Canada Goose’s Image Is Challenged by Union Effort

Production of the company’s parkas was once fully unionized, but labor organizers say the owners have taken a harder line in recent years.

A Canada Goose factory in Toronto in 2018. The apparel maker is controlled by the private equity firm Bain Capital.Credit...Mark Blinch/Reuters

By Noam Scheiber
July 1, 2021

Canada Goose, the luxury jacket maker, has cultivated an image that is not only chic but also socially conscious. It has forged alliances with environmental advocates and talked of its commitment to high labor standards.

These efforts have paid off as the company outgrew its roots as a family enterprise and built a worldwide following for its parkas, which can cost over $1,000 and have been worn by celebrities like Daniel Craig and Kate Upton. “We believe that the brand image we have developed has significantly contributed to the success of our business,” the company wrote in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in March.

But production employees of Canada Goose, who were all unionized as of 2010, have complained that the company has taken an increasingly hard line toward labor that is at odds with its stated values.

Shoppers at a Canada Goose store in New York in 2019. Employees have accused the luxury jacket maker of being anti-union.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times


In 2019, a company official was cited by a provincial labor board for unfair labor practices during a union election at a newer facility, and some employees complain that the company has retaliated against them in recent months for supporting a union.

“People have fear,” said Alelie Sanvictores, a worker who has been active in union organizing. “Some people are scared to talk to me.”

Canada Goose denies that it is anti-union and that it has retaliated against union supporters. “It is the employees who will decide their path forward, and Canada Goose will support their decision,” the company said in a statement. The company dismissed the official cited for unfair labor practices.

On Wednesday, a few dozen labor activists picketed the Boston headquarters of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that owns and controls Canada Goose, hoping to pressure the jacket maker to endorse a union at three plants in Winnipeg.

Pro-union demonstrators gathered Wednesday outside the Boston headquarters of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that controls Canada Goose.Credit...Philip Keith for The New York Times

The tensions at Canada Goose appear to illustrate the challenges of seeking rapid growth while maintaining a high-minded reputation that helps sustain a luxury business.

An immigrant named Sam Tick founded Canada Goose, then known as Metro Sportswear Ltd., in 1957. Its lone factory, in Toronto, unionized in the mid-1980s.

After Mr. Tick’s grandson Dani Reiss took over as chief executive in 2001, he sought to increase worldwide sales of what had largely been a North American operation. Still, he committed to making its parkas in Canada even as much of the country’s apparel industry was moving offshore.

“By keeping the majority of our production domestic, we contribute to local job growth and can more easily maintain our high manufacturing and labour standards,” the company wrote in its 2020 sustainability report.

But Mr. Reiss has seemed more skeptical of unions than his predecessors at Canada Goose. After the company bought a production facility in Winnipeg in 2011, the union sought a voluntary recognition or a neutrality agreement that would allow workers there to unionize easily.

“Dani Reiss said he wasn’t interested in doing that,” said Barry Fowlie, who for roughly a decade has directed the Canada Council of Workers United, the union that represents workers at the company.

A company spokeswoman said the union had never asked for voluntary recognition “in any official context.”

Bain Capital purchased a majority stake in Canada Goose in 2013 and listed it on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges in 2017.

Under Bain’s ownership, the number of unionized workers increased to over 1,000 just before the pandemic, thanks to growth at the original Toronto plant and the addition of two more facilities there. A collective bargaining agreement that predated the new sites makes all Toronto-based production workers part of the union.


But facilities in Winnipeg, where the company’s three factories had over 1,000 production workers before the pandemic, are not covered. The growth of the work force there has helped lower the company’s union membership among production workers to about one-third today, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Workers at the Winnipeg plants say many of them make the province’s minimum wage, which is about 12 Canadian dollars per hour (around $9.65), though workers can earn more if they exceed certain production targets. The company said nearly 70 percent of workers were making more than the minimum wage.

Canada Goose committed to making its parkas in Canada, even as much of the country’s apparel industry was moving offshore. Credit...Mark Blinch/Reuters


In interviews, five workers complained that managers were often abusive toward the largely immigrant work force.

One worker, Immanuelle Concepcion, said her supervisor flew into a rage over mistakes in some jackets she appeared to have worked on. “She told me, ‘How dare you allow this to happen? How dare you?’” Ms. Concepcion recalled. “I was shaking. I haven’t experienced humiliation that way.”

The Canada Goose spokeswoman said that the company had gotten no reports of “frequent abuse” and that all reports of harassment were investigated.

In June, the company disciplined two workers at one of its Winnipeg plants shortly after they had identified themselves as union supporters. One said he had routinely been wearing headphones while working, but was warned and then written up for it — on two consecutive days — only after he went to work wearing a union T-shirt.

Until then, said the worker, Trevor Sinclair, “my supervisor never said anything about it.”

Canada Goose said that “no employees face disciplinary action due to union organization” and that disciplinary action had been taken against Mr. Sinclair once management became aware of his violation.

Nearly 30 percent of Canadian workers are union members, compared with about 11 percent of American workers. Mr. Sinclair said he felt that Canada Goose was essentially importing an American model of fighting unions.

