http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2019/04/big-stall-details-how-neoliberal-think-tanks-blocked-action-climate-change
[links in online article]
'The Big Stall' details how neoliberal think tanks blocked action on
climate change
Yutaka Dirks
April 25, 2019
The Bill Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on
Climate Change in Canada
Donald Gutstein
James Lorimer & Company Ltd.
2018
24.95)
The world's biggest oil companies knew for years that climate change was
real, but they did all they could to derail government action to limit
greenhouse gas emissions. Donald Gutstein's latest book, The Big Stall:
How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change in
Canada is a deep dive into the strategies that Canadian oil companies
and their friends have implemented to prevent political action to slow
and reverse catastrophic climate change.
The author, a former communications professor and co-director of the
media-monitoring project NewsWatch Canada at Simon Fraser University,
follows the individuals and organizations that have shaped Canada's
energy and environmental policy over the last four decades.
Gutstein doesn't neglect the politicians (he devotes a chapter to
Alberta NDP leader and just-defeated Premier Rachel Notley), but he
spends more time on the players who fly slightly under the public radar
or whose impact is felt long after they've fallen from view. People like
Maurice Strong, appointed the first head of Petro-Canada by Pierre
Trudeau and the secretary-general of the UN Conference on the Human
Environment, who said in his opening speech that "There is no
fundamental conflict between development and the environment."
That this position, articulated in 1972, could sum up current official
Canadian climate change policy, wasn't inevitable, argues Gutstein.
Justin Trudeau’s "clean growth economy" -- a mix of investing in 'green'
technologies and "getting our oil to new markets," -- can be traced to
the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. But we can't only blame the
ideological context Trudeau inherited. There has been a concerted
campaign to stall and prevent significant action on climate change by
fossil-fuel industry lobbyists and policy think-tanks.
The book outlines the role of think tanks not just in "blocking action
on climate change" but also in the development of neoliberalism, the
dominant theoretical current in the capitalist world for over the last
forty years (today's turn to protectionist, strong-arm despots
notwithstanding).
Gutstein traces neoliberalism to Austrian free-market economist
Friedrich Hayek, who wrote The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 book which
challenged Keynesian economics. Hayek convinced a British businessman
named Antony Fisher to create a "scholarly research organisation" to
join the "great battle of ideas." Fisher established the Institute of
Economic Affairs, a think tank which had a profound impact on British
public policy debate, opening up the space for England's first
neoliberal government led by Margaret Thatcher.
Canada's Fraser Institute led the charge on climate-change denial until
such a position became considered too fringe by a broad swath of the
public. It was created by a Vancouver economist and a businessman who
were each inspired by the Institute of Economic Affairs and asked Fisher
to be the first acting director. One of Canada's premier sources of
pro-business anti-environmentalist agitprop (followed keenly by
just-elected Alberta Premier Jason Kenney) can trace its lineage
directly to this "originator of neoliberalism."
It's details and links like these that make the book a dizzying read. At
times it's hard to keep all the names of individuals and organizations
straight. For instance, the Business Council on National Issues, which
rallied corporate opposition to Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s National Energy
Program in the 1980s has changed its name not once, but twice (it’s
currently the Business Council of Canada) even as it continues to
successfully champion the interests of Canadian oil corporations during
the tenure of Trudeau's son. Thankfully, Gutstein provides a short
glossary of organizations at the end of the book.
It was the Business Council on National Issues (in its second guise as
the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) that first brought together
corporate leaders in Canada to develop their own plan to respond to
climate change, leading to a 2007 report called "Clean Growth: Building
a Canadian Environmental Superpower." Public opinion had come to support
the scientific consensus that climate change was the result of human
activity. Big oil needed a way to sidestep strict government regulations
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; the "Clean Growth" plan was it.
The plan, supported by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, called for a clean energy
development subsidized by government, a national energy strategy that
relied on federal-provincial agreements, with "carbon reduction targets
designed to protect corporate profits," and "appropriate" carbon pricing.
They worked to build a consensus around the plan through media-savvy
industry-funded think-tanks and arms-length academic institutes founded
by philanthropic CEOs. (Thankfully, Gutstein doesn't fall into the
conspiracist trap of arguing that specific research results are bought
by corporations, only that researchers whose pre-existing academic work
supports industry ideologies are the ones hired).
Some may be surprised to learn (as I was) that oil-friendly Stephen
"Canada-as-energy-superpower" Harper actually prevented big oil's
climate change response from being implemented in Canada. According to
Gutstein, Harper was "ideologically incapable" of moving big oil's plan
forward; he was totally opposed to taxes and didn’t like
federal-provincial negotiations.
It wasn't until the election of Trudeau that big oil found their man. In
2016, Trudeau announced what Gutstein argues is essentially a carbon
copy of the "Clean Growth" plan, his Framework Agreement on Clean Growth
and Climate Change.
The deep research that otherwise buoys The Big Stall thins out in the
closing pages of the book, when Gutstein offers a few solutions to the
climate crisis: "question growth," "question economists," and "listen to
Indigenous voices" -- all essential and (by dint of their importance)
extremely complex tasks which merit books in and of themselves. Gutstein
also says we "can listen to nature." By this, he means giving legal
rights to nature, as in the Ecuadorian constitution, where anyone can
sue to protect nature’s rights to "its existence and …the maintenance
and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and
evolutionary processes."
But "nature" can’t speak for itself. Any legal action taken on its
behalf has to be initiated by human beings. One has reason to be
sceptical of the outcome of such a strategy given the evidence Gutstein
has amassed of corporate Canada's ability to ensure that any political
conversation about nature takes place in their language. One hopes
Gutstein's next book offers up some guidance on how to out-maneuver
their "mechanics" and out-think their think tanks with the same sort of
convincing detail he masters in The Big Stall.
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