It’s part of a clever campaign that could easily be rolled out across the country. Sue Big Oil was launched just over a month ago, inviting citizens in B.C. to join together and press their local governments to agree to a simple request: put $1 per resident into a legal fund for a class action lawsuit.
“The oil and gas industry reaps profits because communities and the public are paying its costs,” says Andrew Gage, explaining the underlying rationale for a court case. Andrew is one of the legal eagles at West Coast Environmental Law helping organize the campaign.
“It’s difficult to overstate how much oil and gas companies have made the problem worse. They’ve known since at least the 1980s their products are causing heat waves and storms when used as intended. They reacted by engaging in misinformation campaigns and lobbying against climate action.”
Vancouver is the first Canadian city to vote for a legal fund. But over 20 local governments in the U.S. are already in court to recover damages, along with three states. The landmark victory against Shell in the Netherlands wasn’t the kind of class action lawsuit Sue Big Oil envisions but it was similarly based on harm caused by the oil and gas industry’s products. Globally, there are over 2,000 climate cases at various stages and courts.
An open letter by Canadian law professors in 2019 noted that governments have been able to recover part of the cost of damages from asbestos, tobacco and opioids. The law profs argue the principle is well established in Canadian law and it’s time to take the same approach with fossil fuel companies.
Sue Big Oil is an intriguing campaign on several fronts, not least because it isn’t designed just as a legal strategy. It’s based on giving individual citizens a new way to engage and pool their efforts behind a simple, scalable campaign. Along the way, those efforts will catalyze and heighten local public debate about the damage from fossil fuels.
And the efforts are aimed at local governments, much more accessible to citizens and often more open to climate action than more distant levels of government (climate advocates can expect a lot more joy at Edmonton’s city hall than the provincial legislature a half hour’s walk away).
If Sue Big Oil gains traction, local governments will, in turn, band together to launch class action lawsuits to recover some of the billions in damages and costs forced on them by fossil fuel companies — the kind of balance sheet impact that forces banks and investors to take notice.
It’s early days for the campaign. Barely a month old, it already has one big city signed up and this fall’s municipal elections will determine whether Vancouver’s war chest actually gets filled.
But the campaign has that indefinable juice that all campaigns covet — a sense of excitement that spreads organically.
“Honestly, I was really surprised,” says Andrew Gage. “Even the fact a motion went before council was surprising. And then we didn’t have any confidence it would pass.”
The Roundup
The feds unveiled two options to cap climate pollution from the oil and gas sector on Monday, both market mechanisms: industry-specific carbon pricing or a new cap-and-trade system. Alberta’s UCP leadership candidates went ballistic and the oil and gas industry is suddenly not so sure about its lofty promises:
“Canada’s oil industry has never shown much of a talent for reading the room, but it took its political tone-deafness to new depths this week,” wrote Max Fawcett.
“With parts of Europe literally ablaze and the United Kingdom having faced the hottest temperatures it’s ever seen, our oil industry’s leaders decided it would be a good time to explain why they can’t afford to reduce their emissions as quickly as the federal government would like — and might not be able to do it at all …
“In other words: any attempt to meaningfully reduce overall emissions in the near future will expose just how far these companies are from living up to their promises.”
On the East Coast, Justin Trudeau popped up in Nova Scotia, where almost half of electricity still comes from coal. He announced $150 million for wind projects in partnership with Indigenous communities and $130 million for energy storage — installing grid-scale battery systems at four sites in the province.
London calling
You will have heard that the U.K. shattered its all-time heat records this week, topping 40 C. It was the busiest day for London’s firefighters since the Second World War.
Protesters from Extinction Rebellion targeted Robert Murdoch’s media headquarters in London, cracking its windows to protest the Murdoch empire’s efforts to undermine public understanding and government action.
Not that the U.K. record wasn’t newsworthy but it also demonstrated the enduring influence of the British Empire on international media. Even within Europe, Germany broke similar records with much less attention and this summer’s heat wave has killed more than 2,000 people in Spain and Portugal.
In China, 900 million people are under heat warnings as yet another extended heat wave arrives on Saturday — right on the day of the “big heat” in the traditional Chinese Almanac.
