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 had to deal
with both the supply and the demand side of the equation.


David Roberts:  


Another thing that I think is germane, especially to your case,
is: “demand” is abstract. But fossil fuel supply fights take
place on the ground, in particular places, and pull people in for
a wider variety of reasons. So tell me about a supply fight that
you won. What brings people into it?


Tzeporah Berman: 


I will, but I want to say one thing about places and policies. As
a forest activist, when I first started working in the climate
movement and on climate issues, the thing that I really noticed
is: in the forest and conservation movement, we fight for places.
We campaign about places. The climate movement — especially 15,
20 years ago, when I really started engaging — talks about not
places, but policies.


I'll never forget, at a briefing with this great, brilliant
pollster, Angus McAllister, he said to me, “Why is it that the
climate movement is always trying to sell the airplane ride to
the vacation? Sell the beach! Sell where you're trying to get to!
Not the complicated, annoying journey to get to it.”


I think that's relevant here. I have three university degrees,
and I spent years trying to figure out, what am I for on climate
change? It's like, “no cap-and-trade, no cap-and-trade and
auction, and then is it carbon tax, but from this benchmark date,
and not this.” And we wonder why millions of people are not
getting involved. 


Then when the pipeline, and the coal plant, or even the Heathrow
Airport — when these tangible fights start arising, people can
see them in their backyard, they can see that they're bad. The
problem with climate change for years has been that carbon
emissions are invisible. Oil spills are not. This pipeline, right
now, they're starting to drill under Burnaby Mountain and under
the Fraser River to put this pipeline in. Well, that's very
tangible to people. 


I've been working on pipelines and oil sands issues for a little
more than 10 years, and in that time, I would say we've won
almost every fight. We've either stopped or delayed every single
pipeline that the industry has proposed, other than the existing
pipeline fights, which are Trans Mountain and Line 3.


Enbridge Northern Gateway: dead. Keystone: dead. Energy East:
dead. These pipelines have been stopped because of citizen
action, which delays the project, raises the concerns, and draws
both investor action and government policy action.


David Roberts:


People’s involvement and passion for a particular place,
protecting a particular landscape, is hard to generate for “the
atmosphere,” which is everywhere and nowhere. Do people build
momentum from these fights to go on to bigger things?


Tzeporah Berman:


Oh, entirely. Yes. The momentum builds. But also, what I've
noticed and witnessed is, people go through a personal journey.
The climate movement is growing and diversifying because of these
fights. 


David Roberts:


You think they pull in young people, specifically?


Tzeporah Berman: 


They definitely pull in young people. But what I was thinking of
in the back of my head was indigenous leaders that I have worked
with in Canada, on Northern Gateway for example, who started
these fights because this is a human rights issue. It's issues to
do with their trap lines, their concern for water. As we work
together, as we're having discussions, as they're learning, it's
a journey. Now many of those same leaders are giving some of the
most passionate climate speeches I've ever heard. 


Nebraska farmers that I worked with on Keystone, they started
this because of eminent-domain issues. I watched some of those
individuals become passionate about working on climate change.
Because it's a journey — they start to be introduced to the other
aspects of the issues. It's a mistake that we make in all of our
communications work: we keep talking about the message box and
the narratives. Well, we need a narrative that brings people with
us, and that's what's happened through the site fights.


David Roberts:


This might sound like a weird parallel, but when people talk
about music, lyrics that are very specific — ”Jane broke my heart
at the high school dance” — can resonate in a universal way, even
more universal than if you try to write something more generic
and broad. The specificity of it is a gateway to the universal. I
think of land fights and exploitation fights the same way. Like
the Nebraska farmers: “Oh, this fight is happening all over the
place.” 


Tzeporah Berman: 


Right, and they motivate people, because they're not about
information and data and statistics. Of course there has to be a
foundation of knowledge, but what resonates with people are the
values: this isn't fair, this isn't right that this is happening
to this local community, that they face the dangers or the
cleanup from the oil development, or the toxins. Then there's a
journey around to, “Well, wait a minute, why do these oil and gas
companies get to profit off this when we know that it's killing
us?” — not just at the local site level, but because of the
contribution to climate change. 