“The way they treat us is not how Canadians treat each other,” he said. “Management doesn’t really understand what Canada is about.”

Philip Keith contributed reporting.



Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic magazine, where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is the author of “The Escape Artists.” @noamscheiber

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2021, Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Union Puts Canada Goose’s Image to Test. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

UK
Clarks workers consider strike 

over fire-and-rehire

By Ben King
Business reporter, BBC News

IMAGE COPYRIGHTGETTY

Over 100 workers at Clarks shoes are considering strike action as the company threatens to dismiss them and rehire them on worse terms.

The union says it is another example of a controversial practice which has become increasingly widespread.

Clarks has been losing money for years, and was taken over by a Hong Kong-based private equity firm in February.

A company spokesperson confirmed it is consulting with employees about employment terms.

109 of the 145 workers in the Clarks warehouse in Somerset are on contracts signed before the private equity takeover, which are more generous than those offered to recent hires.

They are being asked to accept a new contract which would reduce pay by around 15%, along with three fewer days' holiday, worse sickness terms, and eliminate 10-minute breaks and complimentary hot drinks.

Clarks will this week file official paperwork to begin a 45-day consultation, after which it could dismiss all its workers and offer to rehire them on the new contracts.

Community, the trade union representing employees, has said all options are being considered to fight the move, which could include strike action.

A Clarks spokesperson said: "Clarks is currently consulting with unions and employees at our Westway Distribution Centre in Street, Somerset on proposed changes to employment terms and conditions for all operatives.

"As we are in a period of consultation, we are unable to comment any further at this time."

The BBC understands that Clarks is still hoping to find a negotiated solution which does not involve firing and rehiring any workers. The workers on the new contracts could see their pay rise under new employment terms.

Clarks has around 460 stores in the UK and hundreds more around the world

Clarks was losing money before the pandemic, and has been hit hard in lockdown. It is expected to report a significant loss when it files its next set of annual accounts.

"The workers most adversely impacted by these changes are those who have been employees for decades, sticking with the company through thick and thin, stepping up in the last year during the challenging pandemic period," said John Paul McHugh, Assistant General Secretary from Community.

"Fire-and-rehire is no way to thank your employees or your customers. We ask Clarks to call off the diminishing of terms and conditions."

Founded in Somerset in 1825 by two brothers, Cyrus and James, Clarks shoe shops became a fixture on the British high street. It currently has 460 UK stores and over 700 more around the world. Workers in shops are not affected by the proposed changes.

Earlier this year Hong Kong-based private equity group LionRock Capital bought a majority stake for £100m, as the Clark family lost control of the business for the first time in nearly two centuries.

Unions say disputes about fire and rehire tactics have become more common since the pandemic

What is fire-and-rehire?

When an employer wants to change workers' employment contracts, often to reduce costs, they can sometimes dismiss all the affected workers and offer to re-engage them on new contracts - known as "fire-and-rehire".

The controversy about this practice has become more intense following the pandemic.

The list of recent disputes involving alleged fire-and-rehire tactics includes British Airways, Coffee maker Jacobs Douwe Egberts, British Gas, bus company Go North West, and Tesco.

A study into fire-and-rehire by the conciliation service ACAS found evidence of the practice at small- and medium-sized employers too.

Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, as well as trades unions, have called for it to be banned.

The government has no plans to ban it but has said it should be used only as a last resort, not a negotiating tactic.

Magnus Carlsen on 10 years unbroken as world chess no. 1

Jul 1, 2021
chess24
World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen talks to Kaja Snare about being no. 1 on the world rankings non-stop since July 2011.

 Read more: https://chess24.com/en/read/news/magn...

 

Chess: 12-year-old Abhimanyu Mishra breaks youngest grandmaster record

The American beat Sergey Karjakin’s 2002 mark in Budapest to take the record that has been held by Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer and Judit Polgar

Abhimanyu Mishra pictured with his International Master certificate. The 12-year-old has broken the record, held by Sergey Karjakin since 2002, for youngest grandmaster ever. Photograph: Justin Lane/US Chess

Leonard Barden

Thu 1 Jul 2021 17.33 BST

One of the most enduring chess records, Sergey Karjakin as the youngest grandmaster ever at 12 years seven months, was finally broken on Wednesday afternoon. Abhimanyu Mishra, from Englishtown, New Jersey, US, who was already the youngest ever international master at 10 years nine months, achieved his third and final GM norm at 12 years four months. Mishra achieved the 2500 rating requirement a few weeks ago, and his title will soon be confirmed by Fide. Mishra learned to play chess at two-and-a-half and became the youngest ever US expert at seven.

Karjakin’s record had narrowly survived serious attempts by India’s current generation of talents, but Mishra’s concentrated campaign, launched after the pandemic derailed his competitive play for the best part of a year, reached its target with 66 days to spare. His father’s key move was a one-way air ticket from the US to Budapest, which currently has a continuous series of GM and IM tournaments.

3730: Alexey Shirov v Rolands Berzins, Gipslis Memorial 2021. White to move. Black threatens Qxg2 mate. Two questions. 1. Can you find White’s winning move? 2. Can you identify the famous game which had a similar tactic?

