Season 1, Episode 31: How Do We Benefit from Anti-Greenwashing Legislation?

Professors Bill Carroll and JP Sapinski

This episode of the Gravity Well Podcast delves into the critical issues of greenwashing and red washing, exploring their implications and the broader context of environmental and social responsibility. The discussion features insights from Bill Carroll, a sociology professor at the University of Victoria, and JP Sapinski, an environmental studies professor at the University of Moncton. They highlight the deceptive practices of corporations in misrepresenting their environmental efforts and the need for genuine solutions to climate change. The conversation also touches on the importance of decarbonizing, democratizing, and decolonizing our approach to energy production and land stewardship. The podcast emphasizes the urgency of addressing these issues through thoughtful policy changes, community engagement, and a shift towards sustainable practices.

Jenny:

Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast. Here we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that you can handle. Our mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas in conversation and process. Together, we and our communities will face our dilemmas and make the world a better place for all beings. In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on Stolen Blackfoot Treaty seven and Metis districts five and six territories. I take reconciliation by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, or community, a healthy living relationship with the earth and each other is our guide. Welcome. This morning I have Bill and J. P. with me. We are broadcasting from coast to coast in Canada today, which I think is just amazing. Bill is in Victoria, is that right? Bill?

Bill:

Yes.

Jenny:

And J. P., you’re in Moncton. Is it New Brunswick? Oh my goodness. I meant to double-check that this morning. Perfect. Okay. Thank you so much for being here and I’ll let you introduce yourselves, but I’m just going to frame up the conversation a little for folks. Today we’re talking about greenwashing and a little redwashing if we can. The issue that we’ve seen, we’re going to walk through what it is, the work these two have done and are doing in this space. And then a little on what it means and how we can work together to make people aware of this issue and how we can benefit from acting on this issue. Bill, would you mind introducing yourself first, please?

Bill:

Sure, yes. I teach Sociology at the University of Victoria. I live on the land of the coastal Salish people, and I’ve been involved recently in a fairly large-scale project called the Corporate Mapping Project. We’ll probably be talking a bit about that because it was very much about not just greenwashing, but the whole power of the fossil fuel industry and its allies, particularly in the Canadian context. But certainly greenwashing is an important element in that whole kind of structure of power and the way that it operates.

Jenny:

Excellent. Yeah, if we have time, let’s expand a little bit more on that bill. But yes, I put in the chat just for everybody’s sake, the peer-reviewed study that was done on greenwashing. That’s for anybody. This is part of Bill’s work I know contributed to this. J. P., you can speak to that as well if you have. Okay. Please introduce yourself, too.

J. P. :

Well, I’m speaking from Moncton, the traditional land of the MikMak people, the unceded territory where the University of Moncton is located. I teach here environmental studies and I do research on issues of transition, decarbonization, energy transition, just transition in the perspective of phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible and also shedding critical light on the different transition projects that are proposed, whether we put electric cars everywhere with nuclear reactors to power them, whether that’s, well draw the criticisms that we can formulate around this project and explore the other projects that are more based on decolonial approaches and that look forward to changing the deeper structures of how decolonization is organized.

Jenny:

Amazing. J. P., we are having a conversation on decolonization in early December, I’m going to plug that for you if that’s something that you’re interested in participating in. I’m going to start roping you guys into things. It sounds like we have a lot of things in common in what we’re working on. Okay, let’s dive in a little bit on the greenwashing and redwashing analysis that was done. I worked at one of the Pathways Alliance companies and I was very privy to these. I was in some meetings about the Pathways Alliance approach when I was there, and I’ll just lead with my conclusion that we need to be focused on site cleanup and closure rather than doing CCS and looking at emissions only as an incomplete solution. That was my findings, and I will say I don’t think my findings were appreciated.

I ended up being pushed out the door from my point of view. I left in 2022 and I’ve been trying to help people understand this issue. I had a friend recently tell me, this is the biggest issue.

What are Greenwashing and Redwashing?

Jenny:

It is the biggest issue in Alberta. We have a $260 billion liability problem in Alberta and we’re not talking about it.

And this greenwashing to me, I submitted a complaint to AD Standards Canada this spring on the Pathways Alliance commercials because we just had a conversation about misrepresentation and it is a form of violence to be taught something different than what is a real solution. I’m just going to say, what is it? First of all, to me, it is misrepresenting a solution to the public that is truly adding more harm to the environment and not helping us measure in ways that we can see progress and know that we are moving in the right direction. That’s my summary and definition. If you wouldn’t mind just each of you, I’ll start with you this time J. P., and walk through your thoughts on what it means, and what green, and please speak about red washing as well if you can.

