fossil fuel capitalism

By Adam Scott and Patrick DeRochie - Shift Network, May 5, 2022

New analysis finds 80 Canadian pension managers with 124 different roles at 76 fossil fuel companies, raising questions from beneficiaries about fiduciary duty and pension administrators’ potential conflicts of interest on climate-related investment decisions. 

Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health’s May 2022 report, Canada’s Climate-Conflicted Pension Managers: The Oil and Gas Insiders Overseeing Canadians’ Retirement Savings, reveals the deep entanglement between the fossil fuel industry and directors, trustees and investment managers at Canada’s largest public pension funds. 

The overlap raises serious questions from beneficiaries about their pension administrators’ ability to objectively manage climate-related financial risks and make critical climate-related investment decisions – when the pension administrators are so deeply entangled with an industry whose products are the primary cause of the climate crisis, whose bottom line depends on the continued production of climate-damaging products, and that has a long and ongoing legacy of obstructing efforts to cut carbon pollution.

The analysis finds that among Canada’s ten largest pension funds, which together manage more than $2 trillion in assets:

• 80 different pension directors, trustees, executives and senior staff currently hold or previously held 124 different roles with 76 different fossil fuel companies. 

• This includes nine current pension fund directors or trustees that currently hold 13 roles on the board of directors of 12 different fossil fuel companies, and 56 senior staff or investment managers at pension funds who hold 76 different corporate director roles at 39 different fossil fuel companies. 

• Seven of the ten pension funds have at least one board member who simultaneously sits on the board of a fossil fuel company. 

• In some cases, over a quarter of the pension fund’s board has direct connections to the oil and gas industry.

The best long-term interests of pension fund beneficiaries are not aligned with the financial interests of shareholders of fossil fuel companies. A pension director who is also a corporate director of a fossil fuel company could find themself with real or perceived conflicts of interest between their fiduciary duty to invest in the best long-term interests of pension beneficiaries, and their simultaneous legal obligation to act in the financial interests of the fossil fuel company on whose board they sit.

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By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, April 30, 2022

In an act of solidarity with Chevron workers fighting for a new labor contract as executives boast of a record-breaking quarter, Greenpeace USA campaigners joined United Steelworkers Local 5 union members on Friday to expand the picket line onto the waters of San Francisco Bay.

Nearly 500 workers from Chevron's oil refinery in Richmond, California have been on strike for more than a month in what USW Local 5 vice president B.K. White calls "a movement of working people rising up to challenge a corporation." 

Chevron announced Friday that its profits surged to $6.3 billion during the first three months of 2022—four times as much as the fossil fuel giant pulled in over the same period last year, as Common Dreams reported. That prompted fresh calls from progressives for a windfall tax to prevent further price gouging and war profiteering by Big Oil and underscored one of the reasons why workers are demanding better pay.

"What's the answer to corporate greed?" Greenpeace asked on social media. "Solidarity!"

By Dr. Robert Pollin, Veronica Wilson, and Norman Rogers - The Climate Center, April 28, 2022

By Béla Galgóczi and Paolo Tomassetti - European Trade Union Institute, April 25, 2022

The die is cast. The worst scenario of an ‘unjust transition’ materialized with the Russian invasion and devastation of Ukraine. A scenario that brought back to Europe the spectre of the Third World War and the reconsideration of the EU strategy for a just transition.

As the quintessence of the domination of nature by man, war is a minor ecological activity that humans might engage in. Not just for the most evident externalities of war on the natural environment. The very notion of the domination of nature by man “stems from the real domination of human by human” (Bookchin 1982, at 9) – i.e., what the essence of war is about. To accommodate humanity to war, exploitation, and political obedience “involves the undoing not only of human “first nature” as an animal but also of human “second nature” as a child who lives in dependency and protective custody under the eyes and the arms of its mother” (Ivi, at 421).

Out of the philosophical language and drama that the people of Ukraine and Russian dissidents live in, this war comes with shattering consequences for vulnerable workers and households from all around Europe. Due to the energy supply uncertainty associated with the enduring dependency on Russian oil and natural gas, many EU countries are experiencing an escalation of energy prices that exacerbates the post-pandemic inflation crisis. This is causing a series of dramatic economic effects – an erosion of the standard of living of low-income families and uncertainties about investments in new production – all of which depress the EU economy, worsen unemployment, and further disempower labour.

By Kenny Stancil - Common Dreams, April 23, 2022

Scores of people in communities around the United States took to the streets on Saturday to demand swift and bold legislative and executive action to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis as well as skyrocketing inequality.

At "Fight for Our Future" rallies held in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Atlanta, and more than 40 additional cities across the country, the message was simple: Time is running out for Congress and President Joe Biden to make the bold investments needed to create millions of unionized clean energy and care sector jobs that can simultaneously mitigate greenhouse gas pollution along with economic and racial injustice.

The nationwide mobilization—organized by a coalition of more than 20 labor, civil rights, and environmental justice groups including SEIU, NAACP, the Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Green New Deal Network—took place one day after Earth Day.

We out here! With my @ggjalliance comrades at the #EarthDay #FightForOurFuture rally outside the White House. We demand @POTUS and Congress stop playing games with fossil fuels and war. Time is up to get the job done on climate, care, jobs, and justice. #NoWarNoWarming https://t.co/Pltej4qE5I

— Adrien Salazar (@adrien4ej) April 23, 2022

By Robert Pollin - American Prospect, April 8, 2022

Even as Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine proceeds and concerns over the subsequent high gas prices proliferate, we cannot forget that the climate crisis remains a dire emergency. The latest report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the most authoritative source on climate change research—could not be more explicit in reaching this conclusion. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres described the report as a “file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.” This follows several equally vehement studies in recent years, as well as those from other credible climate researchers.

If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC’s findings seriously, it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

By Clark Williams-Derry - Montana Environmental Information Center, April 7, 2022

By staff - Kurzgesagt, April 5, 2022

Web Editor's Note: while there are a few debatable points made by this video (such as an overly rosy view of CCS, even though it's not a major focus of the presentation), its overall argument is entirely sound: doomism is the tool of the capitalist class. Already grassroots organizing (including union organizing) has made a difference. Wallowing in despair is not a solution; organizing is:

Our home is burning. Rapid climate change is destabilizing our world. It seems our emissions will not fall quickly enough to avoid runaway warming and we may soon hit tipping points that will lead to the collapse of ecosystems and our civilization.

While scientists, activists and much of the younger generation urge action, it appears most politicians are not committed to do anything meaningful while the fossil fuel industry still works actively against change. It seems humanity can’t overcome its greed and obsession with short term profit and personal gain to save itself.

And so for many the future looks grim and hopeless. Young people feel particularly anxious and depressed. Instead of looking ahead to a lifetime of opportunity they wonder if they will even have a future or if they should bring kids into this world. It’s an age of doom and hopelessness and giving up seems the only sensible thing to do.

But that’s not true. You are not doomed. Humanity is not doomed.

By Mayeta Clark - ABC (Australia), April 2, 2022

On a mild March day in a brown bike shed at Eraring, the biggest coal-fired power station in Australia, 19 men in high-vis work gear crouch on a low bench around the shed walls. It’s lunch time. The men are contractors and they are looking up at their union leader, Cory Wright, for certainty.

Employed by labour hire companies, they are among the most vulnerable workers caught up in the Lake Macquarie power station’s impending closure. Many have worked at Eraring for years, some decades. But they are only entitled to a fraction of the redundancy payout that their colleagues directly hired by the station’s owner, Origin Energy, will get.

When Cory asks the workers if they want to share some thoughts, some say they don’t believe Eraring Power Station will really shut down. A bald man at the back is first to speak. “I can’t actually see them closing as yet,” he says. “That’s my thoughts personally.” Another man sitting two seats along agrees. “I don’t know. I just can’t — we can’t see it closing, not by ’25 anyway,” he says referring to the new closure date of 2025 — seven years earlier than expected.

Union officials say this denial is a form of shock that they’ve heard often since the recent announcement of Eraring’s closure. Each time they hear it, they remind the workers to take the closure date seriously.

Newcastle organiser Tim Jackson jumps in. “If we just go on the face value that it may not occur, we’re just walking down a grey path of an unknown,” he says. “So if it’s 2025, it is what it is.”

By Martin Empson - Climate & Capitalism, March 26, 2022

Understanding the growing combination of racism, climate science denial, and fossil fuel promotion.

Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective
WHITE SKIN, BLACK FUEL
On the Danger of Fossil Fascism
Verso Books, 2021

As regular readers of my blog will be aware, I think that Andreas Malm, even where I disagree with key points of his argument, is one of the most stimulating Marxist authors on environmental politics. So it was with eager anticipation that I looked forward to this new publication “one the dangers of fossil fascism” that Malm has co-authored with the network the Zetkin Collective, a group of scholars and activists “working on the political ecology of the far right.”

The book does multiple things. It opens with a study of the far-right and fascist movements and looks at their “anti-climate politics” and asks “what would it mean to live in a world both hotter and further to the right” than it is today. It argues that the far-right’s fixation with anti-climate views is closely tied to its anti-immigration perspective and the way that developing capitalism associated technology (and particularly fossil fuel technologies) with white supremacy. The authors argue in the introduction:

“[The book] traces lineages of resurfacing ideas and contends that white skin and black fuel have been coupled for long time — indeed, machines powered by fossil fuels were infused with racism from the very first moment of their global deployment. The European incubator for skin and fuel was an empire… It is out contention that one cannot understand recent developments [of the far right] or their possible continuation and aggravation, without such a longer view.”

Much of the first part of White Skin, Black Fuel is a study of the reality of far-right politics. This links various aspects of conspiracy theory (white replacement) and Islamic takeover, with wider hatreds of immigrants and Muslims with anti-scientific and views that can only be described as pro-fossil fuel industry on climate change. The discussion of the specifics of these ideas are detailed and for anti-fascist readers they are at times depressing ∞ detailing the extent to which they have become mainstream. Shockingly the growth of the far right and the mainstreaming of their arguments around climate and immigration have pulled the center left towards them. The authors note, for instance, that in Denmark, the social democrats “came close to another line of reasoning: in a warming world, it is even more imperative to patrol borders and send people home” as a result of the growth of the far-right.