Mishra has been in continuous action there since April, scoring all three needed GM norms (performance levels at 2600) plus a 2500 overall rating. In fact, he overachieved. Budapest First Saturday in May was his most impressive result, where he simply ran away from the field, scoring an unbeaten 8/9 with a winning margin of three points.

His tournament performance rating (TPR) was 2735, the level of the world top 20 grandmasters. It was almost certainly the youngest 2700+ TPR in chess history, and the first ever by a preteen. His final-round win there, with first prize and GM norm already secure, is one of his best so far.

Mishra was interviewed on Thursday by a team including England’s GM David Howell and No 1 woman IM Jovanka Houska. To the question: “Where does he go from here?” his father, Hemant, said after Abhimanyu became the youngest IM they expected him to break Karjakin’s record by a wide margin, only for the pandemic to stop all over-the-board activity for several months. Hence the crash course in Budapest, where Mishra played virtually non-stop for many weeks with at most a day’s break between tournaments and sometimes two rounds a day.

The GM age record is viewed by the Mishras as just a step on the real target for Abhimanyu’s teen years, to break the records for reaching 2600 (strong GM) and 2700 (elite GM). Several players have passed 2600 strength at 14. Arguably, Bobby Fischer was the first and still the most impressive when he won the 1957-58 US championship, long before the rating system began in 1970.

At 2700, elite GM, the youngest have been China’s Wei Yi at 15 years eight months and Iran-born Alireza Firouzja at 16 years one month. Again, Fischer deserves a mention for his performances at 15 in the 1958 Portoroz interzonal and the 1958-59 US championship.

Youngest GM became official only in 1950, when Fide issued its first list of titles. David Bronstein was then the youngest at 26, followed by Tigran Petrosian at 23 in 1952, Boris Spassky at 18 in 1955, and Bobby Fischer at 15 in 1958. The last three all became world champions. Fischer held the record for over 30 years before the all-time No 1 woman, Judit Polgar, broke it in 1991, after which it was gradually lowered until Karjakin, then of Ukraine and now Russia, took it in 2002.

UK to stage inclusive ChessFest in London’s Trafalgar Square

Read more

Karjakin, who went on from being a prodigy to challenging for Carlsen’s world crown in 2016, had gracious words for the new record holder: “I am quite philosophical about this because it has been almost 20 years. It had to be broken sooner or later. I was sure one of the Indian guys would do it much earlier, and I was lucky that it didn’t happen.

I am a little sad that I lost the record, but at the same time I can only congratulate him and it’s no problem. I hope that he will go on to be one of the top chess players and that it will be a nice start to his big career.”

Mishra will now travel to the 206-player World Cup in Sochi starting on 10 July, where Carlsen is the top seed and the 12-year-old has been given a wildcard entry by Fide. His first-round opponent is Baadur Jobava, three times champion of Georgia and famed for his imaginative attacking style. An unlikely victory there would put him in the second round against the former US champion Sam Shankland, ranked world No 31 after his recent victory in Prague.

3730 Bxf7+ Rxf7 2 Qh8+! Kxh8 3 Nxf7+ and 4 Nxg5 wins easily on material. The famous precedent is Tigran Petrosian v Boris Spassky, 10th world championship match game 1966.

INVESTIGATIONS
The small Alberta oil company behind Saskatchewan’s latest and largest-ever case of orphaned wells

By Roberta Bell, P.W. Elliott and Julia Peterson Global News
Posted June 28, 2021 


A single insolvent oil company from Alberta has created a five-fold increase in the number of orphaned wells to safely shut down and seal in Saskatchewan and leaves behind $31 million dollars in clean-up costs and unpaid bills.


Calgary-based Bow River Energy Ltd., which sought bankruptcy protection in late 2020, has 671 orphaned oil and gas sites in the west-central part of the province. Of them, 394 require abandonment and reclamation while an additional 141 require just reclamation, according to the Saskatchewan Ministry of Energy and Resources.

The ministry confirms it is the largest-ever group of sites from a single company taken into the province’s Orphan Well Fund, and could cost up to $25 million to clean up over two to three years.

View image in full screen

In addition, a long line of creditors is owed more than $6 million, including farmers, ranchers, small businesses, First Nations, rural municipalities — and the Saskatchewan government, itself.

It may be just the tip of an approaching iceberg, says industry expert Ken Gordey, who spent the first half of his career developing oilfields and now the latter half cleaning them up.

“Letting it get to that point is what the issue is,” he says. “It should have never got to this point.

“We have to turn around and do a refocus here.”

Wider potential problem

This is part of a much wider potential problem in Saskatchewan, where there are some 75,000 inactive and abandoned wells in the field, says Bill Kilgannon, the executive director of University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute, which studies the oil and gas industry in Western Canada.

Many are owned by small companies that buy up properties from major oil companies as the wells begin to decline. And while major oil companies have benefited from an upturn in oil prices, the future is less secure for smaller oil and gas firms, says Kilgannon.

As large producers shift to renewables and download aging oil infrastructure to ever-smaller companies, the risk of scenarios like Bow River increases, he says.


