Editor’s Note: This the first post in a two part series on Climate Denialism in the Archives of Imperial Oil. The blog posts in this series originated in Dr. Anya Zilberstein’s History of the Climate Crisis seminar, in the undergraduate History program at Concordia University.
The realities of climate change pose an existential threat to the capitalist model of endless extraction and consumption. It is not necessarily surprising then, that the Canadian state and oil industry have been relatively quick to integrate the language of environmentalism and climate change into their public image. The fact that the white settlement of this land has always been so entwined with the extractive and resource industries should alert us to the fact that this rhetorical move is not evidence of actual change, but of a covert strategy of denial. The history of climate denialism in Canada is a short and convoluted one, always in conversation with American interests, though not always in lockstep. From the 1970s to today the federal government and corporations in Canada have used varied strategies to try to align their language with popular environmentalism while continuing their operations as usual. Documents from the Imperial Oil Archive allow a comparison between the fossil fuel company’s rhetoric with that of the Canadian state. Climate denial may be the wrong word for what this axis of corporate-government power aimed to facilitate in the second half of the 20th century. Climate solutionism is more apt because it was not until the late ‘90s that Imperial turned to strategies of outright denial and, moreover, much of their solutions-based research and rhetoric produced in the ‘70s and ‘80s has continued to be reflected in mainstream policy and discourse to this day.
“From the 1970s to today the federal government and corporations in Canada have used varied strategies to try to align their language with popular environmentalism while continuing their operations as usual.”
From at least the 1960s, scientists in the United States have warned federal officials that the greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels could warm the planet in dramatic, unprecedented ways. However, climate change did not become a hotly debated public issue until the late ‘80s, when news started to break about scientists’ increasing certainty that human activity was responsible for changing the climate. But even before oil companies were forced to contend with the realities of their role in climate change, public pressure did compel them to address their impacts on the Earth. In both Canada and the U.S., the ‘60s and ‘70s saw governments dealing with “environment” in a new way, in response to the environmental movements of this moment that called attention to the impacts of industrialization and growth on the air, land, and water. Activists primarily articulated these concerns in what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as the “one world” or “finite planet” argument, a unifying if universalizing call to recognize that the Earth was not infinitely exploitable and that there were limits to growth.1 The way that Canadian governments and fossil fuel companies responded to this argument reveals their fundamental incapacity to effectively confront environmental problems. The issue of climate would later reveal similar limits.
The Trudeau administration was the first to respond to the environmental movement, creating the Department of the Environment in 1970 with a focus on “resource-conservation” and “pollution cleanup.” In their reading of Trudeau’s throne speeches from his fifteen years in power, policy analysts Doern, Auld, and Stoney found that the main points that he stressed related to environment were pollution and creating new national parks.2 His rhetoric aligned with the main concerns of the environmental movement, but failed to address the root causes that they identified as harming the planet. Importantly, their “limits to growth” argument, which Trudeau apparently sympathized with, was not addressed by his government’s words or policies. North American Oil companies in the ‘70s took up a similar rhetorical strategy in their public messaging, focusing on the issues of oil spills and air pollution. However, without the mandate to provide public policy, corporations argued that mitigating these problems was either the government’s or individual citizen’s responsibility: either way outside of their purview.
In “Exxon and the Environment” (1975)—a collection of articles written by executives and researchers from both Exxon and Imperial—we can see some of these avoidance strategies at work. Similar to Trudeau’s policy, this publication is clearly a direct response to the environmental movement. For example, in “Economics for Environmentalists,” an economic consultant from US energy think tank Resources for the Future argued that “we should apply an economic calculus to all environmental decisions.” Rather than acting from a position of emotion, which he claims is the environmentalist’s grounding, he advocates for a reasoned approach that weighs the costs and benefits of expanding energy use. This article features a two-page spread with a large drawing of an ornate golden scale balancing on one side a white man in a suit in front of a gleaming oil refinery, and on the other side a white man, a deer, and a raccoon next to a pristine mountain stream. Environmentalists who argue for a decrease in economic growth and energy use, he contends, should remember that conserving energy is not really necessary, since the inevitable advances in future technology mean that energy is not “truly irreplaceable, like our national parks.” Conservation should be about land and protecting its beauty, and should not touch “the market mechanism when that mechanism is capable of achieving the desired results.”3 For this oil pundit, and for Trudeau, a few national parks should be enough to protect the environment.
While Exxon is an American company, the document at issue here was stamped with the seal of the central library of Imperial Oil Limited, and included an article by Imperial Chairman and CEO W.O. Twaits. This article, called “The Environment: Whose Responsibility?” is actually a transcript of a video that was made for Imperial employees, “to tell the people who work for Imperial what the company expects from them in the fight against pollution.” Twaits was clear that he was addressing “every Imperial oil person, from board room to service station,” and that all of their participation was necessary for upholding the company’s commitment to “environmental protection as a way of life.” This video and, later, its publication in written form, served the parallel purposes of proclaiming that Imperial was “a leader in the pollution fight” and that this fight needed to be taken up by every individual employee in order to be effective. Twaits repeatedly reinforced the point that “not only the operating personnel, but every agent, every dealer, every office employee – has a responsibility in helping combat pollution of any kind.”4 Nowhere in this document does Twaits deny that there was a problem with pollution. However, his solution was to be found within the industry itself, closely mirroring what scholars have called “the new denialism.” This is the oil industry strategy so widely used today, which attempts not to manufacture uncertainty, but to promote a severely “limited agenda for action that does not threaten capital accumulation by the fossil fuel industry.”5
In the 1980s, Canada saw two major shifts in oil and energy policy, the first in reaction to the oil crisis of the decade before and the rising oil prices that came from it, and the second resulting from free trade agreements and globalization efforts. When Trudeau’s Liberals came back to power in 1980 with promises of lower energy prices and protection of “Canadian oil,” they unveiled the National Energy Program (NEP) almost immediately. Historian Graham Taylor describes this program as an “interventionist” federal policy to increase the government’s share of profits from Alberta’s oil, phase out oil exports by 1990, and favour Canadian-owned operations.6 It was not nationalization, but it was the biggest threat to profit that Canadian oil companies had probably ever experienced. In 1989, Imperial Chairman and CEO Arden R. Haynes commented on the prospects for Canada’s oil industry in the wake of the NEP, of which he was highly critical and described as having “wrought severe damage on the industry and, indeed, on Canada’s economy.”7 While Ottawa had been willing to risk the ire of their industry allies to prop up the economy and rebound from the oil crisis, they would not take on the same risk to protect the environment. This policy was quickly reversed by the Mulroney government, but it still had the effect of exposing the oil industry’s vulnerability to regulation, spurring them in the end of the decade to work in closer contact with governments on the new front from which they faced regulation, climate change.
In the 1980s, Canada saw two major shifts in oil and energy policy, the first in reaction to the oil crisis of the decade before and the rising oil prices that came from it, and the second resulting from free trade agreements and globalization efforts.
The year 1988 is usually where historians see the beginning of real public recognition of the issue of climate change. Oil and gas companies and their corporate and advocacy networks in Canada recognized the threat in this public recognition and doubled down on efforts to gain a seat at every table where decisions about regulation would be taking place. In an address to the Canadian Gas Association Marketing conference in 1990, the President and CEO of Esso Resources Canada Ltd., Douglas D. Baldwin, quoted the federal Minister of Energy, who asserted that “If this government does not move forward with its environmental action plan, a new government will develop one of its own,” (emphasis in original). Throughout the speech he stressed the need for oil and gas executives to ensure they are a part of that process, and pointed to Alberta’s “Clean Air Strategy” as a “real breakthrough” in environmental policy-making since he, among other industry representatives, played a role in writing it. Baldwin remarked that “it’s not just politicians feeling the heat,” citing a public opinion poll to show that Canadians were unhappy with his industry’s effects on the environment as proof that they needed real work to improve their public image. Being mindful of “how green a reflection we’re casting” was both essential for their success and at odds with the way they made profit, by extracting oil from the earth to burn.8 The federal government matched this contradiction with public policy that claimed to be “green” but simultaneously re-entrenched Canada’s commitment to extraction.
After nixing the NEP, Mulroney’s government set in motion a new free trade agreement with the United States, and a new Green Plan for the country. Although his environmental plan has had him hailed as “the greenest prime minister in Canadian history,” in his own day he often faced the scorn of environmentalists who saw through his rhetoric, and saw free trade for the acceleration of neo-colonial resource extraction that it was.9 Imperial Oil, on the other hand, was happy to see new free trade regulations and used them as part of their justification for moderate, rather than transformative, action on climate and environment. In the introduction to Imperial’s “Response to a Framework for Discussion on the Environment, the Green Plan: A National Challenge,” the company’s CEO and VP wrote that “the globalization of trade and commerce requires that we increase the international competitiveness of our economy at the same time as we embrace environmental issues.”10 Invoking the same metaphor of the scale that the economist in the Exxon document from the ‘70s had used, they described how striking a balance between environment and economy would be key to any kind of climate solution.