J. P.:

I agree with what you just said, and I don’t need to add much, I think, but all these false claims that different companies make about their products and environmental impacts and how they reduce it and what they do, and that’s very widespread across the industry. Of course, with all the environmental discourse that has since last 10, 20 years, that’s taken important traction among the public. The companies want to portray themselves favorably in the eyes of the consumers to who they sell their products, and it’s become part of the package of how they sell their products. If you look at the oil industry, well, the problem is that their product is harmful. No matter what environmental claims they say about their product, you might produce the greenest oil in the world, but it’s still oil and it’s still going to be burned and destroy our environment. That’s a bit problematic. Anything they can say a bit of carbon capture or reducing the intensity of emissions at the production site, they’re still making oil that’s going to be burned, and that’s where the problem lies.

Jenny:

Great. Thank you. And Bill, please expand on your participation in this work as well that I’m referring to. Thank you.

Bill:

Yeah. Well, I think with greenwashing, it’s a neologism that goes back to the eighties and nineties. I think Greenpeace might’ve been the environmental organization that introduced it initially, but it’s very much a way of characterizing corporate practices of misrepresentation in describing what they do to the public in order to secure social license. And as J. P. says, to shore up consumer loyalty, it’s about corporate branding. Very often. Think of British Petroleum, for example, years ago, it rebranded itself Beyond Petroleum, as BP stands for Beyond Petroleum, which was a bit paradoxical because 95% of BP’s business continued to be extracting and processing fossil fuels, but it was representing itself as beyond petroleum. That’s a classic example tied to branding, but it is very much tied in with corporate advertising. And corporations need to advertise, they need to secure markets for their products. In these cases, as J. P. has said, the products themselves are deeply problematic, and we’re increasingly understanding how deep the problem is in terms of the use of fossil fuels to power 85% of the global economy.

But basically, the misrepresentation is dangerous because in greenwashing we have messaging that promotes false solutions to the climate crisis and delays the climate action that we need to be taking. The corporation is reassuring us that they’re already doing the things that need to happen, and they have the plan. The Pathways Alliance is all about presenting this kind of plan for net zero that is deeply misleading in various ways, and we could talk about the details of that, but that’s just one example, local to Canada. But this is happening around the world. Corporate capital has these strategies for greenwashing, and I mean it goes back really beyond the term greenwashing. It goes back to a few decades earlier in terms of corporate social responsibility as a kind of way of trying to really create the image of a socially responsible corporation that’s looking after the public and the needs of the people and so on and so forth.

Greenwashing is a key example of that. Corporate social responsibility advertising. I mean, corporations treat this as a budget item under advertising in their budgets. I mean, this is what it’s all about. But redwashing is, I think, really important in our Canadian context where we have a form of settler colonial capitalism in which the land has been taken from Indigenous people. And that’s a continuing process. And there’s a lot of indigenous resistance with a lot of support from non-indigenous people in Canada. That’s very important that that’s part of the political terrain, which is partly why red washing occurs in order to counter the resistance to try to again reassure the public that, oh, there’s nothing to see here. We’re working with Indigenous communities, the corporations will work with some Indigenous band leaders to get agreements for putting pipelines on Indigenous land and that kind of thing, and then show that as evidence of Indigenous support and that the corporation is taking precautions and providing revenue to Indigenous communities so that they can develop economically.

Much of it is about controlling the narrative, controlling the narrative in a way that promotes the interests of the corporate sector, in particular, what we call fossil capital. That is the large corporations that are engaged in oil and gas extraction and processing and that kind of thing. But yeah, I guess that I think is the way I would summarize the two basic concepts that we’re working with here. And red washing I think is important in the Canadian context, that the corporate sector is engaged in this. And I guess the only other point I’d make just opening things up is to note that I think over time the greenwashing efforts have moved from individual corporate branding efforts such as British Petroleum rebranding itself as beyond petroleum to more collective efforts that are organized through groups like the Pathways Alliance, which brings together the six major fossil fuel pipeline and extraction companies all based in Alberta. They’re coordinating their efforts. They have a whole kind of promotional program and lobbying program vis-a-vis governments to try to get the kinds of provisions they need to continue to support and subsidize the fossil fuel industry, particularly through boondoggle that we’ll, no doubt discuss called carbon capture and storage.

Jenny:

Yeah, thank you, Bill. That was such a tremendous opening to this. Some of the takeaways I heard in there, and I’ll just layer in a bit for you. In my view, as a former oil and gas employee, this greenwashing impacted me as an employee to trust in the leaders that I had, that we had solutions and that we were working towards those solutions. To me, the benefit of knowing personally from my experience, again, I worked in what we called CO2 flooding fields back in 2008 and 2009, I worked in Zama and Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Those are two fields where we were doing CO2 flooding in which we saw it recycling. We saw it not stay in the ground then, and we know that we have methane leaks. Again, when we, thank you Bill for bringing in carbon capture and storage, and we can go into a little bit on that, but to me, the carbon capture and storage, since we know that methane leaks, since we know that we have that CO2 is more or less compressible, the methane, it will escape and it’s dangerous.