READ MORE: Alberta officials warned oilpatch faced ‘landslide’ of failures. Then coronavirus struck

A review of Bow River company and court documents reveals this pattern. Founded in 2013 on a purchase of natural gas wells from NuVista Energy, Bow River expanded in 2017, acquiring former Husky Oil wells and a sour gas processing plant for $15.8 million.

The fledgling company specialized in buying up “mature” oil and gas assets and using horizontal drilling to reach remaining pockets of oil and gas, Bow River co-founder and chief financial officer Daniel Belot stated in a court affidavit.

However, Bow River struggled from the beginning to pay debts amid fluctuating oil prices, according to Belot’s affidavit.

“As a junior energy producer, the company is highly dependent on the price of oil and gas to maintain viable and well-capitalized operations,” he wrote.

"AS A JUNIOR ENERGY PRODUCER, THE COMPANY IS HIGHLY DEPENDENT ON THE PRICE OF OIL AND GAS TO MAINTAIN VIABLE AND WELL-CAPITALIZED OPERATIONS," HE WROTE.

Bow River representatives met with the provincial government several times between 2018 and 2020 seeking relief from Crown land rent and other fees, without success.

The company stopped paying rental fees in November 2018 “as part of its cost-reduction measures due to the then declining commodity prices,” Belot wrote. They ceased paying royalties in February 2020.

Also weighing down Bow River’s balance sheet was an estimated $62 to $81 million future liability for decommissioning wells not only in Saskatchewan but Alberta, as well.

Global News attempted to reach out to Belot by phone and email but did not receive a response.

“That’s the biggest problem we have in the Canadian oil field; we do not hold the junior oil companies to the fire before we go transferring licenses,” says Gordey. “And we also don’t hold the major (oil companies) responsible for the liability prior to that transfer.”
‘Every orphaned well will be cleaned up’

Saskatchewan Energy Minister Bronwyn Eyre says approval to transfer well licences during a merger involves “a complicated ratio that takes into account a company’s strength overall, solvency overall and assets versus debts.”

Saskatchewan Energy Minister on Licensee Liability Rating Program

The government is looking to strengthen its Licensee Liability Rating program “to make sure that we have an absolutely organic sense of net corporate health to make sure that we take into account the fullest picture possible, the full inventory of assets across provinces, that we look at annual retirement of a certain percentage of wells.”

Eyre says that although there have been increased mergers during a challenging time, the province has safeguards to manage the risk and protect taxpayers.

“In Saskatchewan, it’s important to recognize every orphaned well will be cleaned up,” Eyre says. “That’s been the case and it is going to be the case going forward.”

READ MORE: Funding to clean up Saskatchewan’s orphan wells a ‘positive first-step’ says Premier Moe

Created in 2010, the Orphan Well Fund is supported by an annual fee paid by oil and gas companies operating in the province. That fee will be increased to help cover the Bow River costs, the ministry confirmed in an email.

“Even in the worst-case scenario that every company, every oil and gas company went bankrupt tomorrow in the province, which of course is never going to happen, the estimated $4 billion dollars in clean up would be immediately offset by $13 billion dollars in assets,” says Eyre.

As well, last April the federal government announced $400 million in assistance for struggling companies to properly abandon wells in Saskatchewan, as a way to avoid more Bow Rivers.

“We can never guarantee that companies will never go insolvent, but we can manage the risk,” she says.

“We have a strong program, we have a strong regulatory structure. I’m very proud of the regulatory structure and taxpayers should be as well.”

0:32‘We can manage the risk,’ says Saskatchewan Energy Minister

In the case of Bow River’s orphaned sites, Saskatchewan estimates it will take two to three years to complete abandonment and reclamation, beginning in 2022. Eyre stresses the fund is supported by oil companies, not taxpayers, and the province also expects to receive a portion of the sale of Bow River assets.

In March of this year, the courts approved sale of Bow River’s producing wells to two energy companies, Heartland and Tallahassee.

A 2019 Supreme Court decision, referred to as the Redwater case, ruled environmental liabilities must be paid first when insolvent companies sell off their assets.

With the receivership still before the courts, Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Energy and Resources says it can’t comment on whether it anticipated collecting any money and if so, how much.

“I think it’s important to wait until the receivership process is complete because only then does the cleanup begin,” Eyre adds.

Saskatchewan is not the only one in line. The province of Alberta has been left $43.8 million in unpaid environmental liabilities. Husky Oil is still owed close to $1 million and there are 388 other creditors scattered across the country.

“It depends on (Bow River’s) ability to sell off their assets at the end of the day, as to what’s left and then who’s in line to receive how much money first,” says Kilgannon.
Creditors come calling

In Saskatchewan, court documents outline $2.2 million in unpaid taxes to rural municipalities and over $2 million in unpaid provincial royalties and fees, alongside 87 creditors owed some $2 million, from trucking companies to coffee suppliers.

Monday, the R.M. of Eye Hill, located near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border south of Lloydminster, was set to appear at Queen’s Bench in hopes of reclaiming $402,559 in unpaid taxes and additional costs, an amount the RM says is rising as time passes.

Usually, companies just get a percentage on the dollar of unpaid taxes, says Kilgannon.

: "ONCE COMPANIES GO INTO BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION, IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO COLLECT ON UNPAID TAXES."

