“The climate crisis is, in the main, a fossil fuel crisis.” Al Gore, NY Times, 18 July 2023
Earth just had the hottest day, week, and month in 120,000 years. Extreme heat is hitting Europe, the US South West (53C) and the US Mid-West, China (52C), much of the Middle East. Canada has already experienced a record wildfire destruction with much of the wildfire season yet to come. Where I live in Nova Scotia we got 250+mm of rain in 12 hours resulting in 4 lives lost and damage to homes and highways likely to total hundreds of millions. At the same time, parts of central US, Pakistan, India, South Korea and Japan experienced catastrophic flooding.
Let’s be clear from the start, these are not freak occurrences or ‘mother nature’ or and ‘Acts of God’ but a result of deliberate actions by fossil fuel companies who made deliberate decisions to make profits no matter what the impact on humanity or the planet. These are fossil fuel driven deaths and destruction.
Compelling scientific evidence about the impact of pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has been around since the 1950s.
- Major news media carried stories about the ‘greenhouse effect’ in 1953.
- Major scientific journals published convincing articles as early as 1956.
- The US Congress heard testimony warning about climate change in 1956 and 1957. [1]
- In 1959 the eminent scientist Edward Teller told a conference organized by the American Petroleum Institute (API), “It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a ten percent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York City.” And he added, “I think this chemical contamination will be more serious than most people believe.”[2]
- US courts have agreed that the oil companies willfully disregarded the Stanford Research Institute’s 1967 report commissioned by API and Exxon’s subsequent climate research through the 1970s and 1980s.
As the years went on the science piled up. Anyone with even a mild interest became increasingly aware that either we phased out almost every combustion use of fossil fuels or face catastrophic consequences. The oil companies went for the profits, damn the consequences. Governments supported and funded the oil companies. Alas, the media, perhaps because of ownership ties or advertising revenues, failed to adequately report the looming catastrophe.
The major oil companies clearly knew about the growing body of research and they were incredibly and irresponsibly negligent. It requires extreme and irresponsible denial to believe they did not know. “One of them – Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil – did its own research in the 1960s. But instead of changing its business model, the company ignored the findings and even spent money to promote misinformation.”[3]
The oil companies spent not just a bit of money, but hundreds of millions to deny climate change science and to spread disinformation. They spent hundreds of millions lobbying governments and making donations to politicians. They financed front organizations and social media fronts. They financed ‘cigarette company science’ and massive public relations efforts. They knew fear of the looming catastrophes would slow their massive profits. They have not changed, but more on that below.
Let’s be clear about who is responsible. It is not the vast majority of people who worked for the coal, gas and oil companies. For the most part, they were simply people with jobs that paid a good or reasonable salary with reasonable benefits – ordinary people like most Canadians. Very few of them likely knew about the scientific research. They had families to feed and mortgages to pay. They were not people in the know nor were they in charge. Those in charge were the shareholders who elected the board, the board and those very highly paid top managers hired by the boards to make a profit no matter ‘hell or high water.” They were paid well, it turns out far too well, to make informed decisions. Every one of them ought to have known about the research and the consequences of their decisions. They opted for personal gain. Humanity got hell and high water!
Their decisions are responsible for the deaths and destruction we have already seen and the even more catastrophic toll down the road. Also responsible is the structure of the investor based corporation whose purpose is not to provide us with energy or medicine or anything else for that matter. The purpose is to maximize the rate of return to investors. Boards fire managers who to not deliver profits and increasing share value. They richly reward managers who do deliver, often with share purchase options that reward profit maximization. As profits rise so does the value of the share options. Those super incomes are justified based on the brilliance of their decisions, but the decisions have been the exact opposite of brilliant.
Among the investors are a large number of individuals with a few shares bought directly or through investment funds to provide them with retirement incomes. They do not vote at meetings or even get to attend them. They have close to zero knowledge about what ‘their’ fossil fuel companies are doing and in many cases whether their retirement funds hold fossil fuel company shares. The boards are elected by the ‘large’ shareholders with a significant number of shares to influence votes at shareholder meetings. The boards and the shareholders who elected them are responsible for the company.
