Sacred Headwaters #41: Alternative Strategies for Fighting Fossil Fuel Growth

COP26 has been just the latest data point showing that governments and international negotiations are unwilling and unable to initiate a managed decline of the fossil fuel industry. So, what do we do?

Nov 16, 2021

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Issue #41: Alternative Strategies for Fighting Fossil Fuel Growth

In the last issue, we talked about how the supply side of climate change has been conspicuously absent from international negotiations, from government plans, and even from mainstream discourse. We also read about how that conspicuous absence demonstrates the vacuity of the growing chorus of climate pledges. The long-awaited COP26 is wrapping up as I write this and, if anything, its deliberations have made it even clearer how incapable our current governance structures are of mitigating climate change in any real sense.

Bill McKibben summarized where things were with the conference’s agreement on Friday:

…it expresses “deep regret” that the rich countries have not made good on their financial promises to the poor ones; it’s gone from talking about phasing out coal to phasing out “unabated coal,” code for continuing to build vast and wasteful carbon capture schemes; and from talking about ending fossil fuel subsidies to ending “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies, which is one of those words that will doubtless hide a multitude of sins.

As depressing as this is, it’s also not much of a surprise, which begs the question: if governments and international negotiations cannot be trusted to pursue the single most important piece of the fight against fossil-fuelled climate change — drawing down the production and use of fossil fuels — what can be done about it?

In this issue, we’ll look at some of the different avenues by which people around the world are successfully fighting the expansion of fossil fuel production and infrastructure. Some of this is what could be called “activism,” and it’s important to zoom out and understand how these kinds of actions fit into a bigger picture. A single sign wave event, performative demonstration, or blockade might seem like an isolated incident, an ineffective exercise of power by people who fail to understand how change really happens. Indeed, those charges are often levelled against activists even by people who claim to support the cause. I had them levelled at me personally just a couple weeks ago by the CTO of a carbon capture company, among others. But the reality is that activism is a key component of how change happens, and very rarely are these kinds of actions taken without some kind of bigger picture strategy in mind, even if not every participant is aware of that. Divestment, of course, is a great example of that and we read about some of the ways criticisms of divestment failed to see the bigger picture in issue #39. Direct action and other forms of activism fit into climate strategy not as a separate, uncoordinated strand, but rather as an important component of a much larger, partially planned, partially emergent whole that includes domestic and international political advocacy around things like the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.

We’ll get into that more in a future issue (or series of issues); today, I just want to inject a dose of optimism into the unfortunate reality of the wealthy world’s response to the climate crisis, a reality that’s been on full display over the last few weeks. Resistance is active and growing; this issue is just a brief look at some of the paths it’s taking and the synergistic ways that people are building collective power against the fossil interests that guide global policy.

Indigenous Resistance Against Carbon (30 minutes)

Dallas Goldtooth, Alberto Saldamando, and Kyle Gracey, Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International, 2021

Indigenous people living under settler nation states have been fighting for their land since colonization, but, at least in North America, the last decade or two has brought the climate movement into what is a growing frontline battle against the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. In the US, Keystone XL and Standing Rock thrust these Indigenous-led movements against fossil fuels into the public eye, but they’re far from the only ones. This report catalogued major Indigenous-led fossil fuel infrastructure fights across Turtle Island — or in what we know today as the US and Canada — and quantified the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that have been avoided by halting these projects. The results are significant: the authors argue that successful Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel projects from 2009-2019 mitigated emissions equivalent to 12% of annual US and Canadian greenhouse gas pollution.

An important point that deserves much more than I’m giving it here: I’ve heard frontline Indigenous land defenders say explicitly, “We are not activists.” For those of us who are settlers or otherwise non-Indigenous, it’s important to think about this distinction. In addition to the impressive quantitative results this report includes, it does a great job explaining how Indigenous resistance differs from “activism” in the section titled “Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities Framework.” For Indigenous peoples, fighting to protect the land is an obligation built into their coexistence with the more-than-human world they inhabit. As the authors write,

Destructive actions like fossil fuel extraction and the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure on Indigenous territories, lands, and waterways directly attack traditional Indigenous knowledge by seeking to untether spiritual ways, languages, cultural practices, legal systems, and social, economic, and legal systems from relationship with those lands and water. An Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities framework links the struggle to protect the land with the ever present struggle to resist settler nationstate acts of violence and colonization fuelled by an extractive economic system.

You Can Refuse to Work for Fossil Fuel Companies—These Law Students Show How (5 minutes)

Josh Kirmsse and Catherine Rocchi, The Nation, 2020

In fall 2020, students at Yale Law School launched “Law Students for Climate Action,” an organization designed to put pressure on law firms to stop representing fossil fuel companies. They have a range of tactics including a pledge for students to withhold work from climate-criminal law firms, a pledge for firms themselves to refuse to work with fossil fuel companies, and a scorecard designed to ratchet up public pressure on law firms that are representing the worst offenders. On the face of it, this may seem somewhat insignificant to the rest of us — who cares what a few law students at top US law schools do? — but as part of a bigger strategy, this is a promising sign, and it aligns with a variety of other similar initiatives that, together, are significantly expanding the dimensions of the climate movement. Of particular note, the analogous organization Clean Creatives is running a prominent and seemingly increasingly effective campaign against the major PR firm Edelman, calling on them to drop their fossil fuel clients.

I interviewed one of the organizers at LS4CA for my Master’s dissertation and he raised the additional point that these US law firms represent fossil fuel companies in high-stakes litigation like what we’ll read about below. Forcing top law firms to boycott oil and gas companies has the potential reduce the quality of legal services they receive (or at least raise the cost), accelerate the material impacts of climate litigation, and otherwise make the production and distribution of fossil fuels more expensive and difficult.

A Court Ruled Shell Is Liable for Its Contributions to Climate Change. What Happens Now? (10 minutes)

Antonia Juhasz, Rolling Stone, 2021

In May, a Dutch court ruled that the transnational fossil fuel company Royal Dutch Shell is individually responsible for climate change (which comes with a bit of painful irony). Climate litigation against fossil fuel companies is a growing field. There are some ongoing attempts in the US, but this ruling represents the most significant victory the strategy has had so far. The court’s findings have a few highlights: Shell’s “fossil-fuel operations undermine basic guaranteed human rights;” Shell’s net-zero pledge and renewable investments “are insufficient, intangible, and too unspecified;” and Shell must, by court order, reduce its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 45% by 2030. By including scope 3 emissions, the court included every aspect of greenhouse gas pollution caused by the fossil fuel supply chain, including emissions at point-of-use — whether that’s a petrochemical facility or a person driving a car. Shell is appealing the ruling and, of course, they may just ignore it — international law is tilted heavily in corporate favor — but it represents an important milestone and will hopefully embolden climate litigation around the world. As Canadian lawyer Patrick Canning tweeted a few days ago: