Former Unite head says he felt uncomfortable testifying against his old union and didn’t want to be critical of successor Sharon Graham – but testimony to employment tribunal in discrimination case was still explosive

Len McCluskey did not want to be photographed as he left the WRC in Dublin

Long-time former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey testified to the Irish Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in Dublin today in union legend Brendan Ogle’s discrimination case against the union now run by Sharon Graham. Despite McCluskey’s obvious discomfort having to testify against his old union and his expressed determination not to speak critically of his successor, his testimony was infused with explosive criticism nonetheless. McCluskey was not thrown off course by hostile questioning from the union’s expensive legal team from Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, which has been engaged by Graham and Unite for both the tribunal and Ogle’s separate defamation claim. The adjudicator in the case is former war-crimes prosecutor Elizabeth Spelman.

Unite’s lawyers tried to portray McCluskey’s insistence – that Unite was always going to keep Ogle on full pay if he was able to return to work from treatment for life-threatening cancer, regardless of the duties he was able to carry out – as somehow outlandish. In a bristly cross-examination, McCluskey told the tribunal he was astonished that anyone would contend that it was bizarre not to want someone to be penalised for being ill and that such a matter of basic decency was part of the ‘union’s culture when I was general secretary’.

Sharon Graham has been heavily criticised among union members and activists in the union – and by more than one Irish politician – for Unite’s treatment of Brendan Ogle, one of and perhaps the highest-profile and effective union figures in Ireland. Ogle, who backed Howard Beckett rather than Graham during the last Unite general secretary election, returned from successful cancer treatment expecting to take up his old duties, but was ‘sidelined’ to a lesser position in Dundalk, over fifty miles from his Dublin base. The situation caused such outrage that union members picketed Graham’s long-delayed visit to Dublin, Unite’s Community section condemned it as ‘disgusting’ and a whole sector branch threatened to disaffiliate.

Unite’s lawyers claimed the union’s policy was to ‘red-ring’ the salaries of ill employees for two years only, but McCluskey said that this had not been Unite’s practice when he was in charge. The union’s legal team also tried to claim that Ogle’s position had been created specifically for him, presumably implying that this was some kind of ‘grace and favour’ position, but McCluskey angrily rejected this, pointing to the union’s changes in Ireland during its disaffiliation from the Irish Labour party over the party’s support for austerity, the organisational changes this necessitated, and the extensive approval of Unite’s executive for the need for such a position and for Ogle’s appointment as the most suitable candidate by a distance.

McCluskey told Skwawkbox that he felt very uneasy testifying against the union he and his team had built, but had been forced to do so because Unite had included claims about him in its submissions to the tribunal in the case.

Ogle’s testimony began this afternoon but is expected to continue into tomorrow.

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.

Download: PDF | EPUB

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative.

Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned. In this case, our careful observer is Canadian oil critic Regan Boychuk.

Boychuk lives in Calgary — a prairie city that is famous for two things. Calgary hosts the world’s largest rodeo. And it is the corporate heart of the Canadian oil business. Calgary … home to cowboys and crude-oil CEOs.

As you might guess, our story of media censorship is not about cowboys. Calgary’s main newspaper, the Herald, is staunchly pro-oil. And that means its editorial pages are filled with oilpatch jingoism. However, the rest of the paper is an archetype of neutral reporting.

Just kidding.

Unsurprisingly, the Herald’s pro-oil stance shapes the content that appears in the paper. This post takes a quantitative look at the editorial ‘curation’.

Most of the heavy lifting has been done by Boychuk, who had the brilliant idea to track the reporting of environmental journalist Mike De Souza. Between November 2010 and July 2013, De Souza wrote a series of articles documenting scandals related to the Canadian oilpatch, and its staunch defender, the Harper government.

At the time, De Souza was working for Postmedia, a news conglomerate that operated a wire service for its many subsidiaries. So when De Souza’s pieces were published, they were delivered to local papers like the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.

Here’s the catch. Although owned by the same conglomerate, these local papers had leeway to edit (or shelve) their wire-service articles. The result, Boychuk realized, was a controlled setting to analyze media censorship. Earlier this year, Boychuk published his findings in a piece called ‘Proximity to Power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies’.

My contribution here is mostly visual. I’ve taken Boychuk’s investigation and translated it into charts. The results largely speak for themselves. As De Souza’s articles approached the center of Canadian oil-and-gas power in Calgary, they were increasingly gutted, and their message changed. It’s a fascinating case study of how business interests shape the news.

The geography (and geology) of Canadian oil-industry power

This post is mostly about the myopia of human bickering. But since that’s a depressing topic, let’s start with something more majestic. Let’s frame the ideological landscape of the Canadian oilpatch by looking at the big picture of fossil fuels.

***

Long before humans existed, life on Earth was doing chemical magic, taking energy from the sun and converting it into biomass. In the ancient seas, dead organisms fell to the seabed where they slowly accumulated. Over the eons, the Earth ground and compressed this seafloor biomass until its chemistry changed into the hydrocarbons we call ‘oil’.

In many regions, this oil remained locked under the sea. But in other places, moving continents and changing climates pushed the seabed above water, where it awaited discovery by a scrappy group of primates.

The North American plains are one of these above-ground-waiting-to-be-discovered places.

One hundred million years ago, though, the great plains were not ‘plains’ at all. They were a sea that ran the length of today’s North America, connecting the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. On the seabed, biology and geology did their thing, slowly forming an immense deposit of oil. When the poles later froze and sea levels sank, the whole area rose above land, awaiting primate infestation.

***

It’s here that we return to human myopia. Roughly ten thousand years ago, the great plains were discovered by indigenous peoples. Much later, Europeans conquered the territory, setting up a nation-state called ‘Canada’. In the 20th century, Canadians began to exploit the fossil fuels underfoot, drilling hundreds of thousands of oil wells, building teeming oil-driven cities, and, of course, squabbling about the business of exploiting oil.

Before we focus on this fossil-fuel bickering, though, let’s connect the big picture of geology and geography to the Canadian ideological landscape. Due to quirks of geology, oil formed in the west of North America. But due to quirks of human history, Europeans conquered the continent from the east. As a consequence, eastern centers of power — cities like Toronto and Ottawa — were established long before western oil was discovered. And so these cities never became dominated by the oil business.

The same was not true for the western cities of Edmonton and Calgary. At the turn of the 20th century, both places were rural backwaters — settlements with a few thousand people. But the discovery of oil changed that. By the late 20th century, Edmonton had grown into a sprawling industrial hub for the Canadian oilpatch. And Calgary became the oil business’ corporate epicenter, with a downtown brimming with oil-company headquarters. In short, the politics of both cities became dominated by the oil business.

Pulling together this interplay of geology and geography, Figure 1 shows the big picture of Canadian oilpatch myopia. In Canada’s east sit the cities of Toronto and Ottawa — centers of corporate and government power with no oil to their name. In the west sit Edmonton and Calgary — cities that are geographically in the thick of the Canadian oilpatch, and ideologically under its spell.

Figure 1: The big picture of Canadian oilpatch myopia. Canada’s oil reserves formed millions of years ago under an ancient sea that eventually became North America’s great plains. The result is that today, the western cities of Edmonton and Calgary lie in the thick of the oilpatch, and are ideologically under its spell. Meanwhile, Europeans conquered North American from the east, long before oil was discovered. So that’s where the centers of corporate and government power are located — in Toronto and Ottawa, respectively. (Side note: this map plots data for over 700,000 oil wells, with depth shown in color. Zoom in for a closer view of the individual wells.) [Sources and methods]

Looking at this map of Canada, keep the geography in mind as we turn to the ideologically charged business of publishing the news. We’ll watch Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting get sliced and diced as it leaves Postmedia (headquartered in Toronto) and journeys to papers in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary.

Of course, it’s conceivable that our three papers — the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald — could treat De Souza’s work with an equal hand. But as you’ll see, that’s not what happened.

Environmental reporting during the Harper years

To set the stage for De Souza’s journalism, let’s wind the clock back to 2006. In Canada, it was a year of jarring political change — the moment when neocon politician Stephen Harper became Prime Minister.1 It’s not an exaggeration to say that Harper — a former employee of Imperial Oil and resident of Calgary — ran the country for the benefit of oil companies. As you’d expect, a string of controversies ensued. And De Souza was there to document the political flames, publishing a string of exposés.

In 2014, De Souza left Postmedia, prompting environmental magazine The Narwhal to write a retrospective ranking his twenty most important pieces. Seeing the opportunity to study censorship, muckraking investigator Regan Boychuk took these twenty pieces and tracked down how (or if) they’d been published by the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.

In ‘Proximity to Power’, Boychuk conducted an article-by-article analysis of the censorship. In this post, we’ll leave the specifics of De Souza’s articles behind. Instead, we’ll take a bird’s-eye view of how his reporting was censored as it approached the heart of the Canadian oil business.

Saving space? … Or saving face?

Every day, newspaper editors face a dilemma: far more stories are written than can possibly be published. The result is a kind of constant ‘editorial churn’ in which numerous worthy stories are axed.

Turning to Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting, editorial churn means that for banal, space-saving reasons, some of his stories will inevitably get cut as they journey from paper to paper. But amidst this churn, there could also be politically motivated censorship. So how can we separate this censorship from the non-political churn?

Regan Boychuk has devised a simple solution: we see if the ‘churn’ has a geographic pattern. We watch a sample of De Souza’s reporting leave Postmedia, and then observe how the articles get cut as they travel across the country. When we carry out this exercise, we find that the editorial ‘churn’ has a conspicuous direction.

Figure 2 shows the pattern. As we approach the heart of oil-and-gas power in Calgary, newspapers mysteriously run out of space for De Souza’s reporting. Of the 20 De Souza articles that left Postmedia, the Ottawa Citizen was able to publish 14, the Edmonton Journal had room for 12, while the Calgary Herald had space for only 11. Funny. When the Herald ‘saves space’, it looks a lot like saving the oil business’ face.

