Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (24 page)

Here Harper begins to use language that was actually made in America. The Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz was in Kingston, Ontario, in May 2006, speaking to the Conservative-linked Civitas Society and making time on the side for a personal meeting with Prime Minister Harper. (The prime minister confirmed in the House of Commons a couple of days later that he and Luntz had been acquainted “for some years.”)

In the weeks that followed, people started listening more closely to the Conservatives and looking for likely connections to the strategy document, as discussed in Chapter 6, that Luntz had written for the U.S. Republican Party (“The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America”). As Ross Gelbspan recorded on the DeSmogBlog on May 31, 2006, the
Kitchener Waterloo
Record
reported the results in a story headlined “Tory Kyoto Strategy Mirrors U.S. Plan”:

In his 2003 memo, [Luntz] told Republicans not to use economic arguments against environmental regulations, because environmental arguments would always win out with average Americans concerned about their health. Luntz also told his U.S. clients to stress common sense and accountability. “First, assure your audience that you are committed to ‘preserving and protecting’ the environment but that ‘it can be done more wisely and effectively.’ Absolutely do not raise economic arguments first.”

Since the Conservatives took office, they have consistently stressed their commitment to clean air and water, and tried to avoid discussion of cutting back environmental programs— although many have been eliminated. “My mandate is to have accountability on the environment and show real results and action on the environment for Canadians,” [Environment Minister] Ambrose told the Commons last week.

Luntz advises that technology and innovation are the keys to curbing climate change, a theme the Conservatives have repeatedly echoed. “We will be investing in Canadian technology and in Canadians,” Ambrose told MPs.

Despite his general aversion to economic arguments, Luntz . . . advises putting the cost of regulation in human terms, emphasizing how specific activities will cost more, from “pumping gas to turning on the light.” Ambrose has claimed that “we would have to pull every truck and car off the street, shut down every train and ground every plane to reach the Kyoto target. Or we could shut off all the lights in Canada tomorrow.”

In this first year that the Harper Conservatives were in power, Canada was also the official chair of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which gave the country two special chances to drag down the process. First, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was anything but a champion for action. She dismissed Canada’s own commitments, blew off Canada’s reporting deadlines, and on one occasion at least, declined even to attend a meeting, assuming her position as “chair” over the telephone.

Canada also increased international inertia on behalf of the Bush administration. Having refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the United States was effectively sidelined from the process, forced to sit outside of the most critical meetings awaiting word of how the parties to the accord were planning to proceed. Given that the United States was the world’s number-one producer of greenhouse gases, there was only so much that could be decided by the remainder of the world’s powers, but the United States still feared that its interests could be marginalized by a concerted international effort to discourage emissions.

That was no threat with Canada in the room. Having backed away from its own Kyoto commitments, Canada also chose to join the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a sort of anti-Kyoto coalition that included the world’s biggest polluters (China, India, Japan, Korea, and the United States) and the second-tier countries that sell them oil and coal (Australia and Canada). Even Republican Senator (and later presidential candidate) John McCain dismissed the partnership as “nothing more than a nice little public relations ploy.” McCain told Grist writer Amanda Griscom Little on August 4 , 2005 (“New Asia-Pacific Climate Pact Is Long on PR, Short on Substance”), that the partnership had “almost no meaning. They aren’t even committing money to the effort, much less enacting rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The group’s apparent determination to create an alternative organization that could be used to undermine the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, combined with the Canadian decision to join the Big Coal coalition during a year when Canada was nominal chair of the UN Framework process, dealt the UN body a telling blow.

At subsequent UN Framework conferences, especially in Bali in 2007, Canada’s obstructionist position became so obvious that people started to believe the Bush and Harper administrations were working together—that Canada was trying to prevent any progress that might demonstrate how badly the United States was out of step. But the theory broke down at the Kyoto Protocol update in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008. By then Barack Obama was already president-elect, though George Bush would retain the actual presidency until January 20, 2009. So the Bush negotiators were still in the room, but with no real mandate: everyone expected that the Obama administration would take a more aggressive tack in approaching climate change.

With the United States removed as a contrarian force, some people expected that Canada would shift to a more productive position as well. But if anything, Canada stepped up its obstructionism, urging other countries to back away from greenhouse gas reduction commitments they had made in Bali the year before. For its efforts Canada was granted the “Colossal Fossil” award. The environmental Climate Action Network chose a “Fossil of the Day” for each day of the two-week conference, and the country with the most nominations was judged to be the Colossal Fossil when the meeting wound down. Canada really earned that international embarrassment.

While dragging down efforts to build an effective greenhouse gas reduction policy on the world stage, the Harper Conservatives continued to emulate U.S. policy at home. Where in 2003 the Bush administration had proposed a Clear Skies Act that ignored greenhouse gases almost entirely, the Harper Tories followed with a Clean Air Act in 2006, which focused on smog and particulate pollutants and promised (still voluntary) emission targets by 2020.

With U.S. president George Bush advocating “energy intensity targets” as a way to address climate change, the same policy started appearing in Canadian climate documents only a short while later, such as in Environment Canada’s 2008 regulatory framework for industrial greenhouse gas emissions. An energy intensity target is something you might expect to get from Frank Luntz: it’s very specific. The definitions are clear and concise. But when you implement it succesfully, you get a public relations boost without any corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Consider, for illustration, the following definition from the World Resources Institute: “Greenhouse gas intensity targets are policies that specify emissions reductions relative to productivity or economic output, for instance, tons CO2/million dollars GDP. By contrast,
absolute emissions
targets
specify reductions measured in metric tons, relative only to a historical baseline.” That means that you can reduce energy intensity by a lot (the Canadian tar sands giant Suncor cut its energy intensity by 51 percent between 1990 and 2006) while at the same time continuing to make the problem worse (despite the “intensity” cut, Suncor increased its absolute emissions by 131 percent during the same period).

