Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash redeye.
Speaker: Podcasts and interviews from that show will be posted the following week. In this episode, Lorraine Chisholm speaks with Nick Gottlieb about the campaign by fossil fuel companies to exploit the war in Iran to push for increased production.
Speaker: As Israel and the U.S. carry out devastating attacks on Iran, the Canadian oil industry and some politicians are seeing it as an opportunity to expand fossil fuels.
Speaker: Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern B.C. He argues the fossil fuel industry is replaying its 2022 war playbook when they used Russia's war in Ukraine to effectively destroy the Western climate movement.
Speaker: Nick Gottlieb's work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today's interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. And we've connected with him today in Terrace. Hello, Nick.
Speaker: Hello. It's good that you could join me today. Let's look at some of the reaction by Canadian politicians following the devastating U.S. s and Israeli attacks on Iran, which has now expanded to Lebanon.
Speaker: Within two days of the news that Iran was closing the Strait of Hormuz, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson made the case for beefing up our fossil fuel industry. What what did he say?
Speaker: So what Hodgson said, um you know, almost immediately, as you said, after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was, quote, what the war absolutely means for our position in the world as an energy and natural resources superpower is we are even more important today than we were before the weekend.
Speaker: In other words, he responded to this illegal and inhumane attack, which included the bombing of a school in Iran and the killing of nearly 200 schoolgirls. He responded to that by saying, this is the perfect opportunity for Canada to start producing and exporting more oil and gas.
Speaker: Now, it isn't surprising that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith would jump in with her fossil fuel backing. How how did she respond? What did she come up with? Yeah, I mean, she she did essentially the same thing. She immediately said that her pet project, you know, the new pipeline to connect the tar sands to the West Coast, is just what's needed in this moment to provide, quote, our trading partners and allies with a stable source of supply.
Speaker: Nick, the federal conservatives are calling for what they are calling an emergency energy supply plan. What's that? Essentially, the the federal conservatives, you know, an an energy crisis like what's happening with the Strait of Hormuz, a disruption to the global energy markets of this scale, means that prices are going to go skyrocketing and consumers are going to be the ones paying for it, essentially. And so what a rational response to this might be from a government would be to pursue policies that ah you know, rein in the profits of oil and gas companies and use that to offset the costs that consumers will pay because of this global disruption. And the Conservatives want to do essentially the opposite of that.
Speaker: They are using this as an opportunity to argue for further deregulation and a radical expansion of Canadian fossil fuel export projects. In other words, exposing Canada more to global markets rather than emphasizing how we can use our own production to insulate ourselves from the effects of this crisis.
Speaker: All this is ah is really bad news when we're trying to fight a climate crisis. You make ah the case that this push on fossil fuel expansion is straight out of the oil industry's Russia-Ukraine 2022 handbook. what What connections are you drawing out there, Nick?
Speaker: Well, you know, i I opened the article with a number of quotes from media in 2022 that sound just like what Tim Hodgson and Daniel Smith and everyone else have been saying over the last two weeks. And and that's what I mean when I say they're they're running this playbook back.
Speaker: They're essentially ah using the war as an opportunity to argue very aggressively to tie sort of the idea of economic stability and security to continuing to expand the oil and gas industry.
Speaker: And in 2022, they did this extremely successfully. in a sense, you know you you quoted in the intro there, I said that they essentially destroyed the Western climate movement with this move. And we've seen that in reflected in policy. We see that reflected in in the transition from Trudeau, who is no no climate champion by any means, but to Carney, who is now you know all in, not just on LNG expansion, but potentially even on continuing to radically grow oil sands production, maybe build new pipelines and so on. And so we've been we've been living in the world that the fossil fuel companies, you know, after they won in 2022, we've been living in this world of extremely weak climate politics in North America in particular, but also in Europe.
Speaker: And so, you know, they they responded to that war by insisting that fossil fuel expansion was the only way to prevent economic shocks like this from happening. And they're responding to the new war in Iran exactly the same way.
Speaker: But the problem, of course, is that it's but it's it's transparent. It's see-through because it's actually precisely our dependence on fossil fuels, both in Canada as exporters, but also as users, that is making us vulnerable to these shocks. If we had learned the right lessons from 2022, instead of being defeated by the fossil fuel industry. If we had ah doubled down on renewable investments and tried to move away from fossil fuels, we wouldn't be feeling new anywhere near the pain that we're feeling it today as a result of this. And so they're trying it again, and it remains to be seen the degree to which we'll be able to prevent our governments from following their lead.
Speaker: But their argument is very transparently wrong at this point. And these were concerted campaigns, right? They were like publicity campaigns, it was media campaigns and so forth.
Speaker: Absolutely. ah a report just came out recently by an advocacy group based in the U.S. ah that's called Clean Creatives. There are sort of like people who work in marketing and public relations who have committed to not work with fossil fuel companies and do research on fossil fuel advertising, that kind of thing.
Speaker: And they identified the 2022 strategy as a marked shift in fossil fuel marketing campaigns. So, you know, prior to that, people might remember Beyond Petroleum, or if that was the rebrand for BP, or Exxon claiming they were going to be growing petroleum projects from algae as sort of a green future. you know and the In the twenty ten s they were they were investing huge amounts of money and in pretending that they were on board with renewable energy and climate action. They obviously weren't, but that was their strategy at the time. In 2022, we saw a remarkable shift where they moved away from that altogether and to this new idea of sort of entrenching the idea that fossil fuel use is permanent and that it's necessary for economic stability and that we're just going to keep burning fossil fuels forever.
Speaker: but that we have to because otherwise we'll have inflation and all these other problems. And so, you know, this this was ah a very marked shift that the Clean Creatives report identified quite clearly and in a lot of their advertising and public relations material. And when I see this happening now, we're seeing it mostly coming from politicians, but we're also seeing it from, you know, the head of TC Energy was just interviewed and the Globe of Mail and said similar things. So we're seeing it sort of, ah it's like a,
Speaker: It's coming at us from every angle and every angle is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and sort of their allies. One of the things I found interesting that you said is that the industry campaign back in 2022 also launched a new form of fossil fueled nationalism in North America. What what do you mean by that? Explain that a bit for us.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this is this is sort of the the move away from talking about renewables, all that stuff, and their greenwashing efforts, and instead towards this idea of security. And so they they sort of tied fossil fuel development. And in in Canada and the U.S., this means oil and gas production, because we're two of the largest producers in the world.
Speaker: They started trying to tie that to not just economic security, but also national security. So there's this idea of energy security, which which is an upside down term, the way it's deployed by our governments, and because They say we need to develop export projects to to develop energy security, but we actually produce enough oil and gas to be self-sufficient. The exports actually undermine that. But you know the the sort of integrity of these narratives is never is never that important.
Speaker: But this is what they did in 2022 is they moved into this sort of like national security, energy security. We're building the nation, that kind of language around fossil fuel development. became much more central in fossil fuel expansion in their marketing. And so that's how we end up with Trump. A big part of his MAGA nationalism is drill baby drill, right? and And then this is also how we end up with Carney proposing all these nation building projects that that aren't high speed rail. They're not an integrated national grid. They're not you know anything that would actually help anyone in Canada. They're export projects for fossil fuels.
Speaker: Well, let's talk for a minute about the mainstream media framing. I'm i'm going to quote from ah a news article that you cite. It's Global News in September 2022, and it has a subtitle, European Energy Crisis Puts Canada in the Hot Seat. And in that article, they say, the devastating impacts of climate change and the dire timelines to control greenhouse gas emissions have long driven efforts to decarbonize and set clean energy transition goals.
Speaker: But Russia's war in Ukraine has put Canada's energy crisis in sharp focus. What kind of framing are you seeing currently in 2026 in the mainstream media? We're arguably four years down the line in the climate crisis.
Speaker: You know, it's eerie to me how much the rhetoric in today's coverage is identical to the rhetoric in some of those quotes that you just cited from 2022. I mean, ah CBC opened an article just a few days ago with the quote, the widening war in the Middle East is driving up natural gas prices in Europe and Asia, highlighting the potential for Canada to play a greater role as a stable global supplier.
Speaker: That's the lead. They didn't even say analysts say or experts say, as they often do for this kind of thing. And this is news coverage. This isn't an opinion. um And so it's it's sort of remarkable. They're using the same words about stability, reliability, and they're just they're just asserting it as though it's fact without any sort of interrogation of of the reality of this situation. And then when they do cite experts inside the articles, the experts are people like Heather Exner Perot, who is an energy analyst for the McDonald-Laurier Institute, which is connected to the Atlas Network, a sort of global far-right organization. And so, you know, they they cite people whose job is to promote fossil fuel expansion, who just say, yes, this means we need to promote fossil fuel expansion. And so this is the story we end up getting from CBC, from other news sources, When in fact, the reality is obviously, first of all, the reality is that we can't expand fossil fuel production because of climate change. This is a disaster in progress.
Speaker: But also that the crisis that's happening right now really isn't a rosy outlook for future expanded production in Canada because higher prices are likely going to drive a lot of countries in Asia away from investing in fossil fuel infrastructure and towards renewables in ways that that will lead to real demand destruction for both oil and LNG.
Speaker: that threaten Canadian exports, especially if we keep expanding them. So that, you know, it's wrong on every level, but that doesn't stop the so-called experts who are on the payroll or the media from reproducing this narrative over and over again.
Speaker: In your opinion, Nick, how should the Canadian left, progressive people, environmentalists, the climate movement respond to this? Yeah, it's ah it's a difficult question because, you know, we did so poorly in 2022 and what we tried then clearly didn't work. There are, you know, the climate movement was already in a fairly weak state after the pandemic um in 2022. And so it was a difficult time to try to organize against this.
Speaker: And I think anti-war politics were also quite complicated I do think anti-war politics today have become a lot clearer for the North American left, in in large part because of the sort of horrors of US and Israeli wars over the last couple of years. And that should should support efforts by the climate movement to try to you know fight against this.
Speaker: I do think a ah very significant thing that the climate movement should be doing in Canada, and increasingly are doing, particularly around the question of LNG exports, is challenging them on sort of economic terms.
Speaker: What I mean by this is challenging the question of whether these are genuinely nation building projects in Kearney's sense or whether they're projects that funnel money predominantly to U.S. billionaires, including many private equity billionaires that are investing in Canadian gas assets who are very close to Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
Speaker: And I think this frame is is really resonating with a lot of Canadians, in particular because of the threats that come from Donald Trump over the last couple of years. And so I think the the climate message is a tricky one these days, but I do think...
Speaker: making it clear how much the fossil fuel industry exists and propagates its messages solely to route money and huge amounts of profits, the windfall profits that they're going to make as a result of this war to shareholders in the United States. That's something that's a winning message that we can really fight to get across and fight to sort of undermine the project that the Carney government is pursuing, which is allowing private equity, finance capital, his allies in his former employer, Goldman Sachs, and places like that, from sort of fleecing Canada and building all these fossil fuel exports and reaping all the profits while the rest of us pay high gas prices and really struggle to make ends meet.
Speaker: Well, it's been really good talking with you, Nick. I really appreciate your joining me. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. I've been speaking with Nick Gottlieb. Nick is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. And his article on this can be found in Canadian Dimension. It is called The Fossil Fuel Industry is Replaying its 2022 War Playbook.
Speaker: war playbook You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
