Volts podcast: treating fossil fuels like nuclear weapons, with Tzeporah Berman

In this episode, longtime activist Tzeporah Berman discusses the need to track and reduce fossil fuel production (not just consumption) and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that she and other activists created to help coordinate those efforts.

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Tzeporah Berman, July 7, 2021

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

For as long as I've been covering climate change, it's been conventional wisdom among economists — and the kind of people who aspire to please economists — that the proper focus of climate policy is on demand. We must reduce demand for fossil fuels, the argument goes, otherwise any supply we shut down will just pop up somewhere else.

Activists have always disagreed with this logic. For many of them, the fight against climate change is a fight for places — specific places, with histories, peoples, and ecosystems — and every fossil fuel project is, in some way or another, an assault on a place. Over the last decade, more economists and policy wonks have come around to their way of thinking, questioning both the economics and the sociology of the demand-focused conventional wisdom. As things stand now, wealthy fossil fuel–producing countries are making grand emission reduction commitments while continuing to ramp up production. All that fossil fuel has to go somewhere. It creates its own set of commitments and investments, its own momentum.

My guest today, Canadian activist Tzeporah Berman, has been fighting for places since grunge and flannel were big. There is no way to do her resume justice in a short intro, or else I would never get to the podcast, but here are some highlights.

In the 1990s, she fought clear-cutting projects with blockades and civil disobedience. In 2000, she co-founded ForestEthics, which uses clever communications campaigns to shame companies into using less old-growth wood.

In 2004, she turned to climate change, founding her own nonprofit advocacy group, PowerUp, to defend BC’s carbon tax; in 2010 she became co-director of Greenpeace International's 40-country climate and energy program, where she led its storied Arctic and Volkswagen campaigns; in 2015, she was appointed to the BC government’s Climate Leadership Team to advise on climate policy; in 2016, she was appointed as co-chair of the Alberta government’s Oil Sands Advisory Group. She also led the effort to secure the Great Bear Rainforest agreement, which protects more than 40 million hectares of old growth forest.

Her activism continues today — she was just arrested in May defending old growth forests on unceded Pacheedaht and Ditidaht Territories on Vancouver Island, BC.

Anyway! In 2019, Berman received the Climate Breakthrough Project Award from a coalition of foundations, which came with $2 million to create “breakthrough global strategies” on climate change. She used the money on a project she’s been thinking about for a while: the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The IPCC is clear: there are already enough fossil fuels in known reserves to blow the world past its 1.5°C temperature limit. Yet fossil fuel production continues to increase.

Fossil fuels have become a threat to all of humanity, as nuclear weapons are, and just as with nuclear weapons, Berman believes we need a global agreement to cap their growth and ramp them down. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is meant to be a template for such an agreement.

Though the treaty is relatively new, it has already been signed by nine cities and subnational governments, more than 480 organizations, and over 12,000 individuals, including a wide array of academics, researchers, and scientists.

I called Berman to hear more about the need to address fossil fuel supply, the motivations behind the treaty, and where it might go in the future.

Tzeporah, welcome to Volts.

Tzeporah Berman:

Thank you. 

David Roberts:

I'm so happy to have you here. It seems like the last time we talked was either a few years ago or 100 years ago.

Tzeporah Berman:  

It definitely feels like a very long time ago, but so does last week. Time is fungible right now.

David Roberts:

Time is meaningless. OK, so I want to talk to you about many things, including the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. But before that, I'd like to just hear a little bit about what pulled you into all of this. You were born into a middle class Jewish family in London, Ontario, and went to school originally for fashion design, yes? 

Tzeporah Berman:  

You’ve been digging far back!

David Roberts:

And you were even lauded, even won some fashion-y awards -- then took a sharp left turn. So what in your youth pulled you toward environmental activism?

Tzeporah Berman:  

Like a lot of my privileged generation, I took a trip to Europe, with a Let’s Go Europe in my hand and a train ticket, in my first year of university, in the summer, and at the time my dream was to go to the Acropolis. I was studying Art and Art History and Fashion Arts Design because I had to have a career and all I wanted to do was art. 

That year, in the late ‘80s, pollution was so bad — in a lot of cities in Europe, but in Athens in particular — that the Acropolis was melting. I can remember hiking up to the top, and this is before all the restoration, and you could just see the pollution on it. It was all crumbling. I looked down on the city, and it was just covered in this yellow haze. I got back to my youth hostel and I remember rubbing my face and leaving a white streak across it and coughing up black goo. 

And I was like, I have got to get out of here. I mean, I'm Canadian, I'm used to a lot of space, a lot of air. And my sister and I, who I was traveling with, we were like, we’ve got to go to nature. We just picked a spot on the map and went to Germany: we're going to hike in the Harz Mountains and drink beer! And we went to the Harz Mountains. I didn't know that most of the Harz Mountains is dead, left standing as a testimony to acid rain. So we get off this train and start hiking through a standing dead forest, not a bird sound, not anything. 

Those two days rocked my world. I remember coming back to Canada and thinking, we are so lucky. And being really scared. I think environmental consciousness is one of those things where there's a new lens and then you can't see anything else. I, at least, went through that phase, and I seem to have never gotten out of it. So I started working on environmental issues, I dropped out of Fashion Arts Design, and I enrolled in Political Science and Environmental Theory and Environmental Studies at university. That was the beginning for me.

David Roberts:

And it's been a long road since. You spend a lot of your time organizing and fighting against forest exploitation, clear cutting, and fossil fuel exploitation. In the climate wonk community, it’s conventional wisdom that the only way to really solve the fossil fuel problem is to go after demand.

If people want fossil fuels, they're going to find them and burn them; if you shut down demand, it doesn't matter if people are supplying fossil fuels, they won't get bought. But if you shut down a supply project, and there still is demand, supply will just pop up elsewhere.

I'm sure you've heard variations on this a kajillion times. Why do you think that's wrong?

Tzeporah Berman:

I think the theory for a long time, now almost 30 years, has been that we're going to constrain demand -- which is happening, obviously: more electric cars, zero emission buildings, zero emission vehicles, etc. -- demand is going to go down, price is going to go up, a higher price on carbon, and the markets are going to constrain supply. That's what I often get from the Canadian government: “We're not responsible for who produces or how much fossil fuels are produced, we're just responsible for emissions.” And the thing about that market theory around demand is that it's not working. I mean, it's not working fast enough to keep us safe, that much is clear. 

I still actually kind of like it as a theory, but the fact is that there are two big problems with it. One is that the markets are completely distorted by fossil fuel subsidies and now by governments out-and-out buying projects that the industry runs away from. So renewables are cheap, cheaper than fossil fuels in a lot of places now; oil and gas companies are operating at the bottom of the SMP, more bankruptcies in that sector than any other; but these projects are still surviving.

Like the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada: it's surviving because investors ran away from it and the government bought it for $12 billion. That's because of the political influence of the fossil fuel industry, and because governments are only just starting to really grapple with the fact that they're going to actually need to deal with supply as well as demand. The fact is, there are very few issues, if any — intransigent issues, where governments have had to step in — that we haven't ha