Vatican backs fossil fuel treaty
The Vatican announced its support for a global treaty to phase out the extraction of fossil fuels. Modelled on non-proliferation agreements against weapons of mass destruction, the treaty already has the support of Nobel Prize laureates including the Dalai Lama, 61 cities including Paris and Toronto, 1,300 organizations and over 150,000 scientists, doctors and other individual signatories.
“The planet already is 1.2 C hotter, yet new fossil fuel projects every day accelerate our race towards the precipice. Enough is enough,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit who runs the Vatican’s ecology and development office.
“All new exploration and production of coal, oil, and gas must immediately end, and existing production of fossil fuels must be urgently phased out.”
EVs past the tipping point
EV sales in Canada are now past the magic five per cent tipping point where mass adoption skyrockets. Across the country, new registrations hit 7.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2022 — the biggest numbers are 15.5 per cent in B.C. and 12.7 per cent in Quebec, the two provinces with sales mandates.
Oil and gas lobbyist to advise Export Development Canada
John Woodside reports that Dave Collyer has been named a sustainable development adviser to Export Development Canada. Collyer led the Canadian oil and gas lobby for six years as president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).
“It's kind of like inviting your foxes to advise you on chicken coop design,” Matt Price from Investors for Paris Compliance said. “Why would you be reaching in that direction?”
Alberta ‘War Room’ hires foreign attack firm
Jason Kenney’s Canadian Energy Centre has hired an American crisis management firm specializing in “counter-adversarial strategies” against “predatory” journalists.
“CounterPoint didn’t respond to a media request, and shortly after The Tyee reached out, it changed its website so that a page explaining its “ethos” and “strategy” is only accessible with a password,” reports Geoff Dembecki.
Lab meat could be big business
Lab-grown meat and “precision fermentation” of alternative dairy products could be as big as the fishing and seafood industry by 2030, according to a report on cellular agriculture. The industry could employ 86,000 Canadians and be a $7.5-billion business.
Winnipeg amps up transit
Winnipeg is redesigning its public transit system and will buy 100 zero-emission buses now that it has secured over $500 million in funding. The biggest chunk ($203 million) is coming from the federal government.
“As we expand over the next while, we know we want to be a zero-emission system,” Bjorn Radstrom, Winnipeg’s manager of transit service development told Electric Autonomy Canada.
The first order will be for 16 buses — eight electric and eight fuel cell vehicles.
It’s progress, to be sure, but dwarfed by India’s announcement this week of a tender for 50,000 electric buses following the purchase of 5,450 earlier this year.
American teachers for divestment
The 1.7-million-member American Federation of Teachers voted this week to demand its pension fund managers divest from fossil fuels.
320 cities in Europe now have clean air zones
Low-emission zones (LEZs) are proliferating across European cities — all of Europe’s top 10 tourist cities now have zones forcing the most polluting vehicles off the road. There are now 320 LEZs across Europe, an increase of 40 per cent in just three years. Over the next three years, the number is expected to hit 507.
Attention is now turning to Zero-emissions zones and Ultra-low zones, reports The Guardian. London is in the midst of public consultation to expand its Ulez across the whole capital. It already has a smaller Zero-emission zone in parts of the city centre and 35 other ZEZs are planned in Europe by 2030, ahead of Europe’s plan to phase out new fossil fuel vehicles by 2035.
In defence of anger
I’ll leave you with The Practice of Anger in a Warming World by Genevieve Guenther, Shakespeare scholar turned climate activist and the founder of End Climate Silence.
“But here’s the thing: my love for my son is actually not enough… I can’t move on that love, transmute it into action, without my anger. So what I do is I turn my attention away from the climate crisis and focus like a hawk on the people who are causing global heating. I literally sit down, as if I was going to meditate, and I close my eyes and take slow and deep breaths and really let myself feel the crackling electricity of fear and the sharp ache of grief in my body. I try to stay in this place until the visceral intensity fades. And once it fades I turn my attention to the people who have knowingly caused the climate crisis and who are currently preventing the decarbonization of the economy and who are quite literally putting the lives of billions of people in danger and who are destroying the only livable planet in the known universe so they can make a few years’ more profit.”
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Support for this issue of Zero Carbon came from The McConnell and Trottier foundations and I-SEA.