The ministry stated in an email: “Powers exist under the Municipalities Act to pursue the collection of unpaid taxes. However, if landowners have concerns, they can engage with the Ministry of Energy and Resources as the energy regulator of the province.”

Left untended, orphaned and inactive wells are a hazard because they can DO deteriorate in time, leaking sour gas, benzene and other harmful emissions.

READ MORE: Calls grow for action on Ontario’s thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells

“Unfortunately, across the entire province of Saskatchewan, we have every kind of well known to mankind that is leaking or an issue,” said Gordey, who has worked on well sites throughout Canada and internationally. “And a lot of it has to do just with the fact that due diligence with putting the well to bed properly has never been done.”

As well, the sites create problems for farmers who have difficulty moving their seeders and other equipment around old well bores sticking up out of the ground, he says.

“Who suffers? We suffer. And that’s the sad part of it,” says Gordey, referring to the people of Saskatchewan.

“People have to realize that we own the oil,” he says. “It is our oil, it is our natural gas. And by letting other people turn around and take it out, take the money and run, and then leave us with the mess to clean up is something that is getting to be more and more critical.

“The government better start putting their foot down, and start looking at everything, or we will not have a future for our families.”

This story was researched with support from the University of Regina and the Corporate Mapping Project, which is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Please see the “Price of Oil” for more information on this series coordinated by the Institute for Investigative Journalism.

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Communities are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images


Via an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for the devastation caused by fossil fuels

Supported by


Chris McGreal
Wed 30 Jun 2021 


After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes.

An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.


Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels.


But, even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public.

The environmentalist Bill McKibben once characterized the fossil fuel industry’s behavior as “the most consequential cover-up in US history”. And now for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.

“We are at an inflection point,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment.

“Things have to get worse for the oil companies,” he added. “Even if they’ve got a pretty good chance of winning the litigation in places, the discovery of pretty clearcut wrong doing – that they knew their product was bad and they were lying to the public – really weakens the industry’s ability to resist legislation and settlements.”

For decades, the country’s leading oil and gas companies have understood the science of climate change and the dangers posed by fossil fuels. Year after year, top executives heard it from their own scientists whose warnings were explicit and often dire.
Advertisement


In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.

“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.

But instead of heeding the evidence of the research they were funding, major oil firms worked together to bury the findings and manufacture a counter narrative to undermine the growing scientific consensus around climate science. The fossil fuel industry’s campaign to create uncertainty paid off for decades by muddying public understanding of the growing dangers from global heating and stalling political action.

The urgency of the crisis is not in doubt. A draft United Nations report, leaked last week, warns that the consequences of the climate crisis, including rising seas, intense heat and ecosystem collapse, will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades even if fossil fuel emissions are curbed.

To investigate the lengths of the oil and gas industry’s deceptions – and the disastrous consequences for communities across the country – the Guardian is launching a year-long series tracking the unprecedented efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account.

The legal process is expected to take years. Cities in California filed the first lawsuits back in 2017, and they have been tied down by disputes over jurisdiction, with the oil companies fighting with limited success to get them moved from state to federal courts where they think the law is more favorable.

But climate activists see opportunities long before verdicts are rendered in the US. The legal process is expected to add to already damning revelations of the energy giants’ closely held secrets. If history is a guide, those developments could in turn alter public opinion in favor of regulations that the oil and gas companies spent years fighting off.

A string of other recent victories for climate activists already points to a shift in the industry’s power.

Last month, a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45% by the end of the decade. The same day, in Houston, an activist hedge fund forced three new directors on to the board of the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, to address climate issues. Investors at Chevron also voted to cut emissions from the petroleum products it sells.

Earlier this month, developers of the Keystone XL pipeline cancelled the project after more than a decade of unrelenting opposition over environmental concerns. And although a federal court last year threw out a lawsuit brought by 21 young Americans who say the US government violated their constitutional rights by exacerbating climate change, the Biden administration recently agreed to settlement talks in a symbolic gesture aimed to appease younger voters.

Miles of pipe ready to become part of the Keystone pipeline are stacked in a field near Ripley, Oklahoma. Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP

For all that, American lawyers say the legal reasoning behind foreign court judgments are unlikely to carry much weight in the US and domestic law is largely untested. In 2018, a federal court knocked back New York City’s initial attempt to force big oil to cover the costs of the climate crisis by saying that its global nature requires a political, not legal, remedy.

Other regional lawsuits are inching their way through the courts. From Charleston, South Carolina, to Boulder, Colorado, and Maui, Hawaii, communities are seeking to force the industry to use its huge profits to pay for the damage and to oblige energy companies to treat the climate crisis for what it is – a global emergency.

Municipalities such as Imperial Beach, California – the poorest city in San Diego county with a budget less than Exxon chief executive’s annual pay – faces rising waters on three sides without the necessary funding to build protective barriers. They claim oil companies created a “public nuisance” by fuelling the climate crisis. They seek to recover the cost of repairing the damage and constructing defences.

The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.

Other climate lawsuits, including one filed in Minnesota, allege the oil firms’ campaigns of deception and denial about the climate crisis amount to fraud. Minnesota is suing Exxon, Koch Industries and an industry trade group for breaches of state law for deceptive trade practices, false advertising and consumer fraud over what the lawsuit characterises as distortions and lies about climate science.