We know. Again, from my lived experience, I worked the first shale gas play in Canada. I drilled the first horizontal well in BC in the shale gas play. And one of the problems we had was a high CO2 concentration. It’s a 20% CO2 concentration, and that meant we had to upgrade all of our systems. And of course, most of those systems were built without that understanding. Now we have an opportunity for pipelines to rupture and leak because of this incompatible gas. We know this doesn’t work, and this is not new. Weyburn is at least 40 years old. We’ve understood this. This is not something to be pursued yet. It’s being presented as a solution, as you guys have said. To me, the cycle that we’re in here is that we have this false solution being presented to the industry.

Then we have the public relying on people who are in the industry to say, “No, no, no, we’ve got this.” Right? I’m telling my friends, “Oh yeah, yeah, we’re doing CCS.” And then what happens is the government officials, these politicians, then feel obligated to support the public anger, and they want to make sure that our industry is being looked after. It’s this cycle, and then they go as far as to, there was an excellent article, and I’ll find it and link it in here, that the Narwhal did have recordings of TC energy executives talking about their relationship with the US government and how they are driving these messages through to policy. And I can say this, I was a lobbyist, didn’t appreciate that I was a lobbyist, but I was writing letters to the government. Now, from my point of view, I can be confident that I was writing letters about site restoration.

The message that I was making to the government is if we want Indigenous participation, it needs to be in site cleanup. It cannot be in carbon capture and storage because as you said, Bill, that is reinforcing this industrial system that is harming our environment. We need to move away from that industrial system and who better to lead that, this was my message to the government, than Indigenous communities that have faced this issue for decades. As you can see, I’m very passionate about this issue and I’m really glad that you guys are exploring it. But Bill, would you mind going into some of the indicators, and also if you can lead with which countries in which jurisdictions are already doing this? Some of the messaging we’re hearing is that this is Trudeau putting out this effort. This is a worldwide effort to address greenwashing and redwashing. If you wouldn’t mind describing how it fits in that context first. Thank you.

Bill:

Yeah, I mean, different countries are trying to deal with this problem. It is, as we’ve mentioned, quite endemic, it’s a standard corporate strategy. This kind of greenwashing did very much infect things right up to the international level of the COP meetings, which are the number of corporate lobbyists at COP meetings is astonishing compared to other sectors of the global population. It’s not surprising that a lot of the indicators that have been adopted by the so-called international community are not effective. I think in terms of moving us away from the fossil-fueled capitalism that we currently working under. I guess an example would be the whole kind of discourse of net zero and how net zero comes into play at the COP meetings and then becomes adopted through certain mechanisms that enable corporations to continue with carbon pollution in one area if they can make this claim that they’re financing something happening somewhere else that can mitigate and compensate for the carbon emissions where the corporation is active.

What is in Bill C-59?

Bill:

And we can get into that, but there’s an enormous amount of fraud around, oh, net zero project, right? Countries like Canada are trying to deal with some of the misinformation and frankly lies that corporations are engaging in and corporate alliances like the Pathways Alliance through certain legislative practices, and regulatory practices that have come. In case this past summer, Bill C 59 was given final ascent at the federal level. It’s a bill that attempts to expand the state regulation of advertising. I mean, there’s been competition. Regulators have been concerned about false advertising for a long time. There have been laws on the books about false advertising. But this is an interesting initiative, I think in the sense that it moves beyond just the narrow definition of protecting the individual consumer from a product that might not be effective or might be harmful to a broader level of society.

And even the ecosystem as a whole, corporations that are engaged in greenwashing according to Bill C 59, which is now law, can face pretty extensive fines from the federal government if they’re found guilty of greenwashing. I think that’s a welcome move and it is in line with what other countries are doing as well. Of course, one issue in this is always enforcement. After all, there are lots of regulations and all sorts of state practices around the development of fossil fuel infrastructure and so on. But we know that a lot of the regulators, like for example, the BC energy regulator used to be called the Oil and Gas Commission is a captured regulator. It doesn’t really, it just rubber stamps the proposals that come in from the industry. And that’s been demonstrated through research. The question is what are the mechanisms for enforcement of Bill C 59?

There is I think, a helpful provision as I understand it in this bill that includes or introduces the idea of private rights of action, which means that as of June next year is a one-year lag in this. But as of June next year, citizens, which would include environmental groups, activists, and advocates will be allowed to issue complaints directly to the competition tribunal, which can then adjudicate an action if it considers it to be in the public interest. At that point, what happens depends on whether the competition tribunal functions as a captured regulator or in the public interest. And I don’t have a read on that. I don’t know how these kinds of complaints will be processed, whether they’ll be taken seriously, but I mean the law itself is a step in the right direction is what I’d say. But it’s hard to say what its actual impact will be. I mean, it did have an immediate impact in the sense that, for example, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers Cap immediately scrubbed its website of all its greenwashing false claims as soon as the bill was passed. Maybe that’s a good sign. I don’t know, but I am interested to hear what J. P. has to say on this as well.

