Pleasing your enemies

From time to time we have bewailed those corporate leaders, especially in the energy industry, who have tried to appease climate radicals by saying at every opportunity that they really truly believe there’s a crisis caused by their horrible planet-destroying product.

They apparently believed that if they pretended to agree that oil and gas should be eliminated, the government would pretend to eliminate it. But now they’ve found out that the people who claim to want their companies dead actually want them dead, preferably soon and silently.

Thus Canada’s militantly alarmist Trudeau administration just passed bill C-59, which legal scholar Bruce Pardy calls “a hodgepodge bill of humdrum provisions, hundreds of pages long” in which lurks one of the most extraordinary attacks on free speech this country has ever seen, aimed directly at any hydrocarbon energy company that dares defend itself. It’s time these companies stopped the pre-emptive surrender and stood up for themselves.

The critical provision is a Draconian ban on “greenwashing”, which in this context doesn’t mean false claims of environmental virtue, it means pretty much any claims of environmental virtue. As Pardy explains:

“Businesses cannot claim that their products or practices help to protect against climate change or provide other environmental benefits unless they can prove the claims are true.”

It shamelessly reverses the traditional onus of proof on those who allege wrongdoing, and then makes the standard of proof hopelessly ambiguous and severe.

Especially as the points under debate concern the absence of harm, so Canadians are left having to prove a negative. One famously cannot prove there are no black swans, only that nobody could produce one… for nearly two thousand years.

The Roman satirist Juvenal’s “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” held up well until roughly 1697 when Dutch mariners found them in Australia.

Ordinarily it is the one alleging wrongdoing who must prove the case. If you are being tried for murder, the prosecution must meet the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, but even they don’t actually have to present ironclad proof.

But now if you want to say, for instance, that Canadian natural gas exports would help reduce emissions in countries that switch from coal, you’re not just going to have to run the kinds of model simulations alarmists do all the time, you’re going to have to prove all the stuff they skip over about your assumptions, every single one of them, or face ruin, including possible fines of 3% of your gross worldwide income if, ironically, it is not possible to prove with absolute certainty precisely how much extra revenue you earned because of the impugned claim.

The firms seem to have clued in, at least part-way. Law firms are issuing scary notices. And as Pardy’s piece explains:

“Companies and industry associations have taken down climate pledges and environmental commitments from their websites and social media. ‘Ottawa’s ban on “greenwashing” has already put a chill on climate disclosure targets,’ objected Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, in a commentary for CTV.

It will affect the entire economy, she wrote, add bureaucratic burden, halt investment, and weigh on Canada’s sagging productivity. Corporate Canada has lost its climate bargain.”

The National Post headline on Pardy’s piece pulls no punches: “Corporate Canada betrayed capitalism. Now it has been betrayed”.

But as Pardy also notes, using an analogy with Battlestar Galactica that makes us glad we never watched the show, there never really was a deal, just some dangerous naivete. Corporations fell for everything from DEI to climate alarmism, unaware that surrender on the instalment plan is still surrender and that appeasement never works.

Well, it didn’t. Thus the “Pathways Alliance”, a group of major oilsands companies that championed appeasement, has now decided, the CBC reports:

“to remove all its content from its website, social media and other public communications. On its website, Pathways cites amendments to the Competition Act that would create ‘significant uncertainty’ for Canadian companies that ‘want to communicate publicly about the work they are doing to improve their environmental performance.’

‘With uncertainty on how the new law will be interpreted and applied, any clarity the Competition Bureau can provide through specific guidance may help direct our communications approach in the future,’ the website reads. ‘For now, we have removed content from our website, social media and other public communications.’”

They’re still pleading that they’re one of the cool kids. But the cool kids want nothing to do with them, except to stomp them flat. In praising C-59 the “Canada Climate Law Initiative” began by saying:

“On June 5, 2024, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, urged ‘every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.’