How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountable


The midwestern state, which has seen temperatures rise faster than the US and global averages, said scorching temperatures and “mega-rains” have devastated farming and flooded people out of their homes, with low-income and minority families most at risk.

Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, claims in his lawsuit that for years Exxon orchestrated a campaign to bury the evidence of environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels “with disturbing success”.

“Defendants spent millions on advertising and public relations because they understood that an accurate understanding of climate change would affect their ability to continue to earn profits by conducting business as usual,” Ellison said in his lawsuit.
Advertisement


Farber said cases rooted in claims that the petroleum industry lied have the most promising chance of success.

“To the extent the plaintiffs can point to misconduct, like telling everybody there’s no such thing as climate change when your scientists have told you the opposite, that might give the courts a greater feeling of comfort that they’re not trying to take over the US energy system,” he said.

The ExxonMobil Baton Rouge refinery in Louisiana. 

Photograph: Kathleen Flynn/Reuters

Fighting the facts

Almost all the lawsuits draw on the oil industry’s own records as the foundation for claims that it covered up the growing threat to life caused by its products.

Shell, like other oil companies, had decades to prepare for those consequences after it was forewarned by its own research. In 1958, one of its executives, Charles Jones, presented a paper to the industry’s trade group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), warning about increased carbon emissions from car exhaust. Other research followed through the 1960s, leading a White House advisory committee to express concern at “measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” by 2000.

API’s own reports flagged up “significant temperature changes” by the end of the twentieth century.

The largest oil company in the US, Exxon, was hearing the same from its researchers.

Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.


Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.

“The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”

Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.

What followed was what Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the report America Misled, called a “systematic, organised campaign by Exxon and other oil companies to sow doubt about the science and prevent meaningful action”.

The report accused the energy companies of not only polluting the air but also “the information landscape” by replicating the cigarette makers’ playbook of cherry-picking data, using fake experts and promoting conspiracy theories to attack a growing scientific consensus.

Many of the lawsuits draw on a raft of Exxon documents held at the University of Texas, and uncovered by the Columbia Journalism School and the Los Angeles Times in 2015

.

An Exxon advertisement in the New York Times. Photograph: The New York Times

Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a “balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate denialism in any developed country.

The company placed advertisements in major American newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.

Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.

“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.

Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.

In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.

Hoffert said he “hoped that the work would help to persuade Exxon to invest in developing energy solutions the world needed”. That was not the result.


“Exxon was publicly promoting views that its own scientists knew were wrong, and we knew that because we were the major group working on this. This was immoral and has greatly set back efforts to address climate change,” said Hoffert.

“They deliberately created doubt when internal research confirmed how serious a threat it was. As a result, in my opinion, homes and livelihoods will likely be destroyed and lives lost.”

Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.

The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.

Exxon alone has funded more than 40 groups to deny climate science, including the George C Marshall Institute, which one lawsuit claims orchestrated a “sham petition” denying manmade global climate change. It was later denounced by the National Academy of Science as “a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists”.

Climate activists protest on the first day of the Exxon Mobil trial outside the New York state supreme court in October 2019. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

To Sharon Eubanks the conspiracy to deny science sounded very familiar. From 2000, she led the US justice department’s legal team against nine tobacco firms in one of the largest civil cases filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act, which was designed to combat organised crime.

In 2006, a federal judge found that the industry had spent decades committing a huge fraud on the American public by lying about the dangers of smoking and pushing cigarettes to young people.

Eubanks said that when she looked at the fossil fuel industry’s strategy, she immediately recognised big tobacco’s playbook.

“Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”

The danger for the fossil fuel industry is that the parallels do not end there.

The legal process is likely to oblige the oil conglomerates to turn over years of internal communications revealing what they knew about climate change, when and how they responded. Given what has already come out from Exxon, they are unlikely to help the industry’s case.

Eubanks, who is now advising attorneys general and others suing the oil industry, said a turning point in her action against big tobacco came with the discovery of internal company memos in a state case in Minnesota. They included language that talked about recruiting young people as “replacement smokers” for those who died from cigarettes.

“I think the public was particularly stunned by some of the content of the documents and the talk about the need for bigger bags to take home all the money they were going to make from getting people to smoke,” said Eubanks.

The exposure of the tobacco companies’ internal communications shifted the public mood and the politics, helping to open the door to legislation to curb smoking that the industry had been successfully resisting for decades.

Farber, the Berkeley law professor, said the discovery process carries a similar danger for the oil companies because it is likely to expose yet more evidence that they set out to deceive. He said that will undercut any attempt by the energy giants to claim in court that they were ignorant of the damage they were causing.

Farber said it will also be difficult for the oil industry to resist the weight of US lawsuits, shareholder activism and shifting public and political opinion. “It might push them towards settlement or supporting legislation that releases some from liability in return for some major concessions such as a large tax to finance responses to climate change.”

The alternative, said Farber, is to take their chance on judges and juries who may be increasingly inclined to take the climate crisis seriously.