J. P.:

Well, that’s very interesting. I read a different section of Bill C 59 and in that section, they talk about, a tax credit on carbon capture utilization and storage, that’s a kind of omnibus bill. There’s a whole bunch of things in the bill including that pardon, greenwashing, different stuff on unemployment insurance and so on. And it touches on everything that’s in the budget. One very important section is a tax credit to oil companies that set up carbon capture and storage facilities, which makes the bill kind of an example of greenwashing. On the one hand, you have a law against greenwashing that also includes provisions that support the continued use of production and use of fossil fuels. And there’s also another part, another tax credit on clean industry investments, which is very interesting, a tax credit on renewable solar wind, which also includes nuclear. There’s a tax credit for nuclear power plants, specifically targeted at small nuclear reactors, small module nuclear reactors, which the oil industry is looking to use in decarbonizing its production.

It’s very interesting if you look at the bill and its entirety, how they fit a bunch of things together and they give handouts to the fossil fuel industry to balance out perhaps the provisions on greenwashing, which affected them directly as well. It’s typical of the strategy of the liberal government to speak on both sides of their mouth, to go strong on the environmental measures on the one hand, and to continue supporting the fossil fuel industry. That’s what’s become the mainstream hegemonic strategy at the federal level. Quebec as well, and perhaps bc, I’m not familiar with the other provinces, to get a transition on a very long term, which supports a slow phase-out. And the best case of fossil fuels, I say in the best case because the worst case, it’s about supporting fossil fuel exports. We reduce emissions in Canada and we look good on paper for that, but we keep exporting the damaging fuel.

And you could have, as I said, you could have the cleanest oil production in the world. It’s going to be oil that’s going to be burned, whether it’s here or it’s elsewhere, it’s a global problem. If you just address it here, your national carbon accounting goes, well, you look good on the international scene because you’re reducing emissions, you’re making your targets, it goes well, but you’re still contributing. Canvas keeps being a large contributor to the problem. That’s how it goes. And this package of the eco-modernist project that’s being applied includes nuclear, which is extremely problematic for very different reasons, but it depends on a very, very damaging uranium extraction industry. And well, it creates waste and is also the most expensive way to produce electricity, a very expensive way to heat water. It’s not economical, but it’s one of the approaches that is being pushed by another industry separate from the fossil fuel industry. It’s interesting to look at the bill, and how it’s structured, they squeeze in things and they make big announcements. The federal announcement was neither on greenwashing nor on the tax credits but was on something else. And what came out in certain media was heavily focused on greenwashing. And if you look at the bill, well, there’s the tax credit that the people who are applauding the provisions on greenwashing lobbied against. Very interesting.

Jenny:

Thank you. That’s extremely helpful to know, J. P.. I think. I agree with both of you in your assertion that I’m not sure what this bill itself will do, but I would like to explore a bit what you mentioned, Bill, which is around fraud. I think that’s the reason why, excuse me, the companies wiped their websites immediately because there is a broader issue here, which is fraud. There was an excellent article just put out within the BOE report, which I’ll add to this chat again here, but it talks about how this is a part of corporate governance now, which is subject to financial litigation if misrepresentation occurs in it. One of my thoughts in terms of how this bill can be used to lever the corporate world, I think this is a way to do that because as you’ve both mentioned, we have captured regulators and we have captured governments clearly when we’re putting out things that are supportive of both fossil fuel continuing through CCS, which we know doesn’t work.

I just saw Mark Jacobson out of Stanford say we should be banning CCS across the board. And to me, that is the next move. I think between the fraud and that, and I do want to say I keep forgetting to mention, and you’re talking about it a bit, J. P., because it’s compartmentalized. We’re talking about emissions, but we’re only talking about scope one emissions. We’re not talking about scope two and three emissions, and therefore we’re not truly representing Canada’s contribution to the problem. I’ll be specific, we export 70, well, first of all, we export 400% of our product today, we only use 20% of what we are producing and then of what we export, we mostly export raw products. That product has to be processed elsewhere. I think it’s 70% of our product is processed elsewhere, and therefore those emissions are not being accounted for.

We are compartmentalizing the problem that, and then the other thing is the Pathways Alliance is more than just oil sands. In advance of this discussion, I’ve been looking at the sites. As I said, Alberta has 275,000 sites that need to be cleaned up. We have a total of 325,000 sites, and of those three hundred twenty-five, two hundred and fifteen are in the hands of those six companies. That means 61% of the sites, the problems that we have in Alberta are their responsibility. And those aren’t even the oil sands sites. This is mostly on the conventional side. I will say that the SAG D sites are included in those numbers, but what’s not included is the hundred thousand hectares of oil sands disturbance that we have to deal with as well as the 1.7 trillion liters of wastewater associated with them. There’s a much bigger, broader issue that they’re not letting us look at when we’re only focused on emissions and we’re only focused on the oil sense. Yeah, I’m just going to tee up that. Can we talk a little bit, Bill, if you wouldn’t mind about these fraud implications, please?

