This week's guest on Cleaning Up is Tzeporah Berman. Tzeporah has been leading environmental campaigns in her native Canada and beyond for over thirty years. Today, she is Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and International Program Director at Stand.earth, the environmental organisation that she co-founded.
Tzeporah was formerly co-director of Greenpeace’s Global Climate and Energy Program, and her success campaigning against fossil development has seen her dubbed “Canada’s Queen of Green”. Tzeporah and Michael take in everything from helping turn Meta and other tech giants off coal and onto renewables, fighting fossil and pipeline expansion in Alberta, and whether a non-proliferation treaty could be the solution for a managed decline of fossil fuel use.
Michael Liebreich Tzeporah, you have been called Canada’s "Queen of Green." You’ve tried most of the different leverage points available to achieve change, haven't you?
Tzeporah Berman Yes, well, I've tried a lot of them. But in the end, what it's about is building power that's commensurate with the scale of the incumbents; of the companies who want to do the extraction, whether it's old growth logging, or whether it's oil and gas. We have the science to show that 86% of the emissions trapped in our atmosphere are coming from three products - oil, gas, and coal - and we need absolute emission and production decline, yet we're still expanding production, emissions are still going up. So, why is that? And what tools can we use? One of the things we did when I was at Greenpeace International is we decided to look at where were the fastest growing consumers of power, and at the time it was the IT sector. So, we actually ran a really fun campaign against Facebook, on Facebook. The people inside Facebook, they are people - they believe in climate change, they're quite progressive. But meanwhile, new coal plants were being built for them. And so, we ran a campaign: we love Facebook, wish it were green, and all the posters, the placards and everything around the world were a heart for Facebook, and then a thumbs down for a coal plant, a thumbs up for a wind farm. And, I guess the rest is history: Facebook did become the first company to create a procurement policy; they started not only sighting their data centres where they could get renewable feeds, but also starting to build renewable energy, and this started to create a race in the sector.
ML After Greenpeace, you went back to Canada and became very closely associated with the pipeline - I don't know what to call them - the pipeline conflicts?
TB We talked a lot about how the pipelines were the fuse to one of the largest carbon bombs on the planet, and the fuse was in Alberta, Canada. As I started working on the pipelines and meeting people in the communities who were opposing them - who were doing lawsuits and hearings and regulatory hearings - what I realized is it was actually a perfect storm, representative of the impacts of the fossil fuel industry. I met indigenous leaders who were opposing pipelines because of treaty rights, farmers who got involved in trying to stop the pipelines because of rights issues. And then there were people who were worried about oil spills, marine scientists, human rights activists. Because there's the climate impacts, but then let's not forget that fossil fuels are the greatest cause of premature death on this planet. And then you also have the rare cancers that show up in refining communities or downstream in the Athabasca tar sands. So, in some ways those pipeline campaigns were the beginning of a new climate movement, that was scientists and health activists and indigenous rights activists and local community activists, and in my opinion, that's when we really started to build power.
ML I've also spoken at conferences in Alberta - and what a lot of Albertans, say is, look, there is demand for oil, we've got the oil, we can do it ethically, and by the way, we're paying the taxes for all of the rest of Canada. What do you say that argument?
TB You hear those same arguments in every country; whether you're in the Permian Basin in Texas, whether you're in Norway, whether you're in the UK, Argentina. Every country, every company, wants to be the last barrel sold. They're not denying climate change anymore; they're saying yes, yes, the world will use less oil, but it's going to be ours. And that is essentially one of the huge problems that we have; that's why we're on track to produce 110% more oil, gas and coal that can ever be burned and meet our targets under the Paris Agreement - stay below 1.5. And that's because no one is regulating the production; we don't have yet negotiation on who gets to produce and how much. As you know, that's decided by the marketplace, it's decided by price, or it's decided by OPEC. Climate policy and agreements have been built for years on this idea that we reduce demand, try and increase the price of carbon, renewables get cheaper, and that will constrain supply. It's not working – certainly not fast enough to keep us safe. Economists would say, you have to cut with both sides of the scissors. Because right now, everybody wants to have their cake and eat it too. So, while we're seeing this, that remarkable drop in prices and renewables, the incredible uptake that is far faster than anyone thought, we're still seeing increased emissions and increased production. And if we increase production, and fossil fuel infrastructure, what we produce today is what we're gonna use tomorrow. So, we need to stop pretending we can negotiate with these companies and start regulating them.
ML Tell us about your work on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. How did that come about?
TB I had been doing research looking at the Paris Agreement, trying to understand, what are the mechanisms that can help align production? And you know, the Paris Agreement does not even include the words oil, gas, coal or fossil fuels. And in order to regulate this industry to reduce production, as quickly as we need to, in order to meet the climate agreements, a lot of us started believing that we need more international cooperation, we need more global governance - and exploring this idea of building a treaty similar to nuclear non-proliferation, where countries start to manage the decline of fossil fuels, in cooperation with each other, and equity and fairness are taken into account. So, we have a global Secretariat for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, who is helping to coordinate both diplomacy and research and communications around the world. We have a directed network campaign that's supported by 3000 civil society NGOs around the world, it's active now in 40 or so countries. We have 80 cities now, we have 101 Nobel laureates, 3000 scientists have joined the initiatives, and now we have the support from six countries. And those countries are starting to hold bilateral and multilateral conversations about, what are the barriers to constraining fossil fuel production and how do we do this?
ML But at present, you've got a whole bunch of progressives and countries that are on the suffering side of climate change, but not the production side, right?
TB That's true. And again, look at the history: with nuclear non-proliferation, what you had first was a group of countries, first movers who start to create the conversation. We started building support for the treaty in the South Pacific on purpose, because those are the countries that had been leading the conversation on climate internationally. We wouldn't have a 1.5-degree target without those countries. We wouldn't have the International Court of Justice recognizing climate change. We wouldn't even have the conversations on loss and damage. And the countries that are most vulnerable are the ones who have been leading some of the diplomacy and discussions on climate change. This group of countries will grow. And I believe that we will get some producers into the group of countries. If not, every country is going to keep trying to be the last barrel sold. And if that happens, then we're all in trouble.
ML There's another possible criticism which is that any increase in energy prices is regressive, because the people it hurts are the poor and vulnerable. Pushing up the price of fossil fuels, starting to price in these externalities, harms the poorest and most vulnerable, does it not?
TB The price rise does not happen in a vacuum, and we're not calling for supply constraints that are not in line and in lockstep with demand constraints. What the Fossil Fuel Treaty is designed to do, is to help ensure a managed decline. Because we're going to have a managed decline, and we're going to have an unmanaged decline. We know that. And the fact is, we have all been - especially the poor and vulnerable - subject to the boom and bust of price shocks from the fossil fuel industry for a very long time. And the fossil fuel industry had the last 50 years to provide energy to the world's most vulnerable, and it didn't. This is an industry that has been making absolutely obscene profits - literally billions a day - on the backs of both our environment and the world's most vulnerable. They are the greatest cause of climate change, and poisoning our air and water, and when they leave a region consistently around the world, they leave taxpayers with the cleanup bills, which is in the billions. I agree with you, we have all benefited from the fossil fuel era, absolutely. But now they are standing in the way of a transition being fast enough to keep the majority of the world safe.