“They may think this is an emergency that requires a response. That the oil companies should be held responsible for the harm they’ve caused and that could be very expensive,” he said. “If they lose, it’s catastrophic ultimately.”

The Guardian is sharing stories in its Climate crimes series with Covering Climate Now, a global news collaboration of more than 400 news outlets

Poundmaker's Lodge wants Alberta government to return land containing potential unmarked graves

Author of the article:Ashley Joannou
Publishing date:Jun 27, 2021 • 

The Poundmaker's Lodge Treatment Centres Society says burial sites on the school ground have been identified by survivors and verified by ground penetrating radar several times in the past, and the society has some burial maps of the site. 

The Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Centres Society wants the Alberta government to return a portion of land next to the site of the former Edmonton Indian Residential School, which they say could contain unmarked graves.

The Poundmaker’s Lodge has sat on the site of the former residential school northwest of Edmonton for decades. In a statement last week, officials said land adjacent to the property, known as River Lot 56, has been identified as “an area of concern” by survivors of the school.

“Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Centres Society recognizes the quickly developing surrounding areas and is proactively working with the Nations toward urban reserve status to ensure the protection and perpetuity of this sacred land,” the statement says.

No one from the society was available for additional comment prior to presstime.

River Lot 56 is a provincially managed natural area that is sometimes used for hiking or cross-country skiing.

In a statement, Adrienne South, press secretary for Indigenous Affairs Minister Rick Wilson, did not directly answer questions about whether the province would be willing to return River Lot 56 or what the potential process would involve.

She pointed to the $8 million that has been earmarked by the government for grants to Indigenous communities to identifying unmarked burial sites and commemorate them.

“These grants will go to support Indigenous organizations so they can decide how to best approach these sensitive issues. Such work can help inform the issue raised by Poundmaker’s Lodge, and potential next steps,” she said.

Poundmaker’s Lodge said burial sites on the school ground have been identified by survivors and verified by ground penetrating radar several times in the past. The society also has some burial maps of the site.

“Moving forward, there is a plan in place to continue to work with ground penetrating radar in further exploration of additional burial sites which are known to exist,” the statement says.

According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the Edmonton Indian Residential School ran from 1924 to 1968 and had as many as 200 students at a time, including from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, British Columbia, Northwest Territories and Yukon.

The society is also working with the University of Calgary and Alberta Culture and Heritage to develop the last remaining historical building on site into a historic resource centre and is planning on developing a digital resource museum after further consultation with Elders and survivors.

“Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Centres Society’s Eagle Staff reminds us that we are the keepers of this sacred land; the land where our children walked and are buried,” the statement says.

“We will ensure their stories continue to be told where voices were silenced so others will not forget.”

Meanwhile, a gathering of survivors is being planned for July 5 and 6. Survivors can confirm their attendance by calling the lodge.

The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available 24-hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of a residential school experience. Support is available at 1-866-925-4419.

RIGHT WING ANTI MASKERS

 Protesters harass Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro and family at Canada Day event

Author of the article:Newsroom Staff
Publishing date:Jul 01, 2021 • 

Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro and his family arrive and were greeted by hecklers and protests at a Canada Day event in Parkland in southeast Calgary on Thursday, July 1, 2021. PHOTO BY JIM WELLS /Postmedia
Article content

Alberta’s health minister says he’s disappointed after supporters of a fringe Calgary mayoral candidate verbally harassed him and his family at a Canada Day event Thursday.

Health Minister Tyler Shandro was arriving at the Parkland Community Association in southeast Calgary with his wife and two sons when several supporters of fringe mayoral candidate Kevin J. Johnston began swarming him.

The protesters chanted “Lock Shandro up,” called him a war criminal and asked him to answer for destroying the lives and businesses of Albertans through COVID-19 restrictions. The harassment visibly upset one of Shandro’s young sons.

Speaking to media after the harassment, Shandro said it was “an unfortunate way” for people to express their views, particularly during a Canada Day event meant for celebration.

“Obviously, throughout the pandemic there has been a lot of high emotions on both sides of the political spectrum, but this is a day to focus on celebrating Stage 3, celebrating family,” Shandro said.

“There’s some anxiety for them to hear people believing some of this disinformation about vaccines. It’s been unfortunate, and the way it was expressed today was unfortunate.”

Some of those yelling at Shandro were supporters of Kevin J. Johnston, a far-right agitator running for mayor in Calgary’s upcoming municipal election.

Johnston remains in jail while awaiting trial on two criminal charges of causing a disturbance and disobeying a court order relating to incidents at downtown Calgary’s Core shopping complex, in which he and others went into shoe stores without masks.

Johnston, 49, was charged again Thursday, this time related to the alleged harassment of an Alberta Health Services employee. Police said in a news release Johnston “engaged in the harassment of the employee by way of threatening conduct directed at the victim in person, on social media and online” between April 24 and May 22.

He is due in court on the harassment charge July 12. He also faces a $1.3-million lawsuit filed by AHS.

Eel products in the EU and the UK 

need better regulation

OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

Research News

Growing in popularity, unagi kabayaki - grilled freshwater eel in soy sauce - can be found on the menu of many Japanese restaurants, and is stocked by Asian shops and in specialist supermarkets. But new research tracing the DNA of eel fillets used for this dish has found that fraudulent food labelling is rife, with a third of the products violating EU regulations on the provision of food information. With certain species of eels now endangered, the researchers say that accurate labelling on these products is vital if the global eel trade is to be sustainable.