What we know from decades of social movement theory and
psychological research is that what motivates people is
triggering values, but also an opportunity to do something.
Education doesn't motivate; opportunity motivates.


David Roberts:


Agency. Having some sense of control.


So what happens when the indigenous people of northern Canada
meet the Nebraska farmers, meet people in the Congo fighting oil
projects — unlike demand fights, which tend to be fought by wonks
and wonky NGOs, these supply fights bring in a really wide
diversity of people. What does it look like when those people
hook up with one another? What’s it like to watch them try to
work things out?


Tzeporah Berman:


It's fascinating. It's joyful. It is also painful. One of the
things I did when I was working predominantly on tar sands and
pipelines is start to bring people together. I realized, whether
you're in Nebraska or northern British Columbia, you're often
fighting the same oil companies, the same pipeline companies —
same strategy, same messaging, struggling with the same or
similar regulatory issues. But they weren’t talking to each
other; the movement wasn't learning from each other. It was very
disparate. 


So I started convening these gatherings, 100 people at a time;
first domestically in the US and Canada, and then eventually
internationally through a network I helped create called the
Global Gas and Oil Network. I have memories of sitting at a
retreat center, watching an indigenous chief from a remote
community engage with a Nebraska farmer, and a union leader, and
then a climate policy wonk from NRDC, and then we've just
finished dinner and they're all getting into the hot tub. I'm
like, “Oh my god, what's gonna happen?”


David Roberts:


You’re over there chewing your fingernails.


Tzeporah Berman:


Some great and fascinating collaborations happened because of
that. We all learned from each other. And there were huge
blowouts!


David Roberts:


The Nebraska farmer is about private property rights; that's
their lens. The indigenous leader is coming at it from a
completely different viewpoint. What is the Venn diagram overlap
where they can work together? It’s so fraught.


Tzeporah Berman: 


Oh yeah. In some ways it was a microcosm of all the debates. We
were fiercely debating which issues are most important, how do
you talk about this issue, who talks about the issue, what are we
asking for, what if the government says yes to this but says no
to this indigenous rights issue? As a movement, we are grappling
with all those questions.


It's almost like we were testing it out before we went public. We
were learning from each other and, quite frankly, unlearning our
own biases, doing the deep work of decolonization and
understanding our own privilege and trying to figure that
out. 


In the process of doing all of that, we reached some pretty
important agreements, which you see in the campaigns over the
last many years: a commitment to step back for a lot of white
folks and help raise indigenous voices and indigenous
perspectives. A commitment to try and find resources for
grassroots groups on the ground, instead of it just being “the
big group” saying what the issues were. All of those things.


I think the movement has strengthened and diversified as a result
of the site fights.


David Roberts:


Do you think there is something like a global movement against
fossil fuel exploitation forming, or possible? As you say, every
site fight is different, every place is different, in many senses
the values that people bring to these things are very different.
What is the connecting thread that might make a global movement?
What would it look like?


Tzeporah Berman:


It’s, what does it look like? Because we are creating it. A whole
bunch of us have been, for the past five or six years,
consciously trying to connect the threads and figure out how to
have global conversations that bring people together; to bring
indigenous groups in the heart of the Amazon into a strategy
conversation around what should we be doing at the United Nations
relative to fossil fuels? What about the subsidies campaigns? How
do we do finance strategies? 


It used to be there were just some environmental groups, maybe
grassroots groups, having these conversations. Now you see more
and more voices coming in, people from different countries
connecting to it through the Global Gas and Oil Network, but also
now through the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative
and campaign that we've been developing. 


We realized we had to stop playing whack-a-mole — this pipeline,
this project in Argentina, this offshore drilling in Norway — and
we had to say, “No.” We had to say, “the science is really clear,
we have to stop fossil fuel expansion.”


This was hard. This was a fight inside the climate movement,
especially with climate policy wonks and philanthropic
foundations. During the Keystone campaign, we had philanthropic
foundations and other NGOs coming to us and saying, you have to
stop this campaign, because it's not a climate campaign. It's
diverting attention from the important climate issues.


David Roberts:


I heard many, many wonks make similar arguments.


Tzeporah Berman: 


That was happening all over the world. What we did is, we found
our peers. A number of us — Steve Kretzmann and Hannah McKinnon
from Oil Change International, myself, a bunch of others — made a
list of the 100 people we knew who are at the forefront of oil
and gas fights around the world, then added to that list a bunch
of academics that we knew were thinking about supply-side policy,
and indigenous leaders. 


At the time, there was a huge battle going on around the Lofoten
offshore drilling in Norway. So we cast about and said, who wants
to host this big strategy retreat? And the groups in Norway did.
So we facilitated a five-day retreat for 100 people in Lofoten,
Norway. That was the beginning of this international network.


That's where we released the Lofoten Declaration, which is the
first global declaration calling for an end to fossil fuel
expansion everywhere, and a global just transition.


In my mind, that's the moment when things changed — when we
started really looking at supply-side pathways and the need for
international cooperation and more work on constraining fossil
fuels.


David Roberts:


That's a great segue into the treaty. It blew my mind a little
bit, when you were first thinking about this and putting it
together — I assumed people were keeping track of fossil fuels in
the world, where they're being dug up, how much, and who's doing
it. But it turns out, not! Can you tell us about the registry
idea, and the state of knowledge about global fossil fuel
production?


Tzeporah Berman: 


We started thinking, OK, so if the scientists and even Mark
Carney [Governor of the Bank of England] is out there saying we
have to keep two-thirds of fossil fuels in the ground, how much
are we currently planning on producing? I also thought it would
be an easy question to answer.


What we now know is, countries are responsible for submitting
emissions data into the UN, and domestically. That's all easy to
find. But if you want to count up today who's producing what
[fossil fuels] and how much, you have to buy the data from Rystad
and Wood Mackenzie. That’s exactly what Oil Change International
has been doing for years, producing its Sky's Limit reports.
That's what Stockholm Environment Institute is doing in producing
the Production Gap report.


Most governments themselves don't even know, or don't have
anywhere that they count up, what's being produced and how much.


David Roberts: 


So these private databases are the only places where that
information exists.


Tzeporah Berman: 


If you dig deep at a national government level, you can find it.
There are great experts out there, like Pete Erickson from
Stockholm Environment Institute and others, who can do this. If
you're an average person — or even, as I've discussed in several
countries, a minister — you can't find it and you don't know
what's being produced.


Intransigent global issues like this — nuclear weapons,
landmines, etc. — the first piece in a global reckoning is
accountability and transparency. In fact, that would be the first
piece at a national level as well. And we don't have transparency
or accountability. We don't even have a comprehensive database of
how much coal, oil, and gas reserves, resources, and production
is happening globally at any given time. It's not even accessible
to decision-makers, let alone publicly accessible. 


That’s the basis of this idea which we're now producing a
prototype for, called the Global Registry of Fossil Fuel
Production: that we can't count up the carbon budget, we can't
assess the potential lock-in of fossil fuel infrastructure and
fossil fuels, if we don't know how much is being produced or
who's producing it. We can't hold anyone accountable on that side
of the ledger.


So the first critical piece in this puzzle was the Production Gap
report that the Stockholm Environment Institute produced with the
United Nation Environment Program, ISD, and others. It's that
report that started crunching the global numbers and said for the
first time that we're currently on track to produce 120 percent
more fossil fuels than the world can ever safely burn under a 1.5
degrees scenario. In fact, we already have enough oil, gas, and
coal, either above ground or under production, to take us past 2
degrees.


So the majority of the world's financial, political, and
intellectual capital at this moment in history is going to
produce three products — oil, gas, and coal — which are
responsible for 80 percent of the emissions trapped in our
atmosphere. Three products which we can't use if we want to have
a stable climate.


David Roberts: 


So you put out this request for proposals on the registry,
because I imagine there's quite a few logistical and technical
issues to work out. What's the state of the registry now? Did
somebody win that? Is somebody out there working on it?


Tzeporah Berman:  


Yeah, they did. What was really exciting is, we had a lot of
submissions from some of the biggest energy agencies and analysts
from around the world. None of them alone could really do it
properly, because it's really hard to do. 


So what we ended up doing is starting negotiations between Global
Energy Monitor and Carbon Tracker Initiative, because they both
harvest data in totally different ways. This needs to be tested:
what you need to do is to scrape data from industry, scrape data
from governments. Originally we thought, oh, it's OK, Rystad and
Wood McKenzie already do this. But we can't use their data — you
have to be very careful, because they’re a company.