Bill:

Well, yeah. There’s a lot of fraud in the very concepts that we’re using here, particularly net zero and the way that net zero is supposed to be achieved. If we look at it, especially at an international scale, basically the way emissions are considered, there’s scope one, scope two, scope three, as you mentioned, Jenny, scope three emissions are the emissions very simply that come when the fossil fuel is burned. In Canada’s case, scope three emissions are left out of its own carbon budget. It’s responsible for its scope one and two emissions that are in the production refining of the fossil fuel transportation, all of the carbon emissions involved in those processes. But the actual burning, which is the whole point of extracting carbon in the first place is not counted if it’s burned outside of Canada. All the exported fossil fuels have escaped this accounting practice.

And that’s most of the emissions that are coming out of the tar sands and other facilities in Canada, like the fracking sites you mentioned in Northeast British Columbia. The claim that Pathways Alliance that they’re on track or they plan to move Canada to net zero emissions, they’re only considering scope one and two emissions. They’re not even considering the burning of the actual fuel, which is what as the tar sands continue to ramp up, it’s just more and more carbon emissions. I think that is a massive problem in itself in terms of the way things are accounted for. But then if you look at how, as I say internationally, how this works, the idea is that, Canada has been a major champion of net zero at the COP meetings, right? Partly because it sees this to its strategic advantage in promoting its oil and gas industry that if it can have scope three emissions not counted as part of its carbon budget, and if it can bring in these practices of carbon offsets so that the carbon extracted in one place its emissions are counterbalanced supposedly by some practice elsewhere, then all is good.

But, if you look at how carbon offset schemes work, there’s an enormous potential for fraud in this public citizen, which is a major group that Ralph Nader founded in the United States and did a study earlier this year. One of the things they say is the carbon offsets the most relevant risk is that carbon offsets do not mitigate climate change at best, their use slows the rate at which climate change intensifies and incrementally delays tipping points. At worst, they invite fraud and prevent decarbonization of our most polluting industries, guaranteeing we will never achieve net zero much less real zero. And they go on to note the types of fraud that occur, and it’s quite remarkable because the whole kind of idea of carbon offsets is hypothetical. It assumes that the funds from the sales of carbon offsets somehow will be used to reduce emissions or capture carbon somewhere else as in planting trees or not tearing down trees, right?

But it is a fictional story. There’s no way of verifying whether or not these effects happen. And of course, as we know with Canada, the current federal government has had this tree planting program, which I think can also be seen as a kind of greenwashing because in its scale it’s tiny compared to what needs to happen to capture carbon directly through the photosynthesis in trees. But in any case, the tree planting program, compared to the amount of carbon released in the Canadian wildfires last year, those wildfires released three times the amount of carbon emissions that the entire economy of Canada releases in a year. We’re facing an enormous ecological catastrophe. And part of the problem, I think with greenwashing is what we, in the corporate mapping project called the New Denialism, like traditional climate change, denialism simply says that climate change isn’t happening, but the new denialism acknowledges that the crisis is here, it’s happening, but we can solve it using these little kinds of tweaks as in carbon capture and storage and utilization. And the utilization part is an important tip-off in terms of how carbon capture and storage works. It’s all kind of a false solution when you consider the scale of the problem and the measures that states are taking. And as J. P. was saying, Bill 59 is a kind of omnibus bill that has all kinds of things in it. And probably the net effect when you consider the subsidies to carbon capture and storage in the tar sands, I think the net effect will be to increase carbon emissions quite substantially.

J. P.:

Yeah. Well, just to pick up on the net zero discourse, that’s a very important issue to address. Well, first of all, the idea of carbon-carbon offsets is completely obsolete right now because as Bill explained, well, the idea is to, you can have emissions here and we’re going to reduce them there. The situation is so dire now we have to reduce emissions everywhere. There’s no place to offset the emissions here or there for luxury purposes. The idea of net zero is that there’s some emission that any society, be it fossil catalyst or not, will produce. There are these hard-to-abate emissions that they call. The idea is that you have to offset these in some way though. Some emissions are considered necessary or hard to abate, depending, well, that’s where the problem is. What do you consider hard to abate?

Is it emissions of airplanes that are hard to abate and then you’re going to offset for them because there’s no technical alternative to using fossil fuels? Ocean transport is that hard to abate. There’s huge room for greenwashing here because you’re going to define hard to abate depending on your interest in your industry. The fossil fuel industry might as well describe all its emissions as hard to abate because they’re necessary to produce windmills to keep society functioning and so on. You’ve got a big problem here with the idea of net zero itself. It seems reasonable when you state it, but if you just start thinking about it, it doesn’t work. And Bill mentioned the tree planting. The problem with offsetting emissions with tree planting is that it’s not permanent. You plant trees. That’s great. Well, first of all, there’s the timescale. Trees take a long time to grow.