The European eel is a critically endangered species with trade strictly regulated, and import and export banned across the EU's external borders. While the researchers found little evidence of illegal trade in European eel in the products they examined, the prevalence of fraudulent labelling suggests that EU, and current UK, labelling requirements are insufficient.

"Only through DNA analysis were we able to demonstrate that more than ten percent of the unagi kabayaki fillets were prepared from species other than that indicated on the label" said Florian Stein, the lead author from the Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. He added, "In times when eel trafficking is considered to be one of the biggest wildlife crimes and consumer awareness regarding the source of their products in general is increasing - the level of evident labelling fraud is alarming."

The origins and labelling of 108 unagi kabayaki products for sale in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France and the UK were investigated by the researchers. Being prepared fillets covered in sauce, it was impossible to identify the species without molecular analysis. Taking DNA and cross-referencing this information with a global database meant that researchers could pinpoint the species involved and check the accuracy of each product label.

The researchers found that none of the products purchased in Europe were produced in Europe, all were imported from China and Taiwan. Each product contained the fillets of one type of eel, but in total four species were detected across the sample group, only one of which is found in Chinese waters. 73 samples were American eel, 33 Japanese eel, and a single sample of European eel and Indian shortfin eel were identified.

"The presence of eels originating from various parts of the world points at the global nature of the eel trade", said Vincent Nijman, Professor in Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, and one of the authors of the paper.

"American eel is transported from the east coast of the US to southern China, where it is turned into eel fillets, these are then exported to the Netherlands from where they end up in UK supermarkets. At the same time, in another shop, also in the UK, you can buy similar looking fillets that are actually Indian eels imported from Germany, that also were processed in China but which originated from perhaps the Philippines".

The research paper says it is vital that the EU and the UK achieve straightforward labelling requirements that include the scientific name of the species, and that this is made mandatory for prepared and preserved fish products.

Andrew Kerr, Chairman of the Sustainable Eel Group in Brussels, who was not involved in the research, noted, "Eel is essentially a wild fish and finite - control is therefore an essential requirement for a sustainable global trade. Accurate and fully traceable labelling are in everyone's long term interests."

 

 

Floods may be nearly as important as droughts for future carbon accounting

STANFORD'S SCHOOL OF EARTH, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Research News

Plants play an essential role in curbing climate change, absorbing about one-third of the carbon dioxide emitted from human activities and storing it in soil so it doesn't become a heat-trapping gas. Extreme weather affects this ecosystem service, but when it comes to understanding carbon uptake, floods are studied far less than droughts - and they may be just as important, according to new research.

In a global analysis of vegetation over more than three decades, Stanford University researchers found that photosynthesis - the process by which plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - was primarily influenced by floods and heavy rainfall nearly as often as droughts in many locations. The paper, published in Environmental Research Letters on June 29, highlights the importance of incorporating plant responses to heavy rainfall in modeling vegetation dynamics and soil carbon storage in a warming world.

"These wet extremes have basically been ignored in this field and we're showing that researchers need to rethink it when designing schemes for future carbon accounting," said senior study author Alexandra Konings, an assistant professor of Earth system science in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "Specific regions might be much more important for flood impacts than previously thought."

More photosynthesis in combination with other factors can enable greater amounts of carbon to be stored in the soil over the long term, according to the researchers. To estimate the presence of photosynthesis, they analyzed plant greenness according to publicly available satellite data from 1981 to 2015.

Because the field of carbon accounting is dominated by research on drought impacts, the co-authors were surprised to find that photosynthesis was affected by flooding so frequently - in about half the regions in the analysis. While drought is known to decrease photosynthesis, wet extremes can either decrease or accelerate the process.

"I think the drought side is probably something that many of us understand clearly because we can see soils drying out - we know that plants need water to be able to function normally," said lead study author Caroline Famiglietti, a PhD student in Earth system science.

Using statistical analysis, the researchers divided the globe into regions and isolated periods during which the plants' photosynthetic activity wouldn't have resulted from other factors, such as temperature or sunlight changes. They then used several long-term soil moisture datasets to determine which locations were more sensitive to extreme wet events than to extreme dry events and found that many regions in central Mexico, eastern Africa and northern latitudes should be targeted for further investigation.

"Everything that is observed in this master dataset reflects the behavior of the broader climate system," Famiglietti said. "This paper identified something surprising, but it didn't answer all the questions we still have."

In a warmer world, extreme weather is projected to become more intense, extensive and persistent, but the mechanisms controlling drought responses in plants are much better understood than extreme wet responses. The findings suggest an opportunity to address "a big component of the uncertainty in future climate change and its links to ecosystem carbon storage," according to Konings.

"If we can better understand these processes, we can improve modeling and better prepare for the future," Famiglietti said.

###

Konings is also a center fellow, by courtesy, of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and an assistant professor, by courtesy, of geophysics. Co-author Anna Michalak is affiliated with the Department of Earth System Science and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The research was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).