Also responsible are the huge Canadian banks who funded and continue to fund expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the face of climate change while going to great lengths to ‘greenwash’ themselves. “To understand how a bank’s board of directors is influenced, Canada’s National Observer combed through the directors of Canada’s five largest banks — RBC, TD, Scotiabank, BMO and CIBC — and found one in five of their directors also serves on the board of a fossil fuel company, the industry most responsible for driving climate change.”[4]
The oil industry spends a fortune lobbying government. As of 2023 the Pathways Alliance, a new gentler brand of ‘big oil’ lobbying, has launched an expensive and massive greenwashing campaign. It seeks to portray big oil as offering solutions to climate change. Their solution? Ramp up oil production and rely on expensive and unproven carbon capture technology to save us. All of course to be financed with massive public funds.
The Pathways Alliance campaign is in addition to the work of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) which has for years run vigourous hard-nosed campaigns often supporting sympathetic Conservative politicians whose blind support they could count upon. CAPP was “extremely problematic,” says former environment and climate change minister Catherine McKenna. “They fought every policy,” she said, and that strategy continues under the current rebrand. The companies are “making historic profits, largely off of an illegal war, which they’re returning to shareholders and through executive compensation rather than investing in the transition,” McKenna says. “And at the same time, they continue to lobby behind closed doors against policies that are needed… for Canada to meet its international commitments.”[5]
And What of Governments?
The other responsible group are those elected officials charged with looking after the good of the citizens they are supposed to serve. Regardless of how much fossil fuel companies donate to their individual or party campaigns; or how much they threaten to disrupt the economy if governments do not do what fossil fuel companies want; elected officials, whether in Canada or the USA, are supposed to protect their citizens. What is clear in the current climate crisis is that they have failed miserably.
Provincial governments as exemplified by Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Newfoundland and BC have acted as subsidiaries of the fossil fuel industries. In addition to their pathetic performance, they generally take angry, critical positions against any federal policy not favoured by the fossil fuel industries.
Canada’s appalling record on emissions is the worst in the G7. How did our government achieve this mess:
- The purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline is just one outstanding example of that failure!
- The Coastal Gaslink pipeline is an irresponsible climate decision.[7]
- Between 2018 and 2020 Canada paid oil companies the highest subsidies of any G20 Country averaging $15 billion USD per year and was one of the lowest in its support for renewable energy.[8]
- In the first three quarters of 2022, the federal government had already given more than $15 billion in public money to the oil and gas industry — despite the fossil fuel industry seeing record-breaking profits in 2022.[9]
The new, loophole riddled policy of not funding oil companies is what the federal government sees as progress.
The failure to seek reparations from the oil companies for their catastrophic and immoral decisions is unbelievable. This in spite of the fact that the costs of accumulating climate catastrophe related government expenditures will soon exceed the costs of oil and gas subsidies.
The Prime Minister and other federal Ministers show up for photo ops of their concern for the aftermath of Fiona[10], the deaths and destruction of wild fires across the country, the flooding in Nova Scotia, but their policies played a role in fueling these catastrophes. They go on posturing while doing whatever the oil giants demand. The only worse scenario would be a Conservative government with a caucus stacked with climate change deniers and unapologetic fossil fuel company servants and an historic pattern of out doing the Liberals by doing everything the fossil fuel companies ask and more.
2023 is the year that we learned the hard lessons about the climate change caused around the world largely by huge coal, oil and gas companies. Extreme weather events largely caused by oil and gas companies, will drastically change our world even more in the next few decades:
- Killing tens of millions of people and force many hundreds of millions more to migrate leaving behind their homes and livelihoods,
- Costing many trillions of dollars in property and infrastructure damages from increasingly violent weather,
- Causing dozens of cities around the world to be unfit for human life because of heat,
- Flooding many millions of homes, villages, towns and cities,
- Sparking droughts leading to massive crop failures and malnutrition or starvation for millions,
- Leading to massive migration,
- Burning vast forested areas creating enormous C02 emissions while destroying the carbon dioxide absorption capacity of the forests burned,
- Greatly speeding up the mass extinction of species and render much or even all of the earth unable to support life,
- Warming the oceans, shifting ocean currents and drastically reducing the reliability of the oceans to support life and supply food,
- Melting the glaciers that millions of people depend upon for fresh water,
- Retreating polar ice sheets raising ocean levels and disrupting ocean currents,
- Bankrupting governments and destroying the ability of our economy to produce the basic goods and services people need.