I actually think they're probably not very happy with us, because
we're really having a go at their business model here.


David Roberts:


If you succeed in this, it's gonna take a whack off some big
revenue streams for some big companies.


Tzeporah Berman:


Yes. When we launch it, which will be the prototype at COP 26, it
will be the first open-source, comprehensive, detailed database
of coal, oil, and gas reserves, resources, and production
globally, that is both publicly accessible and is starting to
have some buy-in from governments and other major institutions.


It will be quite a sophisticated, but interactive and publicly
accessible, database. And it's on its way, currently being
produced.


David Roberts: 


With some of the poorer fossil fuel producing countries that
maybe don't have governments interested in transparency, is there
any way to enforce this? Is there any data that are off limits,
that you have to fight to get, or is all the data out there
somewhere and this is mostly about gathering it? Like if Congo,
for instance, wanted to hide how much fossil fuel it's producing
or obscure it in some way, could they? 


Tzeporah Berman:  


Considering the majority of oil, for example, is from national
companies: maybe. Honestly, I would have to talk to Carbon
Tracker and Global Energy Monitor and see how they're doing on
that front. But they were pretty confident that with what
industry releases, combined with the data scrapes they're doing
from government, they could provide a pretty significant picture.
And we'll know, with the prototype. It's the first time that
anyone has ever tried to build it and to make it available to the
public.


What we're finding with both the registry and the fossil fuel
treaty is that governments in the global south are pretty
interested in this type of transparency, once we show them the
data that shows that the majority, well over 70 percent, of the
expansion planned for fossil fuels in the next five years is in
the global north. It's in wealthy countries. 


David Roberts:


The very countries that are most vocal about climate change,
right? 


Tzeporah Berman:  


That’s right. In fact, the majority of what is planned globally
on oil and gas is in the US and Canada.


David Roberts: 


Let's talk then about the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Conceptually, where did this idea come from and what's it based
on? What's the necessity for it? What do you want it to do or
say?


Tzeporah Berman:  


The idea emerged from some of those conversations we were having
in Norway and other places. What we realized is that every
country was responding in the same way to this question of, how
do we keep two-thirds of fossil fuels in the ground? Pretty much
every nation-state, whether it was Norway, the UK, Canada, or
Argentina, they were all saying: It’s not our problem. We don't
deal with production, and obviously we couldn't, because then we
wouldn't be competitive, and there would be leakage. If we don't
produce it, someone else will. So these are all the answers of
why they couldn't. 


Yet everyone's saying: we know we have to. Meanwhile, we are
locking in all of this production. And all of this money and time
is going to either fighting these projects or producing these
projects that we can't use. The clock is ticking on
electrification and the infrastructure that we actually need to
be spending money on. 


So we started looking at what we could learn from other big,
intransigent problems like this: the Montreal Protocol, the
landmine treaty, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, nuclear
weapons agreements. The idea started emerging, well, if one
country can't do it alone, if it really is this kind of dilemma
that no one will do it without the other countries, then that's
the point where you need international agreements. That's what
treaties are for. It’s a great analogy, the nuclear weapons
treaty. 


Some academics started studying it. I think the first
peer-reviewed paper to come out proposing a Fossil Fuel
Non-Proliferation Treaty was from Peter Newell and Andrew Simms
out of the UK. They are now on the steering committee of our
initiative. I read their paper and I thought, yes, this is what
we've been talking about for ages.


So I just called them up. I didn't know them yet. We’d been to
some of the same conferences. And I said, Look, let's create an
initiative and a working group and start talking about whether
this is really real, and what we need to learn? What do we need
to study? And we pulled together a group of former diplomats and
academics and activists from around the world and started talking
about it. 


Then that summer, out of the blue pretty much, I won the Climate
Breakthrough award, where they give you $2 million to form global
climate solutions that no one has ever tried before.


David Roberts:


Well that was helpful.


Tzeporah Berman:  


Yeah, good timing — and, you know, no pressure, just solve
climate change.