Figure 2: Saving space or save face? A geographic pattern to newspapers’ ‘editorial churn’. This figure tracks twenty Mike De Souza articles as they leave Postmedia and travel to subsidiary papers in Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary. Curiously, papers closer to the heart of oil-and-gas power seem to have less space for De Souza’s environmental journalism. [Sources and methods]

Diving shallow

Before we lay charges of ‘censorship’, we should consider some non-incendiary explanations for the pattern in Figure 2.

Here’s a possibility: maybe the Herald opted for depth over breadth. In other words, the Herald might have published fewer of De Souza’s articles because it was saving space for long-form content. If so, then counting words (instead of articles) should remove our geographic trend.

Except that it doesn’t.

Figure 3 shows the pattern. When we count the number of De Souza words published, we again find that the editorial churn has a geographic direction. As we journey to the corporate epicenter of the Canadian oilpatch, newspapers spill less and less ink publishing De Souza’s work.

Figure 3: Diving shallow — a curious case of declining De Souza word counts. As De Souza’s twenty articles travel from Postmedia into the oilpatch (headquartered in Calgary) the total published wordcount declines. [Sources and methods]

Back-page news

Although the case for ‘objectivity’ looks bleak, let’s continue to hand the Herald olive branches. When it comes to De Souza’s work, maybe the Herald is substituting prominence for quantity — making a splash by publishing a few pieces at the front of the paper.

Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true. Not only did the Herald print fewer De Souza articles, it tended to bury these pieces at the back of the paper. Figure 4 runs the numbers.

Looking at the evidence, the contrast between the Citizen and the Herald is stark. In the Citizen, most of De Souza’s pieces were published in the first four pages of the paper. But in the Herald, none of De Souza’s pieces graced the first four pages, and several were placed deep within the paper. In short, if the Herald editors aren’t biased against De Souza’s environmental reporting, they have a funny way of showing it.

Figure 4: Back-page news — the published location of De Souza’s articles. For each newspaper, the ‘violins’ show the distribution of the published location of De Souza’s articles. Black points show the location of individual articles. As we move from the Citizen to the Herald, De Souza’s reporting gets pushed to the back of the paper. [Sources and methods]

Headlines hacked

Forging ahead, perhaps there’s a more creative way to show that the Herald really cares about De Souza’s journalism. Maybe the proof lurks within its headlines.

On that front, let’s turn to Figure 5. Here, each word cloud shows the top dozen (or so) words that appear in the published headlines of De Souza’s articles. If the Herald is trying to preserve De Souza’s message, it has an odd way of showing it. The Herald’s headline vocabulary seems palpably different than the source material from Postmedia.

Figure 5: Hacking De Souza’s headlines. Each word cloud shows the dozen (or so) most-used words in the published headlines of De Souza’s articles. Font size indicates word frequency. [Sources and methods]

Let’s put some numbers to this game of headline hackery. We’ll start with the ten most frequent words used in De Souza’s Postmedia headlines. Then we’ll track the frequency of these words as our headlines journey across the country.

Figure 6 shows the results, which remind me of a bad game of telephone. As De Souza’s headlines move from the Citizen to the Journal to the Herald, the original message gets progressively lost.

Figure 6: A game of De Souza telephone? Tracking headline vocabulary across newspapers. This figure tracks the frequency of the ten words shown in the grey panel. (These words are the most frequent vocabulary in De Souza’s Postmedia headlines.) As we journey to the center of oil-and-gas power in Calgary, these headline words gradually disappear — like a game of telephone gone wrong. [Sources and methods]

Content, creatively curated

So far, the Herald’s editorial churn looks a lot like censorship. But let’s not give up. Perhaps the key to the Herald’s lack of De Souza bias lies in the content of its published articles.

Speaking of content, there’s no substitute for actually reading the different versions of De Souza’s articles and observing how the text changes. If this close reading interests you, head over to ‘The De Souza Files’, where you can browse annotated versions of each published De Souza article.

Here, though, I’m going to skip the close reading and instead, count words. In what follows, I use word frequency to measure how the content of De Souza’s writing varies across papers. The patterns are … not subtle.

Communication clawbacks

Looking at our De Souza content, let’s start with words that describe communication. For some reason, the frequency of these words declines precipitously as we journey into the Canadian oilpatch. Figure 7 shows the pattern.

Figure 7: Communication clawbacks. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, communication words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

So why is the Herald cutting communication content? Here’s my guess. These communication words are associated with the nuts and bolts of good investigative journalism — the part where a journalist describes what people say. If you happen to gut this investigative reporting, a plausible side effect is that you gut the language of communication. In short, the pattern in Figure 7 smells of biased editing.

Glossing over government

Next, let’s look at vocabulary associated with government. Figure 8 shows how this vocabulary varies across the different versions of De Souza’s articles. After a modest surge in the Ottawa Citizen, government language collapses as we head into the oilpatch.

Figure 8: Glossing over government. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, government words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

Given that the Citizen is published in the national capital, it’s understandable that it would have a governmental emphasis. But what’s with the Journal and the Herald? Why would they gut governmental language?

To understand the pattern, recall that our De Souza articles documented a series of scandals involving the Harper government — a regime that was staunchly pro oil. Now, if you happened to publish a pro-Harper, pro-oil newspaper, you might want to dampen news about government scandals. And if you carried out this dampening, you might end up cutting lots of government vocabulary, giving rise to a pattern much like Figure 7.