He also asked news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising money. In a powerful speech, Guterres summoned fossil fuel companies for ‘distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing doubt’ about climate science and for their insufficient investments in clean energy solutions.”

Got it? Ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. Not just the fake stuff. All of it. You must go, and quietly. As for C-59, “While welcomed by many, some argue that the bill is insufficient to effectively tackle greenwashing and protect consumers in Canada.”

Don’t worry. There’s more where that came from. Specifically:

“While companies must be careful with their statements to avoid greenwashing risks and the other risks arising therefrom, they should not fear or refuse to publicly disclose climate-related information. This practice is called greenhushing.

Instead, companies should engage in real climate actions, avoid boilerplate disclosures, get third-party verification, and be transparent in their communications.”

Real climate actions. As in shutting down all fossil fuels.

As the Calgary Herald noted:

“The Pathways Alliance is a consortium of Canada’s six largest oilsands companies, which together have publicly committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from oilsands production by 2050. The consortium has previously spent millions of dollars on a countrywide public relations blitz aimed at demonstrating the oilsands is committed to helping fight climate change.”

So all those fancy oil and gas company communications departments and perky young things drafting your online statements about how you were knuckling under with classic corporate efficiency have turned out to be a waste of time, money and groveling, and worse, because, as Pardy also wrote:

“Over the course of decades, Western countries, but nowhere more than Canada, have undergone a cultural revolution. Accelerating climate activism, aggressive social justice ideology and managerial government have changed the landscape. Business elites, instead of defending capitalism, competition, open markets, the rule of law and other values of Western civilization, decided to switch rather than fight. To protect their own prosperity and influence, corporate leaders learned to speak the language and adopt the norms of progressive collectivism. They became cheerleaders for the new regime. Many came to believe in it themselves.”

But unfortunately for them, and us, “Progressive statism has never been about the climate, or transgenderism, or whatever the cause du jour. The target has always been Western values and principles.”

Even some enthusiasts are upset with how it was done. In the Globe & Mail one Kevin Krausert, “chief executive and co-founder of Avatar Innovations Inc., Canada’s first energy transition corporate venture studio” (sic but huh?) wrote:

“By inserting a new, undefined and legally ambiguous regulation on reporting the successes that corporations are making toward climate change, this new Bill C-59 has thrown a wet blanket onto corporations’ ability to publicize the good work they are doing.

In turn, this affects companies’ ability to contribute or invest in the future we all seek. As an investor in Canada’s decarbonization technology ecosystem, I believe the role of industrial commercial adopters in reaching our net-zero commitments is of profound importance.”

Yeah but carbon is carbon and nowadays it, like chlorine in that infamous Greenpeace campaign, seems to have become the devil’s element.

Pardy too pulls no punches on the corporations having brought it on themselves. Big firms, here as elsewhere:

“promoted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are a blueprint for socialist managerialism. The Business Council of Canada endorsed carbon pricing and Canada’s climate plans. Major oil companies promoted net zero and repeated the kinds of claims that governments themselves made: that climate action in Canada helps to prevent the climate from changing.

Such claims are patently false. Even if you believe in anthropogenic climate change, if your country doesn’t contribute much to the problem, cutting its contribution isn’t a solution. Bringing Canadian carbon emissions to zero would make no measurable difference to anything. Countries that together produce far and away most of the emissions on Earth have no intention of changing their paths.”

But as governments will, ours seeks to punish “misinformation” from others even while spewing it. Indeed, it will fine and even bankrupt companies for saying precisely the same stuff it says.

So now what? Pardy concludes:

“The Canadian business community still does not understand the point of the revolution. There can be no survivors. Surely, they sputter, you don’t mean us.”

Oh yes they do. And if anyone in corporate Canada has had enough, and wants to start standing up for themselves and the way of life they make possible, they could start by taking one tenth of the money they were planning to spend this year agreeing that they should be decapitated, and donating it to us.