If you’re going to abate the emissions that are produced right now by planting trees that grow and capture them over 40 years or so, it’s not commensurate. Not commensurate with the urgency, of climate emergency, and it’s not permanent. We know forests burn down, and that’s happening more and more. You plant trees and they burn down. You have no assurance that these trees are going to grow for 40 years and offset these emissions. That whole thing is nonsense. And then there’s the carbon capture and the direct air capture that’s more and more presented like you do big machines that work as very inefficient trees to capture carbon from the air and what you do with that while you do enhanced soil recovery or you do synthetic fuels and you put the carbon back in the atmosphere. Yeah, there’s lots of nonsense going on.

The Corporate Mapping Analysis Summary

Jenny:

Thank you. I think the one thing that we’ll say also is missing from this. There are nine planetary boundaries, not one.

Climate change is one of those boundaries. To me, the opportunity that I see in getting after site closures addresses all of these issues. As you’re saying, J. P., we have to address the fact that we ship how much around the world and do not have local food systems to support reducing that where we do not have alternatives. These are some of the key things that I think we have to start messaging. If we could I do want to hit just quickly before we get into the how to the greenwashing indicators. I liked Bill, from the paper you guys did, I’m just going to list them for people just so they have a sense, and you’re welcome to offer comments after I do, but selective disclosure. We’ve talked a little bit about the fact that we’re not disclosing all the information, and even if we are, it’s not necessarily rooted in that scale.

Like you’re saying, Bill, we’re doing these little bits of changes and it’s not translating for people into what that means in terms of what our goals are. That’s coming. Just to be clear, the other opportunity to help industry, government, and regulators pay attention is we’ve got carbon pricing coming. Even though this isn’t a perfect system, there is a system in place and that’s now going to make it a big problem for us to sell our product internationally. And then we have misalignments of claims in action. Again, stating things that do not translate into results. Displacement of responsibility. Again, saying, “Hey everybody, we’ve got this and we’re going to do this together as if it’s the public’s issue to address not critical.” Again, highly controversial practice. We’re saying CCS doesn’t even work.

We shouldn’t even be exploring IT comparison. Not comparing things properly across different political jurisdictions. Let’s say non-standard accounting. Again, these are the numbers that are expected in 2025 from the UN. We have to start aligning these figures with international standards. The other two are kind of similar, inadequate reporting, not enough. And then political sustainability. Understanding whether or not these policies are going to prevail from government to government, the carbon tax is one thing that we have an opposition leader trying to stop. If we can talk a little bit now about the how, and bill, you’re welcome to expand upon what I just said, but how do we help the public understand, we just described this as an insufficient solution space, and how do we help them know how to use this for good, let’s say?

What Can We Do With Bill C-59?

Bill:

Well, if I can jump in, I guess I think it’s important for us to recognize that the struggle here, that the issues are really about more than just stopping greenwashing, not achieving a more transparent and accurate kind of assessment of what’s happening and preventing corporations from misleading messaging, which is sort of the greenwashing question. I mean, I think Charlie Angus’s private member bill, which to some extent pushed the liberals to bring in this kind of anti-green washing clause in Bill C 59. What Charlie Angus was calling for was a ban on advertising by fossil fuel corporations, which I think would be a really good idea. I mean, it’s a similar idea to banning cigarette advertising. I think as fossil fuel products, we should be cultivating a public imagination of a world that is beyond petroleum and not just as a corporate slogan. As long as fossil fuel corporations are allowed to advertise their products in various ways, very typically through corporate social responsibility advertising, this is going to continue to be a problem even if they respect the Bill C 59 provision.

It’s about more than just messaging and reporting and communication, but fundamental changes in energy production. And I think in how energy production is controlled. I think it is about sunsetting the oil and gas industry as soon as possible in a kind of managed decline. It’s not a matter of just shutting everything down overnight and causing economic turmoil. We need a transition strategy. We need a deep just transition strategy that we’ll look after workers and communities who will be displaced as the transition occurs. But this also, I think, as you were pointing out earlier, Jenny, this includes requiring fossil fuel polluters to clean up the messes that they’ve made. And Alberta is a good example of that with its vast number of abandoned wells that pose health hazards and safety and ecological dangers. There’s a group Reclaim Alberta that has a wide-scale strategy for reclaiming Alberta’s ageing and expired oil.

I am just quoting from the website here “Reclaiming Alberta’s Ageing and expired oil and gas infrastructure that puts thousands of workers back to work.” Those kinds of ideas are really important, I think, to move beyond just a critique of greenwashing per se. I think ultimately a good formula for thinking about the future we need to be pressing for is something that some of my colleagues in the corporate mapping project have called the three Ds, namely to decarbonize. That is to move away from fossil fuels to democratize that is to move away from corporate power so that we have a more democratic economy that will make our entire society much more democratic and thirdly to decolonize. That addresses, again, not just redwashing, but the social relations that underline redwashing colonial relationships that continue to exist. I think that 3D’s idea is a useful starting point.

