Month: November 2024

Both the COP16 global conference on biodiversity and the COP29 global conference on climate change have seen large numbers of corporate lobbyists working to delay action to protect their profits

Dr. Trevor Hancock

19 November 2024

702 words

It’s global conference season, and once again the corporate sector is spending huge amounts of money – money that comes from us when we purchase their products and services – to lobby for their own special interests. There are two big problems with this.

The first is that corporate interests often do not align with the public interest. Corporations exist to make profits and to return those profits to their shareholders. There are decades, indeed centuries of experience that show us that corporations are more than happy to make money by producing and selling unhealthy or dangerous products, polluting and damaging the environment, exploiting their workers, harming communities and undermining democracy.

The second problem is the dramatic imbalance between corporate power and the power of civil society organisations that are acting in the public interest to protect our wellbeing, our environment, our communities, workers and our democracy. While corporations are immensely wealthy and have large workforces devoted to their lobbying work, civil society organisations are often struggling to raise funds, and depend often on volunteers.

These two problems are highlighted in the recently completed COP16 global conference on biodiversity and the current COP29 global conference on climate change. Both have seen large numbers of corporate lobbyists working, for the most part, to obfuscate discussions and delay action so as to protect their business opportunities and profits.

“Representatives of business and industry groups more than doubled at the UN’s latest biodiversity summit”, according to DeSmog, an international organisation that exposes environmental misinformation campaigns. This increase was proportionally much greater than the 46 percent increase in overall attendance.

Of the 1,261 corporate delegates they counted – and these numbers are an underestimate, DeSmog admits, because its methodology is conservative – the largest number, 124, were from banks. This included “more than half of the 30 banks named as the biggest financiers of deforestation” in an October report from Forests and Finance. That report found that banks have invested $395 billion in deforestation since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

There were also large numbers of delegates from the fossil fuel industry and big food and agriculture firms, as well as from the agrochemical and seed companies and the pharmaceutical industry – the latter intent on avoiding a tax on their use of genetic data from nature; Bayer alone brought 12 delegates, more than some countries. In addition, big tech is showing an interest in biodiversity because of the large data needs for monitoring biodiversity.

To make matters worse, Canada – along with Brazil, Mexico and Switzerland – included corporate representatives and their lobby groups in their national delegation, “lending pesticides and biotechnology representatives direct access to negotiations”, noted DeSmog. Unsurprisingly, environmental NGOs were concerned: In a related article in the Guardian, Oscar Soria, director of the Common Initiative thinktank, observed: “We certainly saw a stronger lobbying push for policies that favour agricultural productivity, and that clashed with the conservation goals and the position of civil society.”

Meanwhile, over in Baku, Azerbaijan, the 29^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change treaty is underway. And surprise, surprise, the fossil fuel industry is there in strength too. The Kick Big Polluters Out coalition reported there are at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists, more than nearly every country and more than “all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.”

Describing fossil fuel advocates as having a “chokehold” on international climate diplomacy, Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, told Canada’s National Observer it’s time to “free COPs from the influence of big polluters”.

Lobbying by the private sector, using our money to lobby against our interests, has to stop. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Canada barred corporate interests from the development of the new Canada Food Guide. It’s time to expand that approach more broadly.

If it can’t be stopped, here is another suggestion that would level the playing field: For every dollar they spend on lobbying, the corporate sector must give one dollar to authentic civil society organisations (not those set up and surreptitiously funded by the corporate sector). In addition, they should fund one delegate from those organisations and one delegate from a low-income country for every delegate they bring.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Trump’s planned changes could increase the likelihood of a global economic downturn, war, worsening overheating, food crisis, pandemics, failed states, mass violence and humanitarian disasters

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 November 2024

699 words

Thanks to tens of millions of Americans who just voted to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare, we now have to deal with the consequences of a second Trump Presidency.

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is not only a fascist who is a threat to democracy in America, as two former Generals – one his Chief of Staff, the other a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and others have said, he is also a thoroughly disgusting human being: Racist, sexist, a convicted felon about to be sentenced, an adjudicated rapist, a convicted libeller, a compulsive liar, a fraudster, a bully – the list goes on and on.

As President, he will “endanger public health and safety and reject evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies” and will “ignore the climate crisis in favor of more pollution”, according to the editors of Scientific American, who for only the second time in their 179-year history endorsed a candidate for President – and it wasn’t Donald Trump.

Trump and his sinister oligarch backers have a plan – Project 2025 – to dismantle key elements of the state, which will be against the best interests of many of those who voted for him. Of particular concern to me, as a public health physician, is the Scientific American editors’ observation that “Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and has “talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.”

To knowingly elect such a person as President beggars belief. That America has succeeded in raising a credulous population who cannot tell lies from truth, fiction from fact, distorted conspiracy theories from reality – or worse, who can differentiate but lack the moral compass to care about that, or about the massive moral failings of Trump – is surely the sign of a deeply flawed and failed state. 

However, beyond those largely domestic concerns that Americans must now deal with, Trump is also a massive threat to the rest of the world, a clear and present danger we all must deal with, as a report from the Cascade Institute published a month before the presidential election made clear.