The list will be much longer. What insurance company will insure our homes against recurring 200+km winds, massive flooding and wild fires? How many storm sewers are ready for the 100-250mm rain events that will now happen more and more often? How will our economy be able to function as the mayhem and soaring costs of climate change multiply?
How did we get in this mess? The answer is because it was profitable for the coal, oil and gas companies and those who own and control them. Their major shareholders and senior managers became unconscionably rich expanding their companies and growing the markets for oil. Dividends were magnificent, stock prices and bonuses swelled, windfall profits from the Ukraine war were grabbed. While millions of people struggled with inflation and got the fires and floods, shareholders and senior managers got the yachts and villas.
It seems only reasonable that those who made trillions of dollars profits, (hundreds of billions of unearned wind fall profits since the start of the war in the Ukraine[11] alone) should now pay for the results of their decision making. Not only did they ignore the science but they deliberately misled governments and the public and even in the face of disaster continue to do so, posing phoney solutions and seeking even more public money. The words greedy, brazen, bare-faced and ‘bull pucky’ come to mind to describe their behaviour and ‘greenwashing’.
If ordinary people knowingly make decisions that lead to deaths and destruction they have to face the consequences with prison time or substantial fines. If a business, with full knowledge of the science, ignores reality and makes decisions that have catastrophic consequences, common decency and justice demand they should pay:
- Indemnities to the families who have lost their lives or who have lost their health.
- A very large portion of the cost of fighting the wildfires and floods and super storms they have unleashed.
- For the homes and businesses lost or damaged due floods and wild fires and weather events and for their lost incomes.
- The costs of rebuilding infrastructure and building new infrastructure that will withstand the catastrophes they have unleashed.
But, they will whine, that would bankrupt us! So be it. They have earned bankruptcy. If they threaten to close or pull out, let them be nationalized for the value of their shares minus the public subsidies they have gathered and minus the costs of paying for the damage they have caused. The resulting crown corporation can be governed by a board partially elected by its workers and government appointed environmental experts with a clear understanding that there will be an orderly, severe contraction of the fossil fuel industries as rapidly as possible over the next few decades. The board should be mandated by government and supported by government programs, to create good new jobs in renewable energy and green industries. Any fossil fuel industry that remains should be the bare minimum needed for non-fuel purposes with very strict limits on carbon and methane emissions and must pay for any pollution it produces.
Will governments have the courage to firmly enforce a just transition to renewable energy which can produce as many, or more, jobs and cost a pittance in damage to society? Let government ensure that none of those who have depended on the fossil fuel industry to feed their families and shelter them are left behind. Let government not compensate the few very rich people who paid themselves millions while gambling the wellbeing of humanity and the health of the planet. If only massive peaceful civil disobedience will give them the courage to act, then the time for action has arrived.
[1] For a superb account of climate change research see John Vaillant (2023) Fire Weather: The Making of a beast, Alfred A. Knopf, Canada PP 238-250.
[2] John Vailant, 2023, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, Penguin, Random House, Knopf Canada. The information in the following point is from the same source. It is a meticulously researched story of the Fort McMurray fire
[3] https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/01/20/imperial-oil-climate-change/#:~:text=Major%20fossil%20fuel%20companies%20are%20alleged%20to%20have,findings%20and%20even%20spent%20money%20to%20promote%20misinformation. See also: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/08/imperial-oil-climate-change-exxon/ , and https://www.desmog.com/2019/12/03/imperial-oil-archives-climate-denial-energy-research/
[4] John Woodside, National Observer, 14 July 2022.
[5] https://www.nationalobserver.com/newsletters/zero-carbon/2023/07/21/distraught-about-climate-change-get-disruptive
[6] Saxifrage, Barry, National Observer, 12 May 2023. Used with permission.
[7] It is also another instance of treating indigenous people as second class people and forgetting that they looked after this land for over 12,000 years without destroying it.
[8] https://priceofoil.org/2021/10/28/past-last-call-g20-public-finance-institutions-are-still-bankrolling-fossil-fuels/
[9] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-spent-over-15-b-financial-support-for-oil-gas-industry-this-year-report-124413291.html, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-26/big-oil-set-for-record-profit-as-world-reels-from-high-fuel-cost
[10] Almost a year later many victims of Fiona are still waiting for the promised support.
[11] As of November 2022 US oil companies alone made windfall profits in excess of $200 billion https://www.ft.com/content/0d84255c-84ba-4462-b80a-8593352852e2
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