Jenny:

I love that. Thank you so much, Bill. J. P., if you wouldn’t mind going into some thoughts about how we move this forward?

J. P.:

Yeah, I can’t but agree with everything Bill says on this. Of course, banning advertising that the anti-tobacco campaigns were so effective in a relatively short period of time. I think there’s a big inspiration to take from them banning advertising. That’s been a hard one for the public health campaigns, but it did work in the end. However, the general outlook of these campaigns was to act on many different levels. You target messaging at individuals directly, but not just at individuals because we know that it affects 10, 15% of people who are going to change their behaviour. So we target advertising messaging at individuals to change behaviour, but you work more broadly to delegitimize the industry. And in the case of tobacco, it included these messages on the cigarette packages. It included moving secret packages away from behind the counter and convenience stores to hidden underneath. Less visibility.

It goes with the advertising and campaigns targeting schools to reduce the effect of peer pressure and to change the effect of peer pressure away from damaging behaviour and towards good behaviors, desired behaviors. There’s something very interesting that came out two, three years ago, I think called, I forget the title, the Little Book of Green Nudges. It’s about changing the environment in which people make their consumer decisions. Say you want to reduce emissions in the university and you want to promote plant-based diets. Little things like putting the plant-based menu items above first on the menu, that’s going to change people’s behaviour just like that. You put plant-based meals encounters, you put them on top, and you stop talking about vegetarian meals. You don’t label them as vegetarian because it’s a turnoff for many people. You just label them as what they are, lentil soup, tofu, stir fry.

You just do these little changes. It can be for parking, parking in universities or elsewhere. We have apps on the phones that let you pay for parking so easily. You get rid of that. You put a payment station at the far end of the parking lot instead. People have to make the effort of walking away from where they want to go to pay all these disincentives and other incentives that counterbalance what you have, of course, you have to have bike lanes that get people to campus and a suitable public transit system at the same time as you decentivize car use. It’s about changing the structure of the environment in which people make these decisions. Of course, that’s targeting consumer choices. There’s much more than consumer choices, but it’s broad changes like that, which are, many of them are fairly easy to implement. Universities have climate action plans where that could be embedded in other institutions as well, public institutions, and private companies, can also make these choices and implement these kinds of climate action plans that do have an effect.

I think that’s something that would be important to think about. Bill mentioned changing energy production, and control of production, as very, very important. This is important. It opens up more broadly on structural changes. Who controls production and for whom? Are we going to put windmill fields that are built and controlled by large corporations who are breaking the profits and taking them in different other countries or are it going to be smaller fields that are community-controlled, co-op controlled and operated maybe? That’s the kind of stuff you might want to think about. We have one in New Brunswick, which is a co-op private partnership, you could call it. It’s the company Axona based in Spain that built the wind turbines and they get most of the profit, but part of the profit goes every year to the community for community projects and to support the municipalities and the cooperative that was formed around this wind field.

You could look at initiatives like that as an alternative, and that slowly opens up post-capitalist alternatives, which also should be rehabilitated because ultimately that’s what we’re looking for under different vocabulary. But a capitalist economy. Can a capitalist economy function without fossil fuels? That’s a big question. Many people say it actually can because it’s impossible to provide that amount of energy without fossil fuels. We have to look at degrowth. We have to look at reducing consumption, and reducing collection at some point because I don’t think that it’s possible to sustain the same level of functioning as in rich societies. Rich societies, rich countries have to look at the growth to make space for other countries, other places where they don’t have enough because we’re taking it all. Recalibrate and rebalance international relations in that ecological exchange that drains resources and wealth from poorer countries to rich countries to support lifestyles in rich countries.

Key Takeaways

Jenny:

Yeah, this is so great because I normally have R words that I use, regenerate, and restore, and you guys just gave me five D words, I love decarbonize and democratize. Yes, decolonize, I agree.

J. P. :

And regenerate and restore. Very important. Yeah.

Jenny:

Well, a hundred per cent. But I love it, yeah, thank you. Sorry, did I cut you off, J. P.? Did you have more?

J. P.:

It all goes together.

Jenny:

That’s awesome. Yeah. And then disincentivize, absolutely the chance that we could potentially quickly alter people’s actions, I think is what’ll come out of this. For me. I feel a certain sense of confidence talking about what I experienced because CAPP, not just CAPP, but all the Pathways Alliance companies took down their carbon capture and storage claims. I mean, this is corporate governance, I just want to reiterate that that is, despite what this bill means, there is a corporate governance issue for companies. And what’s interesting is the backlash of this C 59 was, “Oh, these environmental companies, how are they going to prove what they’re doing?” Easily, that’s what we do, right? This is our bread and butter trying to demonstrate what success looks like. I think there is a big opportunity for good actors to stand out in this effort, and I think that’s something to highlight as well when you talk about disincentivizing, but also incentivizing good behaviour.