This is the first time in well over a decade that I've worked on
anything which is commensurate with the scale of the problem.
Sure, it's bold, audacious; and you know what, we need bold,
audacious right now. We're racing against the clock and we keep
not meeting our targets. Every COP, every UN negotiation I've
ever been to or heard about, at the end of every one, there's a
press release that comes out that says, well, we've done this,
but we've failed to address climate change and the world is still
burning.


I just thought, let's try this. And then it took off. I mean,
it's been a little bit over two years since that. It's just taken
off. It's grown so fast. 


Now with the IEA coming out last month with the 1.5 net zero
scenario, acknowledging that if we are trying to meet net zero we
have to stop fossil fuel expansion, we're actually the kid on the
block that for years has been studying how to stop fossil fuel
expansion. We all know that we need to do it now.


There's evidence showing that we need to do it, but I think
everyone is now going to start looking for a pathway to how. Part
of it is finance, the divestment campaigns; a huge part of it is
finance. But again, we can't leave it up to the markets, not just
because the markets are distorted, but because the markets aren't
going to address equity and justice.


The basis of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative
is that we are going to need international cooperation in order
to stop fossil fuel expansion everywhere. And that if we're going
to do it in a way that is equitable, that addresses injustice, we
have to have the hard conversations like debt forgiveness.


I do a lot of work with Ecuadorian indigenous nations in the
Amazon. They're facing new oil drilling entirely to feed
Ecuador's debt. A lot of it is debt-for-oil swaps with China.
There's a number of countries like that: Argentina, Ecuador, many
countries that are starting new fossil fuel expansion not because
they're going to use the products; they're just doing it to feed
their debt. So equity and justice is a huge part of this. 


I think one of the reasons we need a Fossil Fuel
Non-Proliferation Treaty is that some countries, especially
wealthy countries, can put in place policies at a national or
subnational level to constrain fossil fuel expansion. But if we
are going to constrain fossil fuel expansion fast enough, in the
time that we have to support actually moving to zero and beyond,
we're going to need international cooperation. Right now, the
Paris agreement does not provide the mechanisms for the
conversations that we need.


David Roberts:


There are estimates that for some, for example, African
countries, a successful green energy transition would devastate
their oil and gas revenues and hurt their economies. That's a
large chunk of their national income in some cases. So we can be
conscious of equity, and conscious of the disparate effects, but
what would an international treaty or organization do about that,
exactly?


It's the same dilemma Canada or the US has internally: there are
some parts of the US where the economy is extremely dependent on
fossil fuels and would demonstrably be hurt if they went away.
Internationally, it seems like that's even trickier. So what do
you do? What's the solution to that?


Tzeporah Berman:  


Part of what we're doing right now is starting to pull apart,
what are the barriers in the global south, and really starting to
do deep dives and understand the situations in particular
countries. The treaty initiative is made up of organizations from
around the world and we have core partners in each region. So
Power Shift Africa, Third World Network, Asian People Movement on
Debt and Development: these are groups that are now doing deep
analysis and case studies of, for example, in Malaysia, PETRONAS
and its influence. We're also working with Sivan Kartha and Greg
Muttitt, who have written a seminal paper on equity and fossil
fuel production. They basically look at a whole bunch of
countries: What is their GDP? What are their jobs? What is their
dependency right now, and so what are their barriers going to
be? 


So we're doing the analysis, pulling apart the barriers. But what
a treaty would do is, first of all, if countries agreed to the
end of expansion, it provides a roadmap. So right now — it's
really strange and in fact, when I first started looking at this
stuff, I thought I was kind of crazy, because we're all talking
about phasing out fossil fuels and everyone's talking about 100
percent renewable, and so I started doing the research to find
out, what is my country's own plan for production? We don't have
one. We don't actually plan for the production of fossil fuels to
go down.


David Roberts: 


Canada you mean, specifically, or anyone?


Tzeporah Berman: 


Canada specifically, but pretty much any country other than
Denmark, who has now announced no new expansion and planning for
managed ramp-down and phaseout of production. So if you go and
look at the NDCs of what countries file in the Paris agreement
and look at any major producing country — US, UK, Canada — they
are saying we're going to go 100 percent renewable, and they're
saying, we commit to these emissions targets. But they're not
actually saying that their fossil fuel production will go
down. 