The Institute, led by Thomas Homer-Dixon at Royal Roads University, “addresses the full range of humanity’s converging environmental, economic, political, technological, and health crises.” Using complex systems science approaches, they seek to anticipate future crises and identify opportunities for intervention.

In their report, Impact 2024, the authors consider the likely impact of a Trump presidency on “today’s highly perturbed global systems.” As a highly unpredictable systems disruptor, Trump as President would “make extreme outcomes more probable”, they concluded.

Specifically, they see a high likelihood of a trade war, a medium to high likelihood of triggering an arms race; a medium likelihood of ‘authoritarian contagion’ – “enabling further corruption and authoritarianism within the United States”, an economic downturn and xenophobia, and a low to medium likelihood of a weakening of multi-lateralism if Trump were to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and other UN agencies.

Moreover, they report, these and other changes triggered by Trump “could then interact to severely escalate the current global polycrisis”, including the possibility of a global economic downturn, a Great Power war, worsening global overheating, a global food crisis, global pandemics, failed states, mass violence and humanitarian disasters.

In an Addendum one week before the election, the Institute wrote, troublingly, that further developments since their original analysis indicated that “our initial analysis generally underestimated the inter-systemic risks of a second Trump presidency.”

The risks we face are already significant, the authors note: “In coming years, humanity’s collective predicament is likely to worsen regardless of the US election’s outcome, because global stresses are rising relentlessly.” Trump’s election just makes things worse, makes things less stable, in a situation where “global systems . . . are already fragile and vulnerable.”

This is not to say all this will come about: “The worst”, the report states, “is far from inevitable.” Much depends on whether, in the face of the polycrisis and the challenges posed by a Trump presidency, “we choose to come together or fall apart.”

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Health Canada and its Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency see industry and its trade secrets as more worthy of protection than the health of Canadians and their environment

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 November 2024

700 words

Over forty years ago, in the early 1980s, I co-led a major report on ‘Our Chemical Society’ for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health. In it we sought to step back from what we called the ‘chemical of the day’ problem – so many chemicals of concern, so many requests to look at them, one by one – to take a broader and more in-depth look at the systemic challenges of living in a society literally perfused with human-made chemicals.

We also raised concerns about the relationship between government regulators and the chemical industry. I vividly recall, on more than one occasion, commenting that Health Canada’s Health Protection Branch should be re-named the Industry Protection Branch, because it seemed more focused on protecting the chemical industry than protecting public health.

What brought this decades-old report back to my mind was the recent exposé by Marc Fawcett-Atkinson in Canada’s National Observer of the unethical shenanigans at Health Canada’s Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA). In a series of articles in recent weeks, and as far back as a year ago, he has documented the agency’s failings, noting that “Since 2020 alone, that agency has been called out for colluding with pesticide companies, attempting to increase pesticide residue limits on food and failing to release data needed to assess pesticide risk.”

Specifically, in an October 17^th article he reported that the PMRA “collaborated with an agrochemical giant to undermine research by a prominent Canadian scientist to stave off an impending ban of a class of pesticides harmful to human brains and sperm and deadly to bees, insects and birds.”

That agrochemical giant was Bayer, which in 2021 had proposed a doubling of the allowable limit of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide, in some food products; a request that the PMRA accepted. But as professors Marc-André Gagnon and Marie-Hélène Bacon noted in a November 2023 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the basis for that decision was shrouded in secrecy, under the guise of confidential business information; clearly it is still the case that Health Canada and its PMRA see industry and its trade secrets as more worthy of protection than the health of Canadians and their environment.  

That was very clear to Parliament’s Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development in its comprehensive report on pesticides in 2000. The Committee stated it was “seriously concerned about the divergent goals of the PMRA” to both promote the agricultural industry and to safeguard health and the environment, noting that “To a certain extent, the PMRA is already a captive of the pesticide industry.”

You would think that might have led to some significant changes – and you would be wrong. Almost quarter of a century later, in June 2023, Bruce Lanphear – a distinguished environmental health scientist at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health – resigned as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the PMRA. In his resignation letter he wrote:

“Should industry representatives – who have a clear and undeniable financial conflict of interest – be allowed to serve on the Pest Management Advisory Council? Absolutely not. . . .  I worry that the Scientific Advisory Committee – and my role as a co-chair – provides a false sense of security that the PMRA is protecting Canadians from toxic pesticides. Based on my experience over the past year, I cannot provide that assurance.”

It seems to me there is something rotten in the state of PMRA. Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg, symptomatic of a far wider problem; the close and unhealthy ties between industries that harm health and the environment and the federal and provincial governments. Whether it be the chemical, plastics, fossil fuel, agriculture or extractive industries, they exert an undue influence over public policy, extracting counter-productive subsidies, tax breaks and other benefits, while hiding behind ‘confidential business information’, and in the process undermining democracy.

At a time when we are crossing six of nine key planetary boundaries, we really need to look at and work to change the way those ties operate. Perhaps it is time for a Senate or Parliamentary inquiry, or at the very least, a complaint to the Integrity Commissioner.  

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy