Do you know about Overshoot? Enviro-problems explained

Interview with Jon Cooksey, Producer and Writer of HowToBoilAFrog Movie

By Luis Fernando Arce, Chief Interviewer, Arbitrage Magazine

Photograph by SFU Continuing Studies via Flickr

A discussion about various topics, with a main focus on the environment. We talked about five main issues that are affecting our world (Peak Oil, Global Warming, Disparity between Rich and Poor, War on Nature, Overpopulation), and which, according to the movie “HowToBoilAFrog”, are all symptoms of a much bigger systemic problem: Overshooting.

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First off, let’s get a little bit of information on you. You’re from Los Angeles, right?

I’m originally from L.A. yeah….

And apparently you had an extensive career in Hollywood.  So let me ask you what to me is the obvious question, how come you came from Hollywood to Vancouver?

My wife and I were working together at the time and we were brought up here to run a TV show that was shooting in Vancouver.  Originally, we came for just three months but after three months here, we decided that we’d much better like to be up here in Vancouver, so we moved.

You liked the city better?

I liked the city and the country better, notwithstanding a fascist government.

So you guys have worked on television for a long time. You guys even worked on the Rugrats.  Can you comment a little bit on your television career?

Well, my career started by working on a sitcom done by the Family Channel….We came back to L.A., did some freelance, including Rugrats, [which] I thought was a bore. Then we came to Vancouver…We created Whatnot and it was cancelled in 2006. But I knew of other stuff coming up, and by that point the pressure in my psyche had built up to move me to do something about the broader problem, particularly because my daughter was 12 going on 13 at the time. And I felt that the problem was so urgent, that there was no time to wait for her to grow up and find out…So it was up to me, and it was all downhill from there.

Is that why you got into environmentally-themed programming?

Well, I’d been aware of it in a larger way since maybe 1992. We worked on an [environmentally-oriented] episode for the sitcom we had at the time; I had also read Al Gore’s book by then – Earth in the Balance – and had done a bunch of other research, so I found out about Global Warming and that in ’92 the Earth Summit was going on So there was a lot of that going on.  And that stuff never fit with the stuff I was doing. By 2006, Gore brought out Inconvenient Truth, which built on what he’d written 14 years earlier.

By that time you had already won a few awards for your work though, no?

That’s right. TV work. I felt like I had possibly the connections to get people to help me make something – because I’d never made a movie and movies are not my thing.  And I was going to spend a little bit of time and a little bit of money; five years later I spent a lot of money and a lot of time! By then the movie had changed from what I originally intended to make into something very different.

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About the documentary, HowToBoilAFrog

What had you originally envisioned?

Well, I’d gotten to know the guys that use desmobblogs – a website that specifically cites misinformation on Global Warming, and it’s run out of the offices of Jim Hoggan who is a PR guy [Hoggan and Associates] here in Vancouver.  There were some brilliant writers – [among them] Emma Pullman, who’s still there. [Well] I’d gotten to know them and what they were doing: they were doing a sting campaign. The guy Marc Morano, whose now running ClimateDepot.com – he’s the guy who hacked the emails that were released out of context, that whole thing, all that stuff about taking money from the oil companies and the coal companies [and scientific conspiracies]. It was to plant doubt about global warming. So I was going to basically do a smug blog movie:  I was going to do a Satire – that’s where the title came from – basically a satirical handbook for fossil fuel corporations on how to bake the planet.  But the more people I interviewed – in particular Rex Weyler and Anita [M.] Burke – I started to understand they were talking about Systems Theory: about systemic problems. So at that point I realized that global warming was just a symptom of a systemic problem, and that systemic problems were an overshoot, principally driven by overpopulation and overconsumption, amplified by technology.

That is the definition of overshoot, right?

Yeah, overshoot…It still reads at UBC here – U of British Columbia – that working with Mathis Wackernagel actually created the Global Footprint concept. I needed a number. And at the time I think we were 20% into overshoot – we were using 20% more resources than the earth could sustainably provide! Now we are at 50% or more! We are way overcharging the Earth. And that is 6 years later. It jumped from 20% to 30% to 50%. So it’s on an exponential increase, obviously. It’s principally driven by overpopulation and the other main variable is consumption. [pullquote] Obviously, we in the developed world are the consensual drivers, because our consumption is 500 times more than the consumption of the people in Africa. [/pullquote] So all of that was kind of a really new viewpoint to me – I’d never thought about it in that way. And if you look at the wealth of problems, what else are you going to talk about? Well, the oceans are collapsing, and acidifying, and species are going extinct, and we are destroying the food supply, and climate change is killing the wheat fields and blah blah blah…There’s so much shit, and people get overwhelmed and they lose focus. They think this is too confusing; that there is nothing I can possibly do that would change this. And the only way to get around it, in my mind, was to say ‘ok, let’s forget about all those little individual symptoms; let’s talk about the systemic problem of overshoot.’ And I saw things in that light: so then, if that is the problem, what would be a systemic solution?

If overshoot is a systemic problem, why…have I never even heard of the term before? Why do you think that is? That we don’t mention the word ’overshoot’ in the media?

[Laughs] Well, I don’t know, you know. I’d never heard of it until five years ago.  William Catton wrote a book called Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change in 1980, so it’s been around for over 30 years. It’s not a new concept, and I think his ideas were influential with theories about the limits of growth of people, along with Denis Meadows and others. So the concepts are there, and the people that are well aware of the psychology movement were reading William’s book 30 years ago. But I think the news media, even if it weren’t corporately owned, even if the corporations that own the media weren’t trying to prevent them from reporting on deeper systemic issues and just trying to keep us all distracted with the latest shiny objects, the reporters and editors themselves have always been editors who worked in the environmental realm, for instance, who always want the local angle. Because people don’t care…if somewhere in the atmosphere there is x number of parts per million, I care about the ducks sitting down in my stream. So every environmental editor is saying, ‘no don’t give me global warming, give me how it affects the ducks down in the stream.’ And that’s the nature of newspaper reporting in particular.

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So I think it’s safe to say that you don’t think our press is free?

I don’t think it’s free or effective. The deeper problem is that those are systemic issues, partly corporate issues and partly journalism cultural issues. But the deeper problems, which you find if you talk to individual reporters is where it all happens, because somebody has to type on the keys. When you talk to climate scientists and writers, they would read all these facts that they knew which was fine. And I would say, ‘wow, I feel despair now, because I have a 13 year old daughter —  or whatever she was at the time —  and you’re telling me she’s going to have a short miserable life?’ They would nod. Then I would say ‘how do you feel about that?’ And they would say ‘what do you mean?’ And I’d say, ‘you don’t feel anything?’ They’d say, ‘well I have to be objective’, which of course is not an answer. I’d say, ‘are you allowed to talk about this at the dinner table?’, and they would say, if they had families if they weren’t already divorced because of the subject matter that they were studying:  ‘no, I’m not allowed to talk about this at home.’ And there is the problem. They’d been trained culturally not talk about feelings, because then they’d be dismissed as being subjective.  But human beings only pay attention to feelings, not facts. So we have a complete disconnect in the news being reported and the way they are reported from the way people are actually impacted by the things that they hear.

So the media ‘thinslice’ the information they give us. How complacent do you think they are in maintaining the status quo? Or what could be done through the media to alter the status quo? Because you say that the status quo is killing us, right?

Yea…Well I think it’s already happening. I think you are doing it. The internet, as long as the grid holds up, and supplies electrons to keep it alive. The media is spinning, obviously. Anybody in their 30’s doesn’t get the evening news, 10% of people read newspapers, or something like that… [pullquote]The mass media, which is the instrument of corporate control, is becoming irrelevant.[/pullquote] And the problem, of course, is that you go to a website that has a more radical viewpoint or that is reporting what is sometimes hard to tell if it’s polemic or biophysical scientific fact. I’m trying biophysical fact and coming from that. I’m trying to interview scientists so that people would understand the physics, and the laws of thermodynamics and the basics of science, and report from that, as oppose to saying damn the fat rich bastards, because it’s not that effective. The fat rich bastards are just doing what fat rich bastards do. That just exacerbates the problem, but it doesn’t create the problem.

I completely agree with you. But what do you say of the “Science” that is trying to undermine global warming, which apparently is surfacing all over the place? Even the Suzuki foundation is being attacked for its receiving foreign donations, and science…trying to disprove what they are doing is constantly surfacing. What do you make of all that?

If you read books by Naomi Oreskes, for instance, who is a science historian, the history of denial about global warming is key, because that denial started with the smoking industry. The cigarette smoking industry was doing ok. In the ‘50s they had the…actors playing doctors saying three out of four doctors smoke cigarettes so it’s all fine. Then second hand smoking became an issue, and it wasn’t about personal responsibility anymore, it was about affecting others with your cigarette smoke. And there was good science about that. But Philip Morris hired a PR firm…and they…formed the first Astroturf groups – first fake-citizens groups – and they hired scientists, among others a scientist called Fred Singer. And he is a very contrarian man who likes to get attention by saying the opposite of what everyone else says – it boils down to personality. So they get Fred Singer and he came out and said all sorts of things that were lies about how second hand smoke is fine, and thusly created doubt. So they realized that they didn’t have to disprove the science, because they couldn’t, but all they had to do was plant doubt. And when they created these Astroturf groups, it was too obvious that it was just about second hand smoke, because it was Philip Morris. So they introduced other issues, side issues, other scientific issues to plant doubt just to cover it up just so people wouldn’t know that second hand smoke is what they were talking about. And those other issues were things like pesticides and global warming. But what they found was global warming was much more conducive to that argument and it took on a life of its own. So singer went from talking about second hand smoke to talking about global warming, why?? He’s still out there, like 80 years old, has a mouth that has said just about every other thing. And there are other ones now that have joined the man – …but there are a few dozen who are contrarians against the tens of thousands who are not. And most of them are geophysicists, they are not climatologists, and they have some other expertise. And uniformly they are people who are just contrarians – who like to say the opposite of what everybody else says. But again, the goal isn’t science…the goal isn’t to disprove the science, because the science is clear. The goal is to create doubt. If you look like a perfectly normal human being, but I know that once when you were eight you stole playboy magazines, I say ’Fernando is a thieve, and a pervert as far as I can tell’. And you’re ‘like I stole when I was 8 and I gave it back’….and I go, I don’t know about Fernando…I can’t trust him….That’s all you have to do. It’s gone beyond that now. Time Magazine actually wrote an article about bullying, that they are actually physically threatening climate scientists…with the internet and all that stuff, they get death-threats all the time.

What can a regular citizen do – not a movie producer, not someone with any kind of clout, just a regular Joe – what can we do to combat the overwhelming support that comes from corporations and government who support the status quo?

Well that was the question I set out to answer. I did not know the answer to that question, and in creating the second half of the movie I thought well, let me present different examples of systemic solutions that work at an individual level. The first one is boycott, which everybody knows it works by spending your dollars on something else. Second one was to reduce your own consumption where it really matters, like beef, clothing, and stuff like that, but also don’t have more consumers, don’t have more babies, just have one and let the population decline.

How realistic do you think that is? That people will have only one baby?

Well if you talk to parents of kids who are 16 to 25…a lot of young women are deciding they don’t want kids at all; they are looking ahead and saying this world is going to be so fucked up in 2o years that I don’t even want to have a child. I think it’s going to be hard on people’s psyches, because you’ll find out when you hit 30, that something goes off in your head; that you want to find someone especial, and that [you] do want a child, and [you] do want to do what we are biologically engineered to do. And if you introduce a cognitive thought that the future is depressing, and you interrupt that biological imperative, it’s a formula for real psychological problems, so I don’t think we cannot talk about it – we have to talk about it out loud. Nature does what nature does. (19:30 – 19:38: indiscernible)…That psychologically, at the same time, it’s depressing that reproduction is dying – not that there wouldn’t be sex, but it wouldn’t actually be to have children. And I think certain nations, China among them, are just flat out repressing birth, although as the demographic problem gets more acute, young people will support the old people, then you start to get the opposite: you have states and provinces and countries paying people to have more children which is traffic – exactly what you shouldn’t do…

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And there are genuine demographic problems from having the human population decline, but it benefits the huge problems that need to be handled, because having more people is not an answer when you have seven billion of them. So I think people can reduce their consumption. Then there is activism, which becomes important once you’ve reached a certain level of momentum. And then there is the spiritual aspect, which comes somewhere in there; somewhere you have a change of values. You know, I want to spend all my time and money for that cause….whatever it may be…..I want to be more into media, more in nature, do something, stop the government, whatever it may be. You want to take action of some kind, for the greater good and for your own soul. So that happens in there somewhere. And then you go further down the road and realize that the status quo, regardless of greed, is not going to be maintained at this level because the global resources simply are not there to sustain civilization for these many people in trouble. Then you think, well I want to get myself into a community that’s going to be workable, where there will be food and fresh water, where I will have friends, where I can travel, with people I like. That is the transition level: I’m going to change my life into a community that supports the people. The thing that I had found in talking to people – and it’s even true in the movie – is that the question that I was asking myself — “what can I do?” – was the wrong question. The question is “what can we do?” You know, the individual-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-North-American-mythos, is really destructive. It’s the gateway to consumer culture; it’s all about me. And the action that we need to take, and at the scale that we need to take it in, given where global warming is, is a collective action, not individual action.

Yeah, it’s Individualism run amok.

Individually you do have to get over your own psychological barriers that is an individual task. But you do that, as a leader, and then you go out and form a tribe. And that’s the communicable part of my experience. I’m no big Hollywood producer, I never made a movie and don’t ever hope to make another one. But it formed a tribe, just waiting to be asked to help with something meaningful. I was scared of asking people for help. I don’t do that. I don’t ask people for help. I’m shy. I would feel like I’m losing position and….all these reasons why we don’t ask and don’t form a tribe, but when I asked, people were like “absolutely, when can I start?!”

That’s exactly what drew me in so much. At the end, when you were talking to people and saying let’s start trouble, and went to the corporate building, got kicked out, and you were all sitting around a table and visiting families. I got the sense that there are a lot of people that have and feel this, but need a kind of leader to jumpstart the movement.

Exactly. People are just waiting to say which hill do we run up? People just need someone to point to a hill and people will run up that one! And even If you don’t win, which often you won’t because you are against giant corporate interests, you make some friends.

Make trouble, make Noise. I’m telling you, I loved it! It was extremely inspirational. What is green consumption, and why do you consider it hypocritical?

Well if you look at the formula for overshoot – which is essentially population times consumption multiplied by technology – I-pad is the impact = population affluence times technology. The more consumption of anything is ultimately not going to be sustainable. The math does not work. So, can you make things more sustainably? Well, what does ‘more sustainably’ mean, right? Less sustainable, there is not. You can’t die a little. You either die or you’re alive, there are only two places. So the concept is flawed from the beginning, because what you need to do is consume less, which is just the formula [to lower overshoot] – it’s just math. So once you start with a flawed concept, you know, once you admit that you are a whore and we are only negotiating now, then the PR firms are saying, “Great! Because this is clear, so it must be good!”… And once you admit that concept, that “Ok I’m willing to kill the earth a little…”

It’s amazing. We talk about it here all the time. It’s amazing how smart the corporations are, who realize that if they tell you it is green, you will continue to buy it. It’s what you said: it’s telling you, don’t worry, buy it, but you’re killing the earth only a little, and you feel good about it.

Exactly…That should be the new slogan. “You’ll only be killing the Earth a little, not a lot!”

In the video you go from a guy who doesn’t really know much about these issues, to a guy who is very well aware of the effects of these issues on our lives. Is this an accurate representation of your own life?

Yeah, absolutely. I compressed the time line. When I read the stuff in ‘92 originally, I’d never heard of global warming, didn’t really know anything about the ozone hole, biodiversity was a word I’d never heard of. I was seriously uninformed. Then in ‘92 I read to worry that if we had a daughter would she curse me when she grew up? And she was born the next year, and that weighed in my conscience for 13 years. When I started this research, the movie’s subject matter changed, because I am ignorant. A friend – who is in the movie – showed me a poster from an organization which is available online, and it has all the world’s problems in one poster, so I ordered a copy and it was completely overwhelming, because there were so many things on there that I didn’t know anything about!

What’s the poster or the person called?

I’ll see if I can find it…I’ll try to find the link and send it to you…..It was so overwhelming that I just decided to put my finger on something and it landed on peak oil, which I’d never heard of before. So I spent the next six months studying peak oil, went into the abyss, which is the natural reaction to reading about peak oil, completely lost all hope and went into despair, read myself to sleep every night with a long emergency and stuff like that. But the sun kept coming up every morning, so I thought ‘ok, the sun is going to keep coming up – I better do something.’ So I went back into action. And that became the template for what I think the process is. And I think it’s what people are afraid of: they kind of know already, but are afraid to really know because then they’ll be in despair and never come out. But I say to them, I’m an example. Yes, you will go down into the abyss, it is dark down there, you’ll be down there for a while, maybe six months, then you’ll come out, you’ll recover your sense of humour, you will find other people who’ve already gone through the abyss, have a group of people to be with, and be able to go to other people who are afraid to know and say, “look I am Ok!”

For a fun-filled guy you are pretty pessimistic. I say that with the best of intentions, because I know what you mean. It’s kind of like a recovering alcoholic. You have to hit rock bottom before starting recovery.

Exactly. Despair is a feeling, not a reality. It’s a feeling about how things are. Reality is that the world is hopeful; that the sun is shining; that there are hundreds of people around you who are just waiting for you to say, ‘let’s run up that hill!’ It’s at your fingertips! Action and a happy life and joy and meaning are right there to be had! But if we’re afraid to take that first step, for whatever reason, then it doesn’t happen. And the first step is to know: to allow yourself to emotionally process what you know to be the truth, which is: things are not workings as they are.

What is your message for how people can inform themselves, because waiting for the news to tell us is simply not going to cut it, right?

You have to study. There are a million great documentaries on the subject. There are great books by certain authors who are biophysically based – a lot of peak oil people are biophysically based. There is Andrew Weaver, the climatologist up here who just wrote another book on global warming and the state of things. So there are excellent books on transition; Garbage Wars is a great movie; Earth Shift, too. There are all kinds of great stuff out there once you start looking. And the best part is that it’s all interconnected. So just start looking at what you’re interested in and you’ll find your way to other great stuff. There are also great websites, tons of them – www.recurrence.org, among others – all sorts of countercultural news sources, etc. And beyond that, there are great organizations. Just pick something. Pick the people that are doing famine, that are fighting for mass transit in Toronto, go up and join them and swell their ranks. Then you meet and talk to people and get to know others. And they’ll already have done research and will therefore be able to recommend other books and movies, etc…And then you have somebody to talk about it with, which is critically poignant because it’s an emotional process.

In the website, there is a motto that essentially says that if you want to build a revolution you want to seem less dangerous. One way to do so is to be less dangerous, the other is to be funny, you say. What do you think of being militant? Not compromising? Resorting to radical measures? Like Malcolm x said, by any means necessary. What do you think of that?

I think it’s a pattern often repeated, that Martin Luther King would not have been as effective without Malcolm X. The same is true for Ghandi. Ghandi was Ghandi, but there was a Malcolm X, also. And there are people, if nothing else, that derive the powers that be towards the people that are willing to have rational dialogue. But the society without a choice doesn’t have any dialogue at all. So I think there is a place for radical action and, in fact, I think that as with the pipelines here in Canada, nothing less than actually getting in the way of bulldozers is going to work. There is so much money involved, and China is such a powerful force, and China does not have the democratic protections that we have and so on, that only that kind of physical action is going to work, and I think that is the way for the future. Now, I don’t want to see people get hurt or killed, I don’t even want to see people look at the police or the army or other peacekeepers as ‘the other side’; I want people to see them as human beings with families and children. Because the 1% would rather that we all fight among ourselves — and cops are part of the 99%. The First Nations people I work with, there is only 100% for them. It’s only us and the animals and the corporate CEOs and we’re all the same. So there is no fight, there is only a choice with what we are going to do with the Earth….So when they choose to stand up and say, ‘it aint going here, you can do whatever you want, but it’s not going through my land’, there is no fight, it’s just a statement. I’m not against you, I don’t hate you, this is just not happening here. And if everybody in their individual little pieces of ground everywhere said, ‘you can do what you want but it’s not happening here’, then it doesn’t happen anywhere. And I think that’s what it’s going to be: it’s going to be a very local standing up and saying, you can run pipelines through Valdez, Alaska if you want, but not through Vancouver. That’s what we are doing: we are just protecting our little piece of ground. And that’s what it boils down to. Everyone is going to have to protect their own little piece of ground.

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It’s a great message, I love it. Just two more questions, the first can be off the record. Can you give me your opinion about socialism or communism in general?

Well my degree is in economics originally, so we study those theories as economic theories as opposed to political or cultural theories. Socialism became conflated with communism in the US, which is where I grew up, and obviously they are not the same thing. That they both got a dirty word, it doesn’t take only dirty words, which is bizarre, because social security for instance has the word SOCIAL in it, and you know all the remedial reforms are all socialism. [pullquote]So people are like, ‘I hate the government but don’t take away my health care, goddamn it!’ Because they are really all socialists, they just don’t know it.[/pullquote] So, from a cultural standpoint, Socialism makes a lot of sense. In fact…the whole theory of capitalism that we are neurologically selfish has been completely disproven. In fact, our brains are wired for community action and taking care of others….And that’s why capitalism is flawed in its foundation. So socialism does build on an instinct for community and tribalism, which is built into our neurology; but having said that, capitalism and socialism ultimately are, from my perspective, two sides of the same coin. The assumptions are there: you have labour and capital, and if you have land and build a factory on the land and blah blah blah and create results. And results are either, if you are a capitalist it goes to the person that had the idea and if you are a socialist it goes to the people, the workers. All of which is completely flawed, because it leaves out the Earth and Externalities. So, the wealth is not created by cleverness, or by labour or anything; it is created by the use of resources, and those resources are limited. So unless you are taking into account for the fact that the resources are limited and you are going to be truly sustainable, then your economics systems are all wrong. And that’s basically what’s happened. As economic theories, they are equally invalid. So again, that is separate from the cultural aspects: cultural aspects of capitalism are Calvinism, that’s the flaw there, the thought that I’m rich because god loves me, and you’re poor because god hates you and you are a sinner. And that became deeply infused into capitalism, and you are dead by that point and the only way out is revolution…And with socialism it was trying to build on something farther, but of course people being what they are, leaders were human beings, became power hungry, and you ended up with communism and flawed forms of state control. Human beings just don’t fit in the industrial model; that’s what it boils down to, both are industrial models. And you can put people in massive cement apartment blocks and not charge them any rent in the USSR, or leave them out in the street when their mortgages go too high in the United States, but you are still killing their souls, because people don’t fit inside the machine. So that’s the larger vehicle for my reasoning: we got to get out of the machine, its killing our souls, we are not built for it. Anything that gives a patina of legitimacy – any ‘ism’ – is counterproductive, ultimately, from a spiritual standpoint.

What are your opinions of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?

Yeah, I think he is a complex human being. I mean anybody that hates George Bush that much I immediately have affection for. Even getting a picture of him is so difficult because it is a ‘social picture’ in western media, and they demonize so much. He is clearly not a perfect human being, and I’m probably fonder of the guy next door who was a peasant, the president of Bolivia. But, yeah, Chavez, he is certainly trying to hold on to a Latin American identity in face of US Imperialism, which is very difficult. But he is also making deals with China; his wealth comes from the Oronoco, which are worse than the Tar Sands, the East goddamn marriage is absolutely destroying the climate. It’s a mixed bag.

What are your opinions on the XL pipelines? It was rejected, but there are plans for a new pipeline, no?

The Keystone XL was blocked in the U.S. temporarily but will be approved. Obama is just booting it until after the elections, but it will be rubber-stamped at some point. The Embridge Northern Gateway Pipeline is probably dead, just because there is so much First Nations opposition. But both of those are essentially decoys, in my opinion. The real pipeline is the one that already exists, and that’s the Kinder Morgan Pipeline. Kinder and Morgan are two Enron billionaires; the ones who cheated their own investors, Jeffrey Skilling went to jail, you know, those guys. [Indiscernible]…What Enron will tell you is that they bought Terasen Gas here in BC, which owned the Trans-Mountain Pipeline that was done in the ‘50s. They bought the company for a year – which is the required length of time for foreigners to own a company – they kept it for 365 days, flipped the company, [Kinder and Morgan] kept the pipeline. If foreigners buy a Canadian company, they have to hold it for 365 days before selling it. They stopped all maintenance on everything in Terasen Gas; they didn’t spend a dime on it. Then they flipped the company a year later, and kept the pipeline. That was in 2005. And that was happening at exactly the same time that the Gateway project was being funded by taxpayers in B.C. The Gateway project was ostensibly to build more highways and bridges for the poor commuters who had deferred the cost to the planet by moving away from the city. But it had nothing to do with that. The Gateway project was about building infrastructure: new oil from the Tar Sands into the port of Vancouver and then shipped to China, that’s what it would be about. Both things happened at the same time. They were clearly coordinated between the harper government and Campbell government in B.C. The taxpayers paid five billion dollars for the Gateway project to build the infrastructure to move oil, and five years later, Kinder and Morgan just announced that they want to triple the capacity of that pipeline from 300,000 barrels a day to 850,000 barrels a day. It’s almost twice what Keystone is. And that’s the battle, because they already have the right of way. So they’re just building on an existing right of way.

So they just want to expand what’s already there?

They want to take it up to basically a one-million-barrel-tanker going through the port of Vancouver. Just for reference, the Exxon Valdez spill was ¼ of million barrels. Today, it would be a tanker with four times the amount of oil at the port of Vancouver. So that’s what we’re on a battle about…Together with the first nations here, who have the constitutional rights, we are working to just put an end to tanker traffic. Because they can build as many pipelines as they want, they can put it on rails, put it on ox carts, do whatever they want, but if they can’t ship it from the right place, it doesn’t matter.

And that land is owned by the natives there?

The Kinder Morgan pipeline comes through the Westridge Terminal in Burnaby, but the shipping is out of Burrard Inlet, which is the First Nations’ private sailors’ sea. And the Burrard Inlet is the traditional territory of the Tsleil-Wautuh; but behind where the Westridge Terminal is, is all toiletry…then as you come further out into the coast, it’s the Maskah on the south and the Squamish on the north. That they create sands between them, this is the traditional territory, and again it’s never been ceded in any treaty. The city of (47:05 Sitron?) has never been ceded.

What is it that they are basing their projects on? Why do they think they have the right to go and pump the land for oil if it’s never been ceded in treaty? Are there any legal arguments being held?

They think that they can get away with it. That’s in the courts. The government maintains that the First Nations don’t have a veto right. They have a right of consultation, but not a veto right. One of the provincial courts just said, ‘that’s stupid. Consultation doesn’t mean you lost it and then do whatever you want’. Consultation has to be taken into account…the first time a judge has ever said that! So if the courts actually gave the First Nations a veto power over what happens on the land, from a Chinese/Pipeline/Oil Company stand point that would be catastrophic. But they are just rolling ahead because they think they can get away with it.

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ARB Team
Arbitrage Magazine
Business News with BITE.

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