Third in a 10-part series of columns from the West Kootenay Climate Hub.
We live in the Slocan Valley, where the summer wildfire emergency was scary. In Winlaw, wildfire smoke sometimes kept grandkids indoors and us out of our gardens. The hardest part was hearing folks from the Valley express their trauma from the evacuation. Some people lost their homes. Thanks to caring neighbours and strong community spirit, we’ve made it through another challenging summer.
As climate impacts get more real here and around the world, powerful interests are working hard to distort the public's beliefs about climate change. Following the money makes it easier to understand how we’re being misled.
Much of the belief that climate action is unnecessary, too difficult, or too expensive is being promoted by fossil fuel companies. For years, they’ve been running a well-funded disinformation campaign to slow the adoption of renewable energy and our transition away from a carbon-intensive economy.
Decades ago, scientists paid by oil majors like Exxon and Shell reported that those firms’ activities were changing the climate, and it would get worse. Companies responded by adopting tobacco industry strategies for manufacturing doubt about climate science, as documented in Geoff Dembicki’s 2022 book, The Petroleum Papers.
American billionaires the Koch brothers funnelled over US$127 million to organizations attacking climate science between 1997 and 2017, many of them with innocuous-sounding names like “the Heritage Foundation” and “the Competitive Enterprise Institute.” The industry spent over US$4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads to spread false climate claims during last year’s global climate conference, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
The climate denial campaign continues in less transparent forms, from inflaming the culture wars on social media to attacking climate solutions like heat pumps, renewable energy and electric vehicles.
According to the National Observer, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP — Canada’s most powerful oil and gas lobby group) paid for social media posts from “grassroots” groups like Canada’s Energy Citizens, actually a now-defunct “astroturf” industry front group, of which others like Canada Action still exist.
For decades, CAPP has used this facade of public favour for oil and gas to secure public and political support, while relying heavily on government funding. The industry lobbied the federal government over 1,200 times in 2023 alone, according to Environmental Defence. In 2018, they convinced the feds to purchase the failing, partially constructed Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. Its final cost was $34 billion of taxpayer money, for what may well become a stranded asset.
Big Oil and Gas have been equally successful at buying influence with provinces and now even municipalities. The Alberta government is currently running a $7-million ad campaign against the draft federal emissions cap, filling front-page ads and TV screens with false claims that the emissions cap is a “production cap” and threatening that it will make “all of life’s necessities more expensive.” Never mind asking the worst polluters in Canada to help clean up their own mess. At the municipal level, gas interests are presenting misleading information to city councils including Vancouver and recently Richmond, hoping to reverse efforts to electrify new buildings.
The industry publicly denies the massive harm of its products, even paying scientists — usually from non-climate-related fields — to trash established climate science. Researchers Emily Eaton and Jennie C. Stephens have documented “multiple ways oil and gas companies have been investing in universities,” including funding fossil fuel-friendly research and even getting directly involved in curriculum design.
The industry also massively over-represents its investment in renewable energy, which is typically just one per cent of companies’ budgets. While industry profits reach all-time highs, climate change costs the public billions each year, and extreme weather events and poor air quality kill millions of people annually. Just last month, B.C.’s atmospheric river killed four people.
Like most Canadians, Kootenay folks are worried about climate change. Every national, provincial and regional poll confirms our very real concern about our children's and grandchildren's future in a hostile, warming world. We can come together to work on inclusive solutions that strengthen our communities. As the Slocan Valley and our Kootenay neighbours recover from last summer, let’s not forget large oil and gas corporations’ responsibility for destabilizing our climate.
At the same time, we can be critical of what we absorb online. We’re not saying information from YouTube videos, social media groups, or friends is necessarily wrong, but we can check it for accuracy against peer reviewed sources (more on that next month). And as we face the new challenge of a MAGA government south of the border, it will be more important than ever to make sure the truths we’re taking in weren’t bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists.
Tia Leschke gardens and makes music on unceded Sinixt lands in Winlaw. She wants a livable world for her grandchildren. Diana van Eyk is exploring rural and intergenerational living in Winlaw.