And then degrowth a hundred per cent, we have to accept the fact that we have everything we need. We don’t need to extract anything more from this Earth. We now must look after the ecology and make sure that, as you said, others succeed. The reason why I think that’s so important is because if it’s not thoughtful degrowth, it’s collapse. That’s what we’re facing. I think it’s important that people understand that. I see we have a few minutes left. I have somebody who’s asked a question. Any suggestions on how to get the carbon accounting approach to include overseas burning of Canadian fossil fuels? Do you guys have any thoughts on that? I have a comment, but it wouldn’t be, I’ll just say that I think that’s what this carbon pricing system will ultimately do. Do you guys agree with that logic?

To me, the EU is defining what carbon pricing looks like around the world, and in that, unfortunately, Canadian oil and gas will not stand up for a couple of reasons. Number one, we’re far from everywhere, and number two, we have lower quality. We have younger oil and gas, we have a lot of byproducts. That’s why I was talking about CO2 and hydrogen sulphide. All of those things make our oil a lesser grade, and therefore it doesn’t stack up against other nations. Again, degrowth is coming. Being thoughtful and pushing back again, I’m going to reiterate my thing, which is land stewardship laws need to be upheld and regulated across each province, not just Alberta and BC and Saskatchewan where we have oil and gas, but all of these industrial sites and every province need to be addressed and removed from the landscape with that. Anything final you guys want to add before we go? I know you wanted to run it the hour, but if you can

Bill:

Well, yeah, I just would reiterate what you just said, Jenny, that we need to think in terms of land stewardship. And I think that’s part of decolonization is I think recognising the wisdom of indigenous land stewardship and applying that to our current situation, which is an ecological catastrophe in the making. We are in a climate emergency, we desperately need to shift from a kind of rapacious capitalist approach to the land that simply externalises costs and so on and so forth onto the environment and communities. And we need to shift to a vision of humans as part of nature and as stewards of the land. And I mean, there are lots of examples of that. As J. P. was saying, it’s very much about all sorts of little changes that can happen in everyday life as well as more structural policy changes. I think free public transit is a very important move, for example, in the medium term or right now to be doing, to get people out of their cars because of the idea of simply shifting the energy source and now everybody’s got an electric car that’s not going to work to speak to the point about extractivism, lithium extraction, the other kinds of rare earth minerals that go into batteries.

Bill:

This will simply continue a program of ecological imperialism really in terms of where these items come from and what kind of power relations between north and south are continued as things shift from fossil fuels post-fossil. I think we do need to look at really fundamental changes that are covered under that 3D slogan.

J. P.:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all about the land. That’s the title of Ty Alfred’s book. It’s All About the Land. And if we see the land as just a bunch of resources that are there for capitalists to take people who are already rich and get richer by taking everything from the land, there’s not going to be any land anymore. We have to give back to the land and have a balanced relationship, just that’s what we need to do.

Jenny:

Thank you. And I just want to say, because I’m thinking of the industry, as you said, Bill, there are a hundred thousand people or more directly working in the oil and gas industry in Alberta, and there is a career for 25 years. I just need people to understand that, as you said, Bill, we need to thoughtfully reverse this bus, and that comes with a geophysicist no longer mapping a reservoir. We’re mapping a contamination plume. We’re no longer drilling, we’re abandoning. We’re no longer building pipelines. We’re removing pipelines where they need to be. These are all the things, all these jobs still exist and need to be thought of. This is something that bothers me when we talk about a just transition, is that we’re not accounting for these myself. I want to contribute to solutions, and I want to know that I’m going to have a career in that. That’s my final word on this. Thank you both so much. This is incredible. I sure hope we have an opportunity to speak again. J. P., please pass on that title and I’ll make sure I include it in the episode when we record it. Any final words from either of you before we close?

J. P.:

Let’s just do it. Yep, everything’s in place.

Jenny:

Excellent. Okay. Thank you so much, guys. Take care for now.

J. P.:

Okay. Thank you so much, Jenny.

For information on J. P. Sapinski’s work:

Brooks, D., Carter, A. V., Eaton, E., Pineault, É., & Sapinski, J. P. (2023). Mapping Fossil Fuel Lock-In and Contestation in Eastern Canada. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia Office. https://policyalternatives.ca/Fossilfuellockin

Carton, W., Knorr, W., Lewis, S., Lund, J. F., McAfee, K., McLaren, D., Möller, I., Sapinski, J. P., Stabinsky, D., Smith, P., & Thoni, T. (2022). Net Zero, Carbon Removal, and the Limitations of Carbon Offsetting (CSSN Position Paper 2022:1). Climate Social Science Network, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. https://www.cssn.org/cssn-position-paper-net-zero-carbon-removal-and-the-limitations-of-carbon-offsetting/

Viens, N., Sapinski, J. P., & Laurin-Lamothe, A. (2024). Decarbonization, hegemonic projects, and the green growth policy-planning network: The case of Québec. Environmental Sociology, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2024.2387418