And that's because the fossil fuel industry has been working for
decades to try and convince governments that they're going to
separate production from emissions, that we are going to
eventually have the technology competitive at scale (CCS, CCUS
etc.) so that we can keep producing and reduce emissions. I mean,
the evidence doesn't show that, and we've run out of time for
that in a lot of ways. But we don't actually plan right now to
end expansion. 


So the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is designed on the
pillars of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. First of all,
end the expansion. Second of all, manage a global phaseout of
fossil fuel production. The third pillar is, ensure peaceful and
just and equitable transition. Right now we have research,
diplomatic efforts, and discussions going on under each of those
three pillars, and our vision is for a world where vulnerable
communities are offered an alternative pathway. That we actually
planned for this, instead of just leaving it up to the
markets. 


Poor countries will have to be supported by wealthier countries
to transition away from fossil fuels. And right now, in all of
those countries, they're under heavy pressure with capital coming
in still from fossil fuel companies to do more fossil fuel
expansion. And they're under heavy pressure, many of them, to
continue feeding their debt. So it's this really strange
disconnect we have right now in the climate debate, with energy
and infrastructure and fossil fuel discussions are over here, and
climate targets over here.


David Roberts:


I wanted to ask about that last point. Even if you take supply
out of the picture and just look at the traditional discussion
around climate change and traditional treaties, Paris and
everything else: even through that lens, it's clear that if we
don't want them to emit so much that we shoot past our targets,
wealthy countries are going to have to send money to poorer
countries. It's been part of the COP talks forever, always super
contentious. We allegedly set up this Green Climate Fund, but if
you've been following the reporting on that, we're not doing it.
The rich countries are not putting money into that fund.


That’s the part where I look around in vain for signs of
optimism. Because if we're trying to pay them to emit less and to
produce less fossil fuels, that's just a lot of money. It would
be a huge wealth transfer to get that going. 


Tzeporah Berman: 


It is a lot of money. But there's a cascading series of impacts
at the point that a country acknowledges that it's going to stop
fossil fuel expansion. If you are going to stop the production of
fossil fuels, then that also means that the tax breaks and the
subsidies that are going to the fossil fuel industry don't make
sense. The reason they need them right now is their margins are
so small; it costs so much to produce those fossil fuels and to
expand those productions. But for Canada, for example, a fracking
project that has a declining field, it doesn't need a lot of
money in support. It's the infrastructure that is the
issue. 


So that's billions, if not over a trillion dollars. In Canada
alone, it's at least $2.7 billion a year just in direct and
indirect subsidies, and that doesn't even include doing things
like buying a $12 billion pipeline that will likely become a
stranded asset. So there is money. There is quite a lot of money.
And that's just on subsidies, let alone what we're spending in
cleanup — cleanup of both spills, billions of dollars, and
cleanup of liability and dead wells and leaking wells and
methane, and billions of dollars that governments are spending
right now into CCS research and pilot projects around the
world. 


And we haven't even started talking about health costs. We know
from the data that's coming out that fossil fuel development,
especially in the global south, is costing millions, if not
billions in health costs. Because it's toxic. We've always known
that.


Sure, we've benefited from this industry, lots of nice people
work in this industry. Now we know, like nuclear weapons, that
the expansion of it is killing us. That's the parallel, and
that's the beauty of the treaty that we haven't really talked
about, is that the climate movement hasn't had a global demand to
government since well before Paris — except for increased
ambition and complicated things that actually don't mean anything
to the average person. 


David Roberts:  


Higher targets! It's always targets.


Tzeporah Berman:


What does that even mean? And what the Fossil Fuel
Non-Proliferation Treaty does is start to shift the norm around
fossil fuels, because we've all grown up with the idea that
fossil fuels are prosperity. They were keeping the lights on. And
in places like Texas or Alberta, where we see production, it's
also what keeps your hospitals open and your roads paved.


In fact, that's not true anymore, because in both jurisdictions —
and this is a trend in most wealthy countries — they’re spending
more money for fossil fuel production than fossil fuel production
provides to a subnational or to a nation state. Because of the
liability costs, because of the royalties going down, subsidies
going up, etc. We're paying them to extract and pollute now,
that's what's happening. 


David Roberts:


So are people and NGOs and academic organizations endorsing this
or signing on to it? I guess the idea, eventually, is that
countries sign, right?


Tzeporah Berman: 


We decided to start at cities. And the reason we decided to start
at cities is because cities are not as influenced politically by
the fossil fuel industry. Also, historically, that's where
treaties start. Look at nuclear. I'm old enough to remember
driving into a city, there'd be a sign: nuclear-free city. That
was part of the campaign for a nuclear weapons ban.


David Roberts:


And cities are where the left is, where progressive-minded people
live.


Tzeporah Berman: 


It’s taken off like wildfire. We launched the idea of the fossil
fuel treaty at Climate Week, last year in September, and by
October, November, Vancouver became the first city in the world
to unanimously pass a motion to endorse the Fossil Fuel
Non-Proliferation Treaty. And the council and the mayor sent a
letter to Prime Minister Trudeau, asking him to start to work on
the treaty and international cooperation on stopping all fossil
fuel expansion.


Vancouver was followed, less than a month later I think, by
Barcelona. It just goes on and on. There were three cities in
Australia this week, there were two cities in the UK last week,
now LA and Hayward, California; there's a motion already tabled
in New York. 


So the cities work is really taking off, and I keep hearing about
new campaigns that have started. We created a campaign hub that
has all the information that we could produce around what the
treaty is, and now groups around the world are starting to make
it theirs. So I know that Friends of the Earth Sweden is
campaigning in Swedish on the fossil fuel treaty in 17 cities.
Youth groups around the world are taking it up. We now have
COICA, the association of all indigenous nations in the Amazon,
who have endorsed and who are starting to work on the fossil fuel
treaty.


It's really starting to become a movement — 400+ organizations
now endorsing and starting to campaign on the fossil fuel treaty.
It brings together those issues we were talking about at the
beginning; it's tangible. People can say, yeah, I don't want Line
3, but I also don't want drilling in the heart of the Amazon, so
enough already. Let's start focusing on the good stuff, instead
of always focusing on the bad stuff.


David Roberts:  


So who will be the first country? And when?


Tzeporah Berman:  


It's hard to know. I do think it will likely be more vulnerable
nations, because the meetings that I've been in, when you talk to
countries in the global south and show them the data —that the
majority of the new expansion of oil, gas, and coal is in wealthy
countries, and the science of the Production Gap report, and how
we're producing 120 percent more than we can burn — they're
angry. 


Some people say it could take 10 years to get a treaty; we may
never get a treaty. I think the journey matters here. If you look
at other treaties — nuclear waste, nuclear weapons, etc. — the
journey mattered. We're creating a new conversation.


Imagine the point when some vulnerable country stands up on the
UN floor and says, “What do you mean, Norway? I saw it here in
this global registry that you’re about to produce this.” I think
what we're going to start to see is bilateral negotiations on
fossil fuel production, some multilateral agreements on pieces of
it, debt forgiveness, etc., working its way up towards a treaty.
It's already started.


David Roberts:


It's slightly disheartening that so much of the production is in
the US. The US has traditionally not been super jazzed about
international treaties, especially lately.


Tzeporah Berman:  


But that's OK. The TPNW was a nuclear weapons treaty that was led
by non-nuclear-armed states, and it stigmatized and banned
nuclear weapons. It changed the narrative about nuclear weapons,
and every country started being held accountable to what they
were stockpiling and how they were going to reduce it.


It's likely that's how the treaty will emerge here as well, by
marking out a legal pathway, by identifying the barriers,
starting to create political will. Let's not forget that it was
Kamala Harris on the campaign trail that talked about an inverse
OPEC; that's essentially what a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation
Treaty would be. It was Biden that talked publicly during the
debates about needing to phase out oil.


There are tipping point moments in history when the technology,
the finance, the political ideas come together, being pushed by
social movements, and I think on fossil fuels, we're living that
tipping point now.


David Roberts:


The future is so opaque to me these days, but it's not hard to
envision the US becoming a pariah on this, if enough momentum
builds and enough countries sign on. I can't envision the US
signing on, but I can envision it becoming isolated.


I'm trying to imagine, how would we here in the US respond to
that? With grace and generosity? Hmm.