Hmm … there’s that censorship smell again.

Indigenous exclusion

Speaking of the aroma of censorship, let’s look at Figure 9. Here, I’ve plotted the frequency of words referring to indigenous peoples. For some reason, in the Herald versions of our De Souza articles, this indigenous vocabulary collapses.

Figure 9: Indigenous exclusion. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, indigenous words become less frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

To understand this pattern of indigenous extirpation, it helps to understand the relationship that indigenous peoples have with big oil.

Going back a century, indigenous peoples signed a series of treaties with the Canadian government — treaties that they believed would preserve indigenous land. But by ‘treaty’, the Canadian government mostly meant ‘piece of paper that we will honor until we discover natural resources on you land.’ When the resource boom started, the (hidden) understanding was that different pieces of paper took precedence — the legal documents that leased indigenous lands for corporate exploitation.

Fortunately, the Canadian government has since embarked on a mission of ‘truth and reconciliation’. So there’s no need to worry about the on-going exploitation of indigenous lands, or the censorship of indigenous issues.

What’s that you say? Something about the ‘oilsands’? Well that’s uncomfortable. Yes, there does seem to be a huge land rush to secure exploitation rights to the oilsands. And this massive resource trove does seem to cover a significant swath of treaty land, as Figure 10 illustrates. But I’m sure that oil companies have a harmonious relationship with indigenous groups, with no need for corporate censorship.

Figure 10: A fossil-fuel land rush — oilsands lease agreements on treaty lands. The colored regions show the Alberta territory cover by historic First Nations treaties, signed with the federal government during the late 19th and early 20th century. The black regions indicate land agreements for oilsands extraction, made with the Alberta provincial government. [Sources and methods]

What’s that you say? Indigenous groups have been taking provincial governments to court, challenging oilsands lease agreements … and winning? Well, that does look bad. But I’m sure oil companies are playing fair.

True, this ‘fair play’ sometimes has the air of one-sidedness. For example, it seems that historically, when the Alberta government consulted indigenous groups about oilsands exploitation, it did so on a project-by-project basis. And it seems that this tunnel-vision had the effect of downplaying cumulative impacts, much to the chagrin of First Nations communities.

In this light, it does seem that a pro-oil, pro-corporate paper would have compelling reasons to censor indigenous issues from the reporting of an environmental journalist. So again, the Herald’s behavior has the scent of censorship.

Removing resistance

Continuing with our censorship sniff test, it seems that when the Herald published De Souza’s work, it rescinded words describing resistance. Figure 11 shows the pattern.

Now admittedly, this evidence doesn’t look good. At face value, it seems like the Herald is running a PR machine — a machine that guts language describing anti-oil resistance. Alternatively, the Herald was just chronically short on space, and these resistance words were by chance, the first to go.

Figure 11: Removing resistance. In the Herald versions of De Souza’s articles, words describing ‘resistance’ are noticeably less frequent than in the original pieces. [Sources and methods]

Glorifying growth-speak

So far, we’ve quantified the Herald’s tendency to cut certain themes from De Souza’s writing. While the direct effect of this cutting is to de-emphasize what was gutted, the indirect effect is to emphasize what remains. And what remains, it turns out, is growth-speak.

This is my term for words like ‘income’, ‘jobs’, and ‘profit’ — vocabulary that gets wielded whenever someone wants to justify ecological harm in the name of economic growth. In De Souza’s reporting, growth-speak appears as he seeks comments from various government and industry representatives.

As we head into the oilpatch, hefty chunks of De Souza’s reporting get cut. But for some reason, the language of growth-speak avoids the knife. The result is the trend in Figure 12 — an magical rise of growth-speak on the road to Calgary. It’s as if the Herald edited De Souza’s reporting in a way that emphasized oil-business revenue. Now why would a pro-oil paper, located at the corporate heart of the oipatch, do a thing like that?

Figure 12: Glorifying growth-speak. As we move from Postmedia to the Herald, business growth-speak becomes more frequent in the published versions of De Souza’s articles. [Sources and methods]

Oil-business consent

Looking at the weight of evidence, we get the clear impression that Mike De Souza’s environmental journalism didn’t get a fair shake. As his pieces made the journey into oil country, they were curated in a rather conspicuous way.

Numerous articles were cut. And the ones that did get published were pushed to the back of the paper. Headlines were changed. Text was gutted, de-emphasizing themes of communication, government, indigeneity, and resistance. Meanwhile, as if by magic, the language of growth-speak got emphasized.

In sum, the editorial evidence reeks of censorship.

I doubt that Herman and Chomsky would be surprised. In Manufacturing Consent, they note that since the corporate media is funded by ads, it is beholden to the interests of business.

That said, business capture doesn’t mean that all corporate journalism is heavily censored. Far from it. Topics that offend a niche set of businesses are fair game, so long as that niche is a marginal advertising client. But when that niche becomes the dominant player — like the oil business is in Calgary — the demands of censorship set in.

