Pretty Heady Stuff

Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication strategy for rallying the public in support of climate action really needs to validate the public’s concerns about things like affordability and health care, while also emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis. The way we do that, he says, is to create an effective political “container.” I get the sense that the phrase “a big tent” applies here. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that expanding the tent, when it comes to transformative changes to infrastructure and to our lifestyles, implies the need to communicate the everyday benefits of climate action, while also being realistic with audiences about the severity of the risks we face. If we fall short in our efforts to convince folks that a radical reset is required – so, if we can’t figure out a way to undermine the cultural importance of the automobile, for example – then we’re in even more serious trouble than the science tells us we are. That’s because a creeping fatalism is forcing a lot of people to court the idea that it’s too late. Neubauer says that nihilism is potentially more dangerous than far right populism. Robert unpacks the idea of petro-populism here, which is still a concept that I struggle with a bit. I find Neubauer’s way of bringing this idea into conversation with the notion of “cultural capital” really helpful. Robert uses this famous idea from Pierre Bourdieu’s work to talk about how petro-populism expresses itself and how it has secured such a prominent place culturally and politically. Neubauer gives us a way of critiquing the propaganda of petro-populists like Ezra Levant, whose ability to manipulate a sense of pride and feelings of national belonging have proven to be remarkably effective. In response to the pull of nostalgia and easy answers, the Left can’t focus on its standard techniques of shaming and allyship. Robert feels like these are now simplistic strategies that go nowhere. Resisting the stunting effects of facile forms of solidarity or public shaming is all about accepting real responsibility for the work of decolonization. The constraints of a carbon-intensive society make it hard to imagine any alternative to the way things are, but things are changing nonetheless. As companies with skin in the carbon game realize they need to aggressively brand fossil fuels as an integral part of our lives to maintain their normalized status, the climate movement is positioning itself to counter with a totally different relationship to energy.

Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always trying to develop anti-colonial ecological futures. Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment. One of the things she brings to this conversation is her shrewd sense of the overlap between human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Cara is known for bringing feminist approaches to power to bear on understanding the ways that global heating emerged, and how it can be combated. Her book The Birth of Energy (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy) has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the acceleration of everything and an ideal of productivity were normalized: the underlying logics that inform today’s uses of energy. In this conversation, Cara and I ask Alice about her recent book, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (https://www.dukeupress.edu/petrochemical-planet), which is an incomparable study of the petrochemicals industry at a time of planetary collapse. One of the toughest-to-crack aspects of this ultra-toxic industry is the fact that it is basically impossible to simply replace petrochemicals in the global economy. There is basically no way to produce them without fossil fuels and virtually no method of decarbonizing the shadowy production practices involved. And the petrochemicals industry is the #1 industrial consumer of fossil fuels globally. Whether it overcomes that feeling of being overwhelmed or not, Alice and Cara think that the way forward is what they call “multi-scalar” and “multi-temporal” action. If we’re going to save some portion of the Earth we’ve ravaged, it will mean being able to think and feel and act outside of the very short-term timeframes we’re accustomed to in a system that incentivizes and rewards corporate plunder. Can we imagine forms of “multi-temporal resistance” and start “building things” on different timescales? For the Earth to heal from extractivism, we’ll have to. This will require a much deeper sense of duration and what Alice describes as an “extension of empathy” across eons.

Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to climate action is fascinating. It has given her unique insights on the challenge of crafting popular climate policies, ensuring that they’re equitable and fair, and a powerful sense that, because “climate change will create a threat to everything that makes our lives possible,” we are called to resuscitate our struggling democracies in the interest of forcing the system to actually support social life. I resonated most with her feelings of anger as she searches for climate justice. The way Allie puts it is that she is “driven by anger, more even than hope,” and this is because of the “knowing” destruction and suffering being perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry. In her words: “mass suffering was [and is] enabled by… a handful of people that will not bear the consequences.” There’s an emphasis throughout this conversation on how we can incorporate knowledge of the way the project of colonization sought to extract resources and annex Indigenous land. We see the continuation of this plunder today with the environmental obscenity of the Alberta tar sands and the tailings ponds, which represent the largest impoundment of toxic waste on the planet. This sprawling sea of poison is unequivocally an act of environmental racism. Rather than allowing these realities to overwhelm us, though, Allie says that we need to take our feelings of anger and urgency and use them as a turning point. Unfettered energy consumption is creating planet-wrecking carbon bombs and adverse health effects. This needs to be linked, now, with a rejection of extractivism as a worldview.

Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University and both the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, which has been a crucial source of organizational strength, culminating now in a series of funding announcements and some serious policy changes as Environmental Justice Bill C-226 is debated in Canada’s parliament. Ingrid’s commitment to public engagement and to publicizing the fact of environmental racism has made a huge impact in Nova Scotia, but it’s also been an inspiration to people globally, in part because of the success of a 2019 Netflix adaptation of There’s Something in the Water. Waldron’s radical definition of environmental racism is, as far as I’m concerned, the most precise one: she describes it in terms of the “white supremacist use of space” and explains how the “white supremacist use of space manifests in the disproportionate placement of polluting industries in Indigenous and Black communities.” From that powerful definition, Ingrid develops an argument that leaves a mark by detailing how the fact of environmental racism is rooted in “boundary-making practices that create social hierarchies” and why environmental racism is related to “other structurally induced racial and gendered forms of state violence.” This all has a history, and that history matters because it manifests itself as a combination of ecological destruction and social violence. We talk about how “racial capitalism” influences, and in some cases even determines, the politics of places like Nova Scotia and Flint, Michigan, which have seen intergenerational struggles over how polluting industries get sighted. We also discuss Indigenous sovereignty and the wisdom of Indigenous land and water protectors for thinking more expansively about health, wellness and treatment of the body’s ills. While the language of holistic medicine has been wholly co-opted, Waldron looks to reclaim and recover the concept, reminding us that “This includes all of the medicines the land provides, as well as social relationships with family members and the wider community.”

Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.” Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body in early 2021. She also serves on the strategic advisory committee for the Global Gas and Oil Network and the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Destination Zero has been foundational to the creation of the important Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, as well. In this conversation we talk about Abreu’s experience of COP28, the health of our democracies and whether they’re up to the task of accomplishing the massive and mandatory shift to clean energy. We look at the culpability of Canada in the climate crisis and the level of responsibility that culpability therefore requires as we move into a future that is likely to be environmentally very unpredictable and dangerous. How can the climate movement gain more traction? How have we kept fighting in spite of so many setbacks and blockades produced by private industry and governments? Part of it, I think, is a sense that the struggle is just and it is urgent. As some of us wait on incremental change to repair -relations to the Earth, others--like Catherine--keep pushing for an ecologically rational disruption of the system that could create a series of chain reactions and ultimately the kind of lasting change we’ve been told is absolutely necessary to protect the world from anthropogenic climate change.