Tzeporah Berman: 


California just became the first subnational in the world with
major fossil fuel development to announce an end date to fracking
and new oil development. That's huge.


That's the beginning of recognizing that constraining and
managing how much fossil fuels we produce, and for how long, is
part of the climate debate. We have to start creating policy
roadmaps for both supply and demand. That's the seed for the
conversation in the US.


Given the immense opposition in Texas and New Mexico to what's
happening in the Permian Basin, and how bad the financial outlook
is in the long term … I don't know.


David Roberts:  


These unpaid-for cleanups are popping up more and more often.
It’s brutal out there on those Texas natural gas fields. That's
going to be billions of dollars. And of course it's not fracking
companies who are going to pay that.


Tzeporah Berman:  


No, it's taxpayers. People are also waking up to the fact that
there are alternatives. I'm starting to see them right here.
Look, there's an electric car, I can see it now. Maybe we don't
have to be using all these fossil fuels. It'd be cheaper if my
house was using better efficiency, and then I didn't need to buy
so much.


David Roberts: 


Maybe I wouldn't have to burn my back fence to stay warm during a
cold snap if we had more renewables.


Tzeporah Berman:  


The solutions clearly are more reliable, even at the moment when
we need them to be more reliable, because they're distributed and
safer and healthier. Again, new data came out this year from the
Harvard study that fossil fuels are killing millions of people
every year because they're toxic.


There's a lot of good reasons to start thinking about fossil
fuels in a different way, and to address that anxiety that we
have: are we going to freeze in the dark? We're not going to
freeze in the dark.


We have enough fossil fuels already above ground or under
production to meet the world's needs while we transition to a
cleaner future. That’s the part we're just starting to
understand. That’s the point where people start getting excited
about what that beach looks like.


David Roberts: 


Let's talk briefly about the beach. You've said before: the
fossil fuel model, in terms of social and economic organization,
is very centralized. It lends itself to concentrations of power,
which of course then lend themselves to graft and bribery and all
the rest, and the little people getting screwed, getting the ass
end of all these cleanups, and not benefiting. I can't tell you
how many stories I've read now about, this North Dakota town
thought they were going to be rich forever … and then fracking
left and now they’re all super poor.


Tzeporah Berman: 


Turns out now their water is poisoned, they have higher cancer
rates, and, yeah, they don't have any more money. 


David Roberts:  


None of the wealth stayed behind. So what's your vision of what
comes next after that, and why is it better? Obviously there’s
not dying of inhaling poison — that's a bonus. But how else do
you see clean energy reshaping some of those social and economic
structures? 


Tzeporah Berman:  


Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, not just the use of
them, but the production of them, changes everything. It changes
the daily lives of millions of people. We're no longer fighting
asthma. We're no longer fighting what should be rare cancers,
which are now massive in downstream communities, especially
communities of color, near refineries, and indigenous communities
who are in the heart of the production in remote areas, from the
Amazon to Canada. 


Having spent a bunch of time in some of those incredibly
visionary communities in the heart of Amazon, and in northern
Alberta, in Canada, where they are saying no to the oil
extraction that is killing their communities — they show me the
fish with lesions, I get introduced to people in their
communities who are dying of cancer. And then they show me the
renewable energy facilities that they're building, and they're so
excited about them. The whole community is working on them, and
they're plugging in their cell phones to their solar panels.
They're doing traditional dances, circling the solar panels in
the Beaver Lake Cree community. In the heart of the Amazon, I
watched a shaman fire up his laptop after he plugged it into his
new solar panel, and the beaming look on his face.


People get to control the power that fuels their daily lives.
They know that it's not going to have the direct health impacts
on them. It's safer, it's cleaner. That’s the thing about a solar
spill: it’s just a sunny day. That's the best image I can leave
you with about what the future looks like.


The work we're doing now on the fossil fuel treaty is, we're not
going to get there just by the local efforts. We're not going to
get there in time to have a planet stable enough where we're not
just dealing with constant disasters. If we're going to do that,
we need international cooperation. That's why we have to call on
our governments to do this.


David Roberts:


Thanks so much for taking the time. 


Tzeporah Berman: 


This has been really fun. Thanks, Dave.


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