Under the Paris Agreement, a Just Transition is deemed a necessary industrial transformation to ensure a transition to a zero-carbon economy while leaving no one behind. While the Government of Canada undergoes its own consultations on just what a ‘Just Transition’ means, two new reports released this August layout progressive perspectives for a decarbonized economy.

A new report from Unifor entitled Navigating the Road Ahead: Rebuilding Canada’s Powerhouse Auto Sector was launched this August, with the election of the union’s new National President Lana Payne, that lays out recommendations on a way forward for industrial transformation out of production of internal combustion engine vehicles to electric cars. 

Decarbonizing the transportation sector is crucial for climate action to cut emissions, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and ensure that the working-class aren’t taken for a ride every time the oil and gas industry decides on increasing profit margins. While building public transit infrastructure and building new communities around people instead of cars are better pathways to decarbonize transport, for much of Canada that is already built around the automobile, electric cars cannot be ignored.

Unifor shows us what policies and plans are needed for a Just Transition in the automotive industry that secure and create jobs while replacing gas-guzzlers with plug-in electric vehicles. This includes active labour market policies that support skills development and funding for union-run social welfare institutions, re-orienting international ‘fair trade’ policies, and the creation of a new ‘Ministry of Automotive Supply Chain Development’ to oversee this transformation. While a whole government department dedicated to the auto industry may be too narrow in scope to be viable, an auto industry ‘sector’ within a full Ministry of Just Transition should be created for a more comprehensive policy around this economic transformation.

In this Just Transition, however, new emphasis is being placed on resource extraction of so-called ‘critical minerals’ which are identified as necessary raw materials for this industrial shift. Unifor’s report highlights the need to plan around Canada’s endowment of materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite and domestically produce the semiconductors and batteries needed to get more electric cars