Thus, intensity targets are for people who don’t want to deal with the problem. Consider this May 7, 2001, statement from Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer in response to a question about whether the president would urge Americans to change their world-leading energy-consumption habits: “That’s a big ‘no.’ The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policy-makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one . . . The president considers Americans’ heavy use of energy a reflection of the strength of our economy, of the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy.” True to his word, until oil prices spiked in the summer of 2008, the Bush administration held its position, touting energy intensity cuts while supporting the expansion of the coal-fired power industry and the aggressive extension of oil drilling into parks and oceans.

Here’s how things played out in Canada during the same period: the provincial administration in Alberta, home to the largest section of Canada’s huge tar sands deposit, announced a climate change strategy in 2008 that would call for no greenhouse gas emission reductions whatsoever before 2020. In a document titled
Responsibility/Leadership/Action,
Alberta also proposed to pursue energy intensity targets in the short term (2010), to “stabilize” emissions by 2020 and to “reduce” emissions by 2050 by 14 percent from 2005 levels. Put another way, Alberta was planning to give industry free rein until 2020, after which it would introduce regulations so gently that by 2050, the province still would not comply with the target that Canada promised in Kyoto to meet by 2012. Returning once again to the dark definition of Orwellian, it’s hard to imagine how that could seriously be described as responsibility, leadership, or even action.

Nationally the Harper government came out in 2008 with its regulatory framework for greenhouse gas emissions. This new plan, dubbed
Turning the Corner,
set out a strategy that would keep the country straight on course. It concentrated on energy intensity targets even while allowing unrestricted tar sands development at least through 2012. New coal-fired power plants would get a free pass for at least a decade. They would have to be “carbon-capture ready” by 2018, but there was no hard deadline for when they might actually have to start capturing carbon. Nevertheless, the government still imagined that it could reduce total national greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020. Keeping in mind Canada’s record of increasing greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2006, the Harper government had set out a plan that would violate its Kyoto commitments for at least another dozen years.

This again is not leadership. Rather, in Canada and in the United States, it looks just like a bunch of politicians overlooking a serious scientific issue and ignoring the interests of the public in favor of serving the interests of a wealthy and well-connected industry group. It’s also clear that the politicians on both sides of the border know that what they are doing is wrong. How else can you explain the use of a policy like energy intensity targets?

If the governments truly believed that addressing climate change was unnecessary—if these politicians were confident that they were doing the right thing by pursuing unrestrained, old-style industrial development at increasing risk to the environment— there would be no reason to rustle up phony carbon cuts to make it sound like they were taking the climate issue seriously. If the provincial and federal governments in Canada were not wrestling with a guilty conscience, why would they come up with promises to reduce greehouse gases by 14 percent by 2050 or by 20 percent by 2020—all the while changing the base year so you can’t compare one proposal with the next?

EARLY IN MARCH 2009 DeSmogBlog manager Kevin Gran-dia started poking through the public records at OpenSecrets .org, looking at how much money the oil-and-gas industry had been spending on political lobbyists in the United States. Grandia reported his findings in a March 17 blog post, the headline for which did a good job of telling the story: “Oil and Gas Lobbying on Capitol Hill Up a Whopping 57% in 2008.” The stunning part is that the oil-and-gas-industry lobbying budget was already US$82 million in 2007, which means the companies threw in an additional US$46.6 million, to bring the 2008 total to US$128.6 million. In his report, Grandia also quoted from a Center for Public Integrity story called “Climate Change Lobby Explosion”: “Senate lobbying disclosure forms show that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year, as the issue gathered momentum and came to a vote on Capitol Hill. That’s an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.”

Four lobbyists for every member of Congress. Does that seem excessive to you? That group will include a significant minority of lobbyists from environmental groups that are trying to get politicians to take this issue seriously, but the oil-and-gas industry’s US$18.6 million is certainly paying for the vast majority of these influencers. And you have to assume that the industry believes it is getting value for money. Why, otherwise, would it increase its spending by 64 percent in a single year?

We know, then, who’s looking after the interests of Big Oil. There are big, burly lifeguards aplenty in that camp. And once again, it’s a free country. The oil companies have every right to do what they can to protect their profits. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s wrong to try to deny the science of climate change even after your own scientists have assured you that the case is undeniable. Maybe it’s wrong to bury that report and then organize and implement a strategy designed to hold people “balanced” in confusion. And maybe the politicians who have asked for our votes should be closing the doors on a few of those 2,340 lobbyists and taking the time to read some actual science—and then to act in the public interest. Maybe it’s time we all stood up and demanded a little equal time before these people direct us all off a cliff onto the ever-more-undeniable rocks waiting below.

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fourteen
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WHITE WASHING COAL
In coal country, cleanliness
is relative, but profit is absolute

F
rom the destruction of green Welsh valleys to the clogging of lungs in old London, coal has long been seen as an anti-environmental culprit, a dated and clumsy fuel source that was dangerous to mine, difficult to move, and dirty to burn. In the course of the 20th century, one industry after another discovered the superiority of fuels like diesel and natural gas, and coal seemed to slip into the background as an energy source whose time had passed.