Yesterday, flanked by indigenous elders in elaborate neo-traditionalist ceremonial dress, David Eby, the BC premier recently installed by the fossil fuel industry in a bloodless coup, announced another amazing Identitarian “first,” the first indigenous-owned indigenous-led liquefied natural gas export terminal. Far be it from me to suggest that indigenous people should be held to higher standards of environmental stewardship than their settler neighbours. While I disagree with the Haisla Nation’s decision to cash in on the LNG bubble, I disagree with it no more or less than I disagree with the BC government’s decision to do the same. It is racist to expect indigenous people, who continue to disproportionately suffer from poverty, to forego economic opportunities their settler neighbours take.
That stated, I plan to oppose this second Kitimat-area terminal as vehemently as I do Royal Dutch Shell’s terminal up the road.
The reason I draw attention to “climate champion” Eby’s ceremonial announcement is in an effort to explain one of the central paradoxes of post-political Anglo America. The fact is that the more vigorously our parties campaign on the need to fight climate change, the faster emissions and extraction increase when they are in power. So-called conservative parties that campaign on denying or minimizing human agency and the role of atmospheric carbon in climate, and promise enthusiastic patronage of the oil industry consistently sink fewer new wells, finance fewer pipelines and increase emissions and extraction more slowly than their progressive counterparts.
How is an ecologically conscious voter to determine whom to support at the polls when a party’s positions and promises on fossil fuels are not merely unrelated but inversely correlated to what happens when the party governs? And how do we explain this phenomenon?
In our post-political age, explanation and blame have become confused. Blaming individual malefactors for a problem is the opposite of explaining the problem. “Bad people” is not really an explanation for anything, by itself. Sure, I may feel that NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver are malefactors and sell-outs for the mass of increases in fossil fuel subsidies and fracking increases over which they presided in their three years co-governing BC. But it grows clearer to me by the day that this is bigger than individuals.
While I oppose the fossil fuel industry, as a whole, as do most people who have spent as much of their lives fighting the Greenhouse Effect as I have, one of our collective failings has been in understanding how divided and non-monolithic the fossil fuel sector is and how different parts of it operate by opposing logics.
Big Oil, transnational corporations like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, especially those that are primarily based in Europe, have different interests than small and medium-sized domestic oil companies that dot the Canadian Prairies and Boreal Forest.
The genius—and I don’t use this term in a flattering way—of Rachel Notley, and the reason she may return to the Alberta premiership in 2024 is that Notley realized that conservative parties of the West were controlled by the interests of small and medium-sized oil and carry out the agenda of that constituency, even when they contradicted the interests of Big Oil. Furthermore, there were a number of ways in which the New Democrats and other progressive parties, like the Greens, were better situated to be Big Oil’s friends in government. Nationally, that insight by Gerald Butts, the man behind the rise of Justin Trudeau, fundamentally shaped the new Liberal Party of Canada that returned to office the same year Notley was elected in Alberta.
First of all, there is the matter of class adjacency. Elizabeth Cull, the Hill and Knowlton fossil fuel lobbyist who installed Eby by disqualifying his competitors from the race to succeed Horgan, is typical of the kind of people who transact the power of Big Oil: members of the professional courtier class that exists within the larger commissar class, moving between appointed government positions, elected government positions and lobbyist work with ease. Paying a monthly retainer to a company like Hill and Knowlton, which has a stable of courtiers to lobby the government, both formally and informally, is the way Big Oil prefers to get business done and changes made in this country.
Small and medium-sized oil, on the other hand, are still based around an owner class that does not tend to delegate nearly as much of its political influencer work to the courtier class but instead works to create broad social consensus in oil-dependent communities. Both formal and informal lobbying work is still done but tends to be more owner-based, more publicly visible and, when professional lobbyists are used, they tend to be social and economic outliers within the commissar class’s professional courtiers.
Small and medium-sized oil tend to be investors and owners of locally-based firms who lack the spending power to make serious capital investments or who have to take them very slowly, in contradistinction to Big Oil. Small and medium-sized oil is interested in reducing regulatory and cleanup burdens to maximize the little liquidity that it has. Reduced regulation, reduced taxation, lower royalty fees: these are the priorities.
Big Oil has very different interests and priorities. It is interested in getting state support for major capital investments through tax reductions targeted specifically at those investments and not to the sector as a whole and through direct subsidies euphemized as “partnerships.” It also favours state patronage through law enforcement and land rezoning and prioritizes things like special squads of police specifically tasked with helping to drive pipelines and other infrastructure through hostile territory.
But more important than boutique tax concessions and co-investment in pipelines, terminals and other infrastructure, more important than turning local cops into industry brute squads, the most significant need of Big Oil is to maintain the support and continued patronage of its investors. Transnational oil companies have a global investor community to which they need to deliver dividends and maintain high share prices and from whom they need to secure funds for new investments.
In order to continue to secure investor capital in the European Union and Blue State America, they need to demonstrate to their investors that they support the Paris Agreement, net-zero by 2050, diversity, equity, inclusion, “just transition” and, as referenced in my opening paragraph, the holy grail of investor relations for Canadian projects: decolonization and indigenous reconciliation.
In other words, investing in Donald Trump’s USA is more dangerous and less profitable than investing in Joe Biden’s. Justin Trudeau’s photos marching with Greta Thunberg are very important for reassuring and gaining investment from liberal-minded, social democratic-voting members of the European and Pacific Coastal commissar class and haute bourgeoisie.
New pipelines get built faster in jurisdictions that do not approve 100% pipeline projects but only 70%. New wells are sunk faster in jurisdictions that protect some portion of their land from fossil fuel development, faster still, if those jurisdictions are unveiling new parks, plastic straw bans, electric car quotas and gas stove phase-outs. All of those things are a boon to investor relations professionals, professionals who work across the hall from the lobbyists in the most common type of lobbying firm, one with three practices: investor relations, public relations and government relations.
In essence, an especially retrograde type of post-politics has seized Canada’s already anemic managed democracy. It is our progressive parties that now represent the Big Banks, Big Oil and Big Pharma. Conservatives have been left with the table leavings in the form of generic drug manufacturers, local financial institutions and medium-sized oil. Fortunately for them, those running the real estate pyramid scheme on which the country is increasingly basing its economy, still tilt to the right.
What does this mean for me and people like me, politically? It means that until we can break the stranglehold of the commissar class on our public square, our party system and Canadian society as a whole, it will be impossible to cast an effective vote on the climate question. We once again find ourselves one step further back, further removed from politics.
Like it or not, the commissar class and their Woke orthodoxies have appointed themselves the level bosses of this phase of our video game. Until we break through the de-politicization of politics, their destruction of democratic institutions and processes and their control of the public square, all other politics is cut off from us. Only by restoring democracy and the public square can we get back to directly fighting the oil industry as a whole.