Having been “involved directly” in the consultation process on the Green Plan, Imperial executives were not surprised by its contents, and were not particularly upset by them either. CO2 emissions and climate change made up a relatively small part of the plan itself, which, although it promised to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000, recognized that the measures it proposed “[were], of themselves, unlikely to realize Canada’s stabilization target.”11 Though they proposed to tighten regulation after hearing feedback from the public, we know today that that tightening did not take place and those targets were not met. Despite the weakness of this section of the plan, it was the part that Imperial responded to with the most anxiety. In their discussion of “instruments for change” company executives focused heavily on the idea of “potential” global warming, warning that to effectively reduce emissions across the world would imply “a truly massive intrusion into the working of the economy,” and “major economic and social disruption.”12 Not only is their anxiety visible here, but also the beginnings of their all-out efforts at casting doubt on the science behind the greenhouse effect.
Denialism in its most obvious form was not the main strategy that oil companies and governments in Canada used to avoid criticism for their inaction on climate, although it did have its time in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Today, Canadian corporate-political networks have come to embrace the “new denialism,” where climate change is recognized as a problem and laughably inadequate solutions are the only ones publicly debated. This strategy bears a strong resemblance to the early reactions of governments and corporations to the environmental movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, which dealt with protection and conservation rather than emissions, but used much of the same language and logic in their arguments. Solutions proposed by corporations who only exist to profit from extraction, and a state which has always done its utmost to protect those profits, will never touch the actual problem.
Feature Image: Oil refinery in Burnaby, British Columbia. Steven Lee, “Burnaby Mountain’s Oil Refinery…”, Flickr, November 16, 2008. https://www.flickr.com/photos/steveleenow/3032728979/. Used under a Creative Commons license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/.
Notes
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 17.
2. G. Bruce Doern, Graeme Auld, and Christopher Stoney, Green-Lite: Complexity in Fifty Years of Canadian Environmental Policy, Governance, and Democracy, of Carleton Library Series, 234 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 58, 72.
3. Exxon Corporation; Jamieson, JK; Rutter, Richard; Netschert, Bruce C; Winkler, Raymond W; Lamp, The; Pasciano, Nicholas; Gresham, Grits; Cronin, Fergus; Mardon, John; Dedera, Don; Immaulate; Elliott, Keith; Murphy, D; Martin, Jean; Lynett, Steve; Tucker, Joe; Lowery Jr, George; Keating, Bern; Hays, John; McIIhenny, EA; McIIhenny; Attie, David; “Exxon and the Environment,” 1975 December 19, Climate Investigations Center Collection, Climate Investigations Center, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/hxgl0228, 14-17.
4. “Exxon and the Environment,” 10-11.
5. William K. Carroll, Shannon Daub and Shane Gunster, “Regime of obstruction: fossil capitalism and the many facets of climate denial in Canada,” In Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism edited by D. B. Tindall, Mark C. J. Stoddart, and Riley E. Dunlap, 217-222 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), https://search.ebscohost.com login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=3216402.
Ibid, 222.
6. Graham Taylor, Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2019), 261.
7. Arden R. Haynes, “Canada and its Energy: Opportunities Waiting to Happen,” January 26, 1989, Climate Investigation Center Collection, Climate Investigations Center, 9, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6563153-1989-Canada-and-Its-Energy-Opportunities-Waiting.
8. Douglas D Baldwin, Esso Resources Canada Limited, “Running a Green Business: A Balance of Environmental and Economic Priorities,” 1990 October 22, Climate Investigations Center Collection, Climate Investigations Center, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/gkgl0228.
9. G. Bruce Doern, Graeme Auld, and Christopher Stoney, Green-Lite, 62.
10. A.R. Haynes and J.D. McFarland, “Response to A Framework for Discussion on the Environment and the Green Plan: A National Challenge,” June 1990, Climate Investigations Center Collection, Climate Investigations Center, 2, https://www.industrydocuments.uscf.edu/docs/zygl0228.
11. Government of Canada, “Canada’s Green Plan,” Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1990, https://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/24604.pdf, 109.
12. A.R. Haynes and J.D. McFarland, “Response to A Framework for Discussion,” 2.
Freyja Chapman