Thus we get the Calgary Herald’s blatant gutting of Mike De Souza’s environmental reporting. It’s disturbing behavior … if you think that newspapers have a duty to deliver inconvenient truths. But while this duty may be part of newspapers’ journalistic motto, it’s not part of their business model. So in a business sense, the Herald was just doing its job — making sure that journalism didn’t interfere with the more important business of selling oil.

Support this blog

Hi folks. I’m a crowdfunded scientist who shares all of his (painstaking) research for free. If you think my work has value, consider becoming a supporter.

Stay updated

Sign up to get email updates from this blog.

Email Address

Keep me up to date

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. You can use/share it anyway you want, provided you attribute it to me (Blair Fix) and link to Economics from the Top Down.

Sources and methods

The De Souza Files

For the interested reader, I’ve made a webpage (below) where you can browse the published versions of De Souza’s articles.

https://sciencedesk.economicsfromthetopdown.com/data/2023/desouza/home.html

Article position

Here’s how I quantify the page number of De Souza’s articles. In the simple case that the article is published in the A section, the page number is simply the section page number (i.e. A7 = page 7). This covers all but two cases — both of which are in the Herald.

The Herald saw fit to bury two De Souza articles in the D section. To quantify the position of these articles, I used ProQuest data to figure out how many pages were in the A, B and C sections of the relevant Herald issue. Then I summed this page count and added it to the section page number in the D section.

Map data

• Shape files for Canada (Figure 1) and Alberta (Figure 10) are from Statistics Canada and can be downloaded here.
• Shape files for the geological regions of Canada (Figure 1) are from Natural Resources Canada, and can be download here.
• Shape files for Alberta oil wells (Figure 1) are from the Alberta Energy Regulator, and are available here. I used depth and location data for ‘bottom holes’.
• Data for BC oil wells (Figure 1) is from the BC Energy Regulator (formerly the BC Oil and Gas Commission). A list of available data lives here. I used the following datasets:
  • Drilling Data for All Wells in BC [BCOGC-41984]
  • Directional Survey Data [BCOGC-2354]
• Data for Saskatchewan oil wells (Figure 1) is from the Government of Saskatchewan, and can be downloaded here.
• Data for Manitoba oil wells (Figure 1) is from the Government of Manitoba and is available here.
• For oil wells in the Northwest Territories (Figure 1), I couldn’t find data about actual wells. As a substitute, I used data for oil-and-gas rights (i.e. well leases). The data is available here.

Note: In Manitoba and the Northwest territories, I couldn’t find data for oil-well depth. So I assumed a generic depth of 1 km.

• Shape files for First Nations Treaties (Figure 10) are from Global Forest Watch, and can be download here.
• Shape files for oilsands leases are from the Alberta Energy Regulator, and can be downloaded here.

Notes

1. Harper’s ascent was jarring in much the same way as the election of George Bush south of the border. It’s not like the previous governments — the Clinton administration in the US and the Chrétien regime in Canada — were progressive. They weren’t. But they hid their neoliberal zeal below banal centrist rhetoric. Not so with Bush or Harper, who governed with neocon bravado.︎

Further reading

Achbar, M., & Wintonick, P. (1992). Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Li2m3rvsO0I

Boychuk, R. (2023). Proximity to power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies. Capital as Power. https://capitalaspower.com/2023/01/proximity-to-power-the-oilpatch-albertas-major-dailies/

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.

Linnitt, C. (2014). Mike De Souza’s 20 most important articles for Postmedia. The Narwhal. https://thenarwhal.ca/mike-de-souza-s-20-most-important-articles-postmedia/

The post Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.

Newsletter offer

Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive editorial emails from the Byline Times Team.

Sign up

The COP28 agreement has provoked mixed feelings. Some are rejoicing that finally the elephant in the room, ignored for 27 years, has now been made visible. Some are despairing that 28 years of talking has left us with a banal recognition of the obvious.

Both have missed the more critical issue: that the world has crossed a global tipping point in which every country has now woken up to the reality that the age of fossil fuels is drawing to a close. We're walking into a whole new world. And this is a genie that can never be put back into the bottle.

Markets move on the basis of perceptions. The global reverberations of this agreement will impact decisions at all scales – not only among governments and intergovernmental agencies, but among boardrooms, investors, local authorities, business of all sizes, civil society, and beyond.

This COP will be remembered as the one where an energy executive presiding over the seventh-largest oil producer in the world, managed to get Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China, Russia and many other oil-producing detractors on board, however reluctantly, with the recognition that we should “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems”.

Above all, though, we should be wary of some of the loudest voices – such as Al Gore – who have done their best to singularly blame Arab petrostates for an agreement that did not endorse a total phase-out of fossil fuels.

While the latter certainly played their part in watering down the final text, Al Gore carefully shielded the world’s number one petrostate, the United States, from serious scrutiny – the country has the biggest fossil fuel expansion plans of all; and he obscured the fact that the trillions worth of finance needed for the transition was not actually being offered by the Western countries pontificating about a phase-out.

Despite his criticisms, the UAE's COP28 presidency achieved what no previous COP had ever even tried, let alone achieved: it got the Saudis on board with a text endorsing the global move away from fossil fuels. And the latter weren't happy about it: the delegation refused to applaud when COP president Sultan Al Jaber noted this was the first time that language on fossil fuels had ever been mentioned in a global UN climate agreement. Even Russia’s representative commented: “We are not happy but we all agree.”

For 27 years, COP after COP failed to even recognise fossil fuels as the root cause of the climate crisis. Which is why we should not dismiss the significance of this language taking the global stage, against the early opposition of oil-producing nations.

EXCLUSIVE

‘Keeping Carbon in the Ground’ Missed the Point: How COP28 Signals End of Oil

Western hypocrisy nearly scuppered global climate negotiations. But now the direction of travel is clear. Byline Times’ columnist sums up his conclusions after addressing the Dubai summit

Nafeez Ahmed

It prompted the UN climate chief, Simon Stiell, to describe the text as “the beginning of the end” for oil, gas and coal – wording that mirrors what the International Energy Agency concluded in the 2023 World Energy Outlook.

So yes, it's only the beginning, and it's a text that is far from perfect. But it's going to have a seismic impact, because it signals how global consciousness, major institutions, all governments, have signed up to the inescapable vision of the final necessity of a world after oil.

This result is as much a reflection of how slow governments are to catch up with the reality of the current transformation, as it is an amplifier of that transformation.

The naming of fossil fuels on a global scale achieved at this UN climate summit might well seem stupendously obvious to those who are fighting at the coalface of the climate crisis. And I sympathise with that sense of perplexed frustration, that it’s taken this long for the world to formally face up to what we all know.

Yet, now that governments are finally collectively acknowledging the fact that fossil fuels must be made a thing of history, this in itself will trigger markets to move even faster in that direction. Of course, there are critical gaps in the text, not only on key areas around the energy transformation, but around climate finance. We need to work harder than ever to close these gaps.

There is a broader issue that remains poorly understood by world governments.

During the first week of the summit, I had warned heads of state at COP28 that the age of oil is being driven to extinction by unstoppable exponential technology disruptions in energy, transport, food and information.

Those disruptions are undoing the sinews of the global industrial production paradigm, and on track to completely displace them within the next two decades in what I’ve called a ‘global phase shift’ – faster than most believe possible, but still too slow to evade the climate danger zone (experts looking at these confounding disruptions warn that the current pace of change is too slow to avoid breaching the 1.5°C safe limit – we’re currently hurtling closer toward a planet-wrecking 3°C).

But it’s still faster than conventional analysts understand. Consider, for instance, that Sinopec – the world’s largest oil refining, gas and petrochemicals conglomerate, based in China – has brought forward its forecast of the coming peak of Chinese oil demand by two years, concluding it’s already arrived.

So this global transformation cannot be stopped. And even while its scale and pace will continue to surprise, it’s still not happening as comprehensively and at the speed it needs to – most of all, if we fail to understand it and adapt our entire civilisational structures to it, we will face the risk of not just ecological collapse, but also economic and social collapse at multiple scales.

COP28 has taken the first major step over the past three decades to bring foundational clarity on one of the most important components of this transformation: that we are, indeed, in the midst of a great global phase-shift which will see us move beyond fossil fuels, one way or another, before mid-century.

Even Big Oil has hailed the agreement. Is it greenwashing? Probably – but we now have a basis to double-down on why Big Oil itself admits to being a dinosaur.

Is it cause for celebration? Perhaps not, at a time when earth systems continue to collapse at a rate that far exceeds the transition, and when mounting evidence suggests we are on track to breach the 1.5°C safe limit.

But will this agreement help us move faster? I think so.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

PAY ANNUALLY - £39.50 A YEAR

PAY MONTHLY - £3.75 A MONTH

MORE OPTIONS

We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

Perhaps the most important message I tried to deliver at COP28 was that this will not necessarily require painful sacrifices: to the contrary, it will open up new avenues for prosperity within planetary boundaries, allowing us to escape the clutches of outmoded industries which are not just hurting the earth but crumbling under their own weight.

And we can partly accelerate the system changes we need by leveraging market forces to ramp up key technologies in energy, transport, food and beyond, which will help transform the rules and dynamics by which these sectors currently work.

The biggest and most transformational victory, by far, is the global adoption of the 2030 tripling renewable energy goal, which was also specifically endorsed by 130 countries, two-thirds of the world. No COP has ever even contemplated a renewable energy target before.

But COP28 defied sceptics by becoming the first time all governments recognised renewables as the primary vehicle to solving the climate crisis. Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Energy Alliance, rightly called it it “a paradigm shift in the energy transition”.

If implemented, this will accelerate clean energy adoption, slashing costs by half, helping to push past the tripling target, and taking a major chunk out of global fossil demand – in turn accelerating the phase-down and eventual phase-out of fossil fuels.

Change is already exponential in energy: but we’re still only at the beginning of those exponential S-curves, which means it’s not going to slowdown, it’s going to speed up. We have to hit the pedal to the metal by marshalling investments, restructuring regulations, expanding grids, creating new energy ownership and trading rights, and eliminating barriers.

Citizens everywhere now have a basis to pressurise their governments on real delivery, based on having agreed at COP28 that leaving fossil fuels behind while ramping up renewables is necessary, and inviting each other to do so.

But the biggest elephant in the room – the one that left the building – has to be addressed: demanding and expecting a country which has an entire economy is dependent on oil to phase it out, especially a developing one, without offering that country a lifeline and roadmap to phase up a thriving post-carbon energy system is a kind of madness.

We have to do more than righteously demand a phase-out. We have to focus on extending those lifelines and charting those roadmaps to make every country in the world and its citizens say 'this is the future we want’. That means ensuring that the support, the finance, the logistics, the expertise and the technology is available.

Whether it’s at the next COP, or by building new coalitions across nations and regions, we can this use step forward to take the next giant leap into our post-carbon future.

Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist and director at Futures Lab

After eight extensive posts about the Ontario electricity sector, I am expanding my geographic coverage to look at the electricity sectors in selected OECD countries. My focus will be on the historical and relative performance of each country’s sector with respect to decarbonization and prices. As in the case of Ontario, whole volumes could and have been written about each of these countries, and the electricity sector in general, including with respect to current and future reliability and technologies and preferred vs. feasible future decarbonization pathways and other matters. To keep this manageable, my analysis will be a high-level data-driven overview of past and current generation technology mix, sector emissions and prices only, all based on internationally-comparable data from reputable sources. Interested readers should check out my earlier posts and other writing as to why my focus on the question of affordable decarbonization. In this blog I start with Canada, France, Germany and Japan. Future editions will cover additional countries.

I look at data from 1990 to 2019/20 to ensure to ensure I capture trends in the sector, which, because of its capital intensity, tend to be relatively slow-moving. I look at electricity generation mix by country based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data. I present it in seven groups: nuclear, hydro, non-hydro renewables (this includes wind, solar), natural gas, petroleum products, coal products and biomass and waste. To control for aggregate generation changes over time within a country and for country size differences, I present these in percentage terms. But these technologies are just means to an end, which is sector decarbonization – I source sector emissions directly from the respective country National Inventory Reports (NIR) submitted annually to the Secretariat to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC format combines emissions from public electricity and heat, which is the same combined manner that the IEA presents emissions data. Ideally, we would only include public electricity emissions but relative few countries present this on a stand-alone basis. Public heat provision, generally in the form of district heat systems, is generally a few percentage points of public electricity. To control for differences over time and country differences I present sector emissions intensity (kg CO2/MWh). From an accounting perspective, so as to not “double count”, the UNFCCC does not allocate emissions from the generation of electricity from the combustion of biomass to electricity (the Energy Sector), but rather to the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector. For this analysis, given that I am focussing on the electricity sector only, and not the economy as a whole, I include emissions from the generation of electricity from the combustion of biomass to the electricity sector. Lastly, I source household electricity prices from the IEA, which include base prices, plus any consumer-oriented or taxes and specific levies, in USD(PPP)/MWh. After I provide an overview of the countries I present some initial comparative analysis, which I expect to fine tune as I cover more countries in future blogs, including with more sophisticated multivariate regression analysis.

Country Overviews: Canada, France, Germany & Japan

Starting close to home, Figure 1 shows that the technology mix in Canada has been relatively stable over the last 30 years, with a high percentage (ranging between 70% to 80%) of generation coming from zero-emissions technologies (nuclear, hydro and non-hydro renewables). This has resulted in relatively low emissions intensity over the study period, with three phases: a decrease from the displacement of coal by nuclear and hydro from 1990 to 1996; an increase as some nuclear generation went off line from 1996 to 2003; and a steady decline from 2004 to 2019 as nuclear comes back on line and non-hydro renewables are introduced and expand to 6%, which together with gas increasingly displace coal. Household prices increased moderately during almost the entire period, but started to increase in 2015, primarily due to the increase in high-contracted-priced non-hydro renewables in Ontario (see my earlier blogs).

Crossing the Atlantic, Figure 2 shows that the technology mix in France has also been relatively stable over the last 30 years. France has had an even higher percentage (around 90%) of generation coming from zero-emissions technologies, resulting in relatively very low emissions intensity over the study period. Like in Canada, changes in emissions initially relate to the addition/subtraction of zero-emission technologies, but starting in the mid 2000’s there was also substitution away from higher-emitting coal to lower emitting gas. Household prices were stable until about 2009, after which they increased by about 6% per year in the ten years to 2020.

Moving north-east in Europe, Figure 3 shows that the technology mix in Germany has been much more dynamic over the last 30 years. For the period from 1990 to about 2016 Germany had a relatively low percentage (between 30% to 40%) zero-emission generation, resulting in relatively very high emissions intensity. This is specially given the case that its largest emitting generation was coal. Emissions decreased from 1990 to about 1999 as nuclear and hydro increased and gas displaced some coal and then stabilized over the next decade until the large policy-driven decrease in nuclear (in reaction to the Fukushima accident) in 2011 resulted in a large spike in emissions that were not bright back to trend by fast-increasing non-hydro renewables until 2015-16, which by 2020 accounted for 31% of generation. Household prices in Germany were stable until about 2000, after which they increased by more than 8% per year for 13 years to 2013, after which they increased moderately at 1% per year to 2020. As in Ontario, who modeled their Green Energy Act (GEA) on the Energiewende, the increase in prices in Germany are primarily due to the increase in high-contracted-priced non-hydro renewables.

Heading to Asia, Figure 4 shows that the technology mix in Japan has also been relatively dynamic. For the period from 1990 to about 2010 Japan had a relatively low percentage (between 30% to 40%) zero-emission generation, resulting in relatively high emissions intensity. It was lower than Germany, however, because it relied on relatively lower-emitting gas and oil and less on higher-emitting coal. Emissions decreased from 1990 to1999 as nuclear increased and then increased moderately as nuclear decreased slightly until 2010. As a policy matter in reaction to the Fukushima accident in 2011, however, Japan took most of its nuclear generation offline. This decrease resulted in a very large spike in emissions, as zero-emission generation dipped to only 10%. Emissions decreased moderately to 2019 as some nuclear was brought back on line and non-hydro renewables increased to 9% of generation. By 2019 zero-emission generation, at 21% was only half of what Japan had achieved in 1998. Household prices increased moderately until after 2011, when they increased at 4% per year to 2019.

Comparative Analysis and Discussion

Figure 5 shows the emissions intensity for the four countries from 1990 to 2019. It confirms that due to their large legacy zero-emission generation grids of 70%-80% for Canada and 90% for France these are the countries that have already deeply decarbonized their electricity sectors, both hovering around 100 kgCO2/MWh in 2019. After relatively stable but relatively very high emissions for most of the study period, Germany finally broke through the 550 kgCO2/MWh threshold in 2015 and has reduced emissions intensity by 6% since then to reach 420 kgCO2/MWh in 2019. Japan had been unable to make much progress from 350 00 kgCO2/MWh before 2011, after which emissions spiked and have since slowly been reduced to about 400 kgCO2/MW.

Figure 6 plots emissions intensity against the % of zero-emission generation for every year and country in the study. To give a sense of the direction of the movement in this two-dimensional space, I identify years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2019 for each country. The strong negative correlation (downward sloping trendline) confirms the almost linear tradeoff between the amount of zero-emission generation and emissions. The time progression, with the exception of Japan, is from higher emission down and to the right. I am interested in seeing whether this linearity holds for the USA, a country for which much of the decarbonization has been attributed to the switch from higher–emitting coal to lower-emitting gas. Stay tuned for future blogs.

Figure 7 shows household prices for the four countries from 1990 to 2020 and confirms our earlier observation that while all prices have increased after a period of relative stability, the prices in some countries began increasing earlier and faster than in others. Germany is the outlier in this respect, where prices have almost tripled since 1990.

I am interested in exploring affordable decarbonization. From this perspective, both Canada and France had already achieved this by 1990 and so the process of decarbonization, and whether it was affordable, would involve looking further back in time. For Canada that may be 1960s to 1980s when many of current large hydro-electric projects and nuclear generation stations came online to displaced emitting technologies. For France it would be from the mid 1970’s to 1990 when its nuclear fleet displaced fossil technologies. In both cases, however, given that both countries started the period as the two lowest-priced countries in the sample, it is reasonable to assume that the transition was likely affordable, and certainly no less unaffordable than the approaches adopted in Germany and Japan prior to 1990. After that year and specially for Germany from 2000 and the coming into law of the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and the introduction of high-contracted-priced non-hydro renewables, we see very significant price increases to 2015 but no reductions in emissions until that year because, as discussed above, Germany was in parallel reducing nuclear generation.

In these last two figures I start an initial correlation analysis, which I expect to fine tune as I cover more countries in future blogs, including with more sophisticated multivariate regression analysis. In my previous blogs I have discussed studies showing that any increases in electricity prices have been mostly due to the introduction and growth of non-hydro renewables, due to their higher-than market contracted prices and broader integration costs. This is certainly the case in Ontario, Canada and Germany. I am interested if this holds in other countries and what is the likely scale of the impact. I begin with the simple correlation analyses in Figures 9 and 10.

Figures 9 and 10 separate out zero-emission generation into dispatchable nuclear and hydro and intermittent non-hydro renewables and plots them against prices to examine any corresponding correlation. To also provide a sense of the direction of the movement in this two-dimensional space, I identify years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2019 for each country. Figure 9 shows a generally negative (downward sloping) correlation, indicating that nuclear and hydro are correlated with lower prices. Figure 10, on the other hand, shows a generally positive (upward sloping) correlation, indicating that non-hydro renewable are correlated with higher prices. Based on prior studies, we knew that for Canada (via Ontario) and Germany this non-hydro renewables/higher price association had been shown to be stronger, of statistical significance suggesting causation, but it is good to replicate this via a simple correlation analysis. Looking at Figure 9 and 10 together, this correlation also holds for France and to lesser extent Japan. Note to my inner econometrician – there could be some time effect in the last decade or two (for example the introduction of liberalized electricity markets) that could separately be contributing to higher prices and thus could be a confounding variable to the simple non-hydro renewables/higher price association… That statistical question to be resolved down the road once I review a larger number of countries.

Next Steps

I am expecting to be able to cover four other OECD countries in the edition of this series, hopefully to come out in a few weeks, time permitting. I am aiming to include the USA, either Australia or New Zealand, and two countries in Europe.