subject. You are submitting yourself to a higher order, a powerful ruler…
We are seeing this happen extremely fast in Britain and the United States. People are losing their basic rights as citizens… We experienced this in Turkey too – it was an earthquake hit our houses and we realised we hadn’t done enough to keep the walls strong…
Democracy is a very young concept, and as humanity, we are still trying to create democracy, we are still trying to understand democracy…. We have to keep our eyes open.
Q: Why is democracy so fragile?
[Ece Temelkuran]: The real owners of democracy have been pushed away from democracy, and this began when our democracies – in their current state – stripped citizens of an integral part of democracy, social justice. When you remove social justice from democracy it becomes a feeder for the elite – and that’s why progressive organisations can only make themselves heard on the streets, not through democratic and governmental institutions… It was perhaps the Cold War that kickstarted this, because social justice was so related to socialism.
It’s hard for people to defend democracy when it cannot defend them against social injustice.
Q: How can we fight the growth of authoritarianism?
[Ece Temelkuran]: People sometimes look to the Middle East to see where things are going wrong, but I must say… in Turkey, perhaps our democracy was stronger – it took decades for Erdoğan to achieve what Boris Johnson did in a few weeks… maybe we had a better resistance…
I have to say though, it’s difficult to find something positive to say about the fight against authoritarianism in the middle east but I am incredibly inspired by the fight of young women in Turkey and the Middle East – fighting for democracy with their lives… they are unstoppable…
When it comes to Europe and the Western democracies; we have to take to the streets and make ourselves heard – end of story. We have to organise, mobilise and politicise… we have to use those good old-fashioned tools of politics, they’re the ones that count. We have to show-up! We have to fight, we have to get out onto the streets and change things.
Since the 1970s it’s almost become a taboo to talk of conflict – we’ve become a society geared around consensus, and co-existence – and this has domesticated politics in a dangerous way. The media have been too busy finding consensus with the Brexiteers and Trumpeteers to fight them.
This is a political struggle and there is no politeness or kindness in this. It is very clear what one has to do if one has to defend her right. It is to fight back when there is oppression.
Q: What gives you hope for the future?
[Ece Temelkuran]: I am not a big fan of the word hope, I am a big fan of the word determination. Being determined is a moral position, when you are depend on the word hope you are lazy.
Thanks to social media, we are constantly faced with the worst side of human beings – but often we are shielded from seeing the other side, the good, the wholeness of the human story… we’ve come to expect outrage and to feel appalled – but we have to realise politics is not about evil and crazy, it’s about real human communication. I do believe that going back to human communication, back to old school communication a little bit would make a lot of difference in people’s perspective on human beings condition today, and current political situation.
I’ve often thought that maybe there is a certain hormone in human beings that we can only produce it when we are face to face. And it’s the hormone of shame – it becomes absent when you are communicating on social media and you become worse than you are. We just invented this. We just invented social media, this is a new invention – we cannot really control it, and we are experiencing the childhood diseases of social media playing out in our democratic institutions….
Opinion: Canada is cutting Alberta a blank cheque with TMX
PETER MCCARTNEY Updated: December 17, 2019 The Trans Mountain Expansion Project pipe is on the ground near Highway 60 and 628, and will be in the ground before Christmas as an event was held to mark the start of right-of-way pipeline construction just west of Edmonton Dec. 3, 2019. ED KAISER / POSTMEDIA
Oh, Alberta. You’ll have to forgive us in the rest of Canada for taking the recent rumblings of separatism with a grain of salt. Western alienation has risen and fallen opposite the fortunes of the oil industry for decades. I’ve got family who still refuse to gas up at Petro-Canada because of the first Trudeau’s national energy program in the ’80s.
Prime Minister Trudeau bought you a pipeline. He stuck his thumb in the eye of one of his core constituencies and paid for it when many environmentalists abandoned his party. And now, he’s offering unlimited public dollars to see it through — the mother of all fossil-fuel subsidies.
When the Trans Mountain expansion was first proposed, it was projected to cost $5.4 billion and be finished by 2017. That year, the project had just received its first approval and construction costs rose to $7.4 billion. Before the federal government bought the pipeline last year, the price tag grew to $9.3 billion. And now that the Canadian public owns the project, nobody can tell us how much it’s eventually going to cost.
Either the federal government is hiding the ballooning costs, or worse yet, they don’t even know. That any government would start a project without giving the public a credible cost estimate is a bad sign. The parliamentary budget office has given us some insight into the debacle. It says Canada already overpaid by up to a billion dollars, before counting the numerous delays that have already decreased the value of the project. It also says a year of delay will lower its worth by $693 million, and a 10-per-cent increase in construction costs puts it a further $453 million in the red.
Trudeau is effectively cutting a blank cheque to Alberta — or more precisely, the oil and gas sector knowing full well permitting, legal errors and protests will slow construction and drive up costs. Just how much are Canadians willing to spend on a project now driven more by political factors than economic ones?
Global oil markets have seen a seismic shift since Kinder Morgan first applied to expand its pipeline in 2012 and Albertans have felt the consequences. But as stark as the situation seems now, it is only going to get worse. Even the notoriously conservative International Energy Agency now predicts demand for oil will start to level off around 2025 with existing climate policies. And once the world actually gets its act together to stave off climate catastrophe, demand will plummet.
Credible industry observers forecast oil demand to peak as early as 2022 — possibly before Trans Mountain could even be complete. Should Canada really be spending tens of billions on infrastructure when it may be obsolete before it’s even finished?
While the government appears ready to make a massive investment in Alberta, isn’t it worth setting ourselves up for success instead of doubling down on an industry that clearly has an expiration date?
Trudeau has repeatedly claimed his government will invest the pipeline’s profits into clean energy. But anybody who has been paying attention is asking — what profits? His own advisors confirm Trans Mountain lost $36 million in the first seven months of public ownership. And even if they could complete the expansion without massive cost overruns and devaluation, they’re clearly never going to turn a profit on its sale.
Canada already spends about $53.5 billion annually just in health-care costs due to air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That dwarfs any lost revenue for oil companies from pipeline constraints. We need to invest now in solving the problem, not making it worse.
Clean energy is forecast to employ nearly 560,000 Canadians by 2030, even as the fossil-fuel sector sheds 50,000 jobs. Its contribution to Canada’s GDP is on track to grow 3.4 per cent a year, almost 10 times faster than fossil fuels. Private investors are abandoning oil and gas for wind and solar. Canada should follow their lead.
Instead of propping up the nation’s most polluting industry for a few more years and letting economics make these tough decisions for us, let’s cut our losses and use the billions we would spend on Trans Mountain to invest in an economy that will actually last. That starts with a Just Transition Act to offer immediate support for oil workers and communities who are already hurting.
Boom times are never coming back and this pipeline won’t do anything to change that. But Canadians are ready and willing to help the province off the economic roller-coaster of fossil fuels. Alberta is full of talented, hard-working people who have all the skills we need to build a clean economy if we invest in the province’s future — not its past.
Workers sort recycling at Edmonton Waste Management Centre in December 2017. IAN KUCERAK / POSTMEDIA
Alberta employers will no longer be required to have an occupational health and safety (OHS) committee at every work site, come Jan. 31.
The United Conservative Party government said the change eliminates red tape for employers while upholding workers’ rights to have a say in health and safety on the job.
“We have heard that the current rules around health and safety committees are not working,” Labour and Immigration Minister Jason Copping said in a government news release on Friday. “Employers are still responsible for ensuring healthy and safe work sites and the new rules provide the flexibility to meet the unique needs of each workplace.”
Under the UCP’s changes, employers can now have one committee for all work sites, rather than one committee for each location.
“This is frustrating and disturbing because we’d finally gotten to the point of catching up with the rest of the country in terms of making these very important workplace health and safety committees mandatory,” Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan said Saturday.
He said the change to the committee rules will “dramatically undermine” their effectiveness.
In Alberta, there were 18 workplace deaths in the first 10 months of 2018, and 21 people died at work in 2017, according to the most current report on the government website.
Alberta last to require OHS committees
At OHS committees, employee and employer representatives regularly meet to discuss potential workplace safety issues, and steps the employer could take to address them.
They’re important prevention mechanisms that provide workers with a safe venue to raise concerns, McGowan said.
NDP labour and immigration critic Christina Gray said Sunday the committees are also good value for the money, saving $3 for every dollar invested in training and meetings by preventing workplace injuries and deaths.
Alberta was the last Canadian jurisdiction with no committee requirement. The NDP’s changes to the Occupational Health and Safety Act forced all employers with 20 or more workers to have joint OHS committees, while employers with between five and 19 employees had to have a health and safety representative.
Gray said the intent of legislation was for each work site to have a committee, and the former NDP government issued a director’s order in June 2018 requiring exactly that.
The UCP government rescinded the “burdensome” order on Friday, “returning to the system that worked well prior to the NDP’s unnecessary change,” said Brittany Baltimore, Copping’s press secretary, in a Saturday email.
Since June 2018, employers had complained about the administrative hassle of the site-based committees, she said. People submitting red tape reduction tips to government also flagged it.
OHS officers retain the ability to order an employer to form an OHS committee at any location where they think one is required, she said.
Unionized workplaces with committees written into their collective agreements will be unaffected until their agreements expire.
Rules in other provinces vary. Ontario requires each workplace with 20 or more workers to have a committee; Saskatchewan mandates them at workplaces with 10 or more employees.
The government is also immediately paring back required training for OHS committee members — they now need one training course instead of two. The change should save government $275,000 a year.
One committee, thousands of workers
In a Friday news release, the government quoted three school division superintendents as saying a single, division-wide OHS committee is a prudent change that still meets student and staff safety requirements.
McGowan said it could allow large employers with numerous locations, like a grocery store chain, to disband many committees.
UCP REDUCES EFFORTS TO PROTECT OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY; UNDERTAKERS SHOULD APPLAUD
[This Christmas story is a first in our series of "Scrooge Comes to Alberta in 2019."]
"We promised to create more jobs, and we are delivering for you," Premier Kenney is about to announce to a Christmas gathering of Alberta funeral home operators.
A copy of his speech shows that the premier will tell the undertakers that he expects his new policies to undermine workers' health and safety should lead to more deaths on the job, an area in which per capita Alberta is already the national leader, and of course more people being maimed and dying earlier than they might have expected. That will be a short-term boost for the funeral business.
"You add that to my cuts to the health system and I think your businesses are about to boom," the premier will tell the gathered business people in an effort to bring smiles to a group that normally is rather gloomy.
"My education policies should also help you," his speech will continue. "There's lots of evidence that more educated people live longer than the uneducated and that's no help to your business. So, please remember me as the undertakers' best political friend and contribute to the UCP, the Undertakers' Conservative Party."
And he'll conclude: "And a merry Christmas and productive New Year to you all."
