{"id":60966,"date":"2021-12-15T18:38:10","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T23:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60966"},"modified":"2021-12-15T18:38:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T23:38:10","slug":"the-big-stall-details-how-neoliberal-think-tanks-blocked-action-on-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60966","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Big Stall\u2019 details how neoliberal think tanks blocked action on climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018The Big Stall\u2019 details how neoliberal think tanks blocked action on climate change<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Donald Gutstein\u2019s well-researched new book is a deep dive into the strategies that Canadian oil companies and their friends have implemented to prevent political action and reverse catastrophe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Bill Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The world\u2019s biggest oil companies knew for years that climate change was real, but they did all they could to derail government action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Donald Gutstein\u2019s latest book,\u00a0The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a deep dive into the strategies that Canadian oil companies and their friends have implemented to prevent political action to slow and reverse catastrophic climate change.<\/p>\n

The author, a former communications professor and co-director of the media-monitoring project\u00a0NewsWatch Canada<\/a>\u00a0at Simon Fraser University, follows the individuals and organizations that have shaped Canada\u2019s energy and environmental policy over the last four decades.<\/p>\n

Gutstein doesn\u2019t neglect the politicians (he devotes a chapter to Alberta NDP leader and just-defeated Premier Rachel Notley), but he spends more time on the players who fly slightly under the public radar or whose impact is felt long after they\u2019ve fallen from view. People like Maurice Strong, appointed the first head of Petro-Canada by Pierre Trudeau and the secretary-general of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, who said in his opening speech that \u201cThere is no fundamental conflict between development and the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That this position, articulated in 1972, could sum up current official Canadian climate change policy, wasn\u2019t inevitable, argues Gutstein. Justin Trudeau\u2019s \u201cclean growth economy\u201d \u2014 a mix of investing in \u2018green\u2019 technologies and \u201cgetting our oil to new markets,\u201d \u2014 can be traced to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018The Big Stall\u2019 details how neoliberal think tanks blocked action on climate change Donald Gutstein\u2019s well-researched new book is a deep dive into the strategies that Canadian oil companies and their friends have implemented to prevent political action and reverse catastrophe. The Bill Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,6],"tags":[103,23456,6996,1729,32309,23457,9550,32310],"class_list":["post-60966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-canada","tag-donald-gutstein","tag-neoliberalism","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-rabble-ca","tag-the-big-stall","tag-think-tanks","tag-yutaka-dirks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60967,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966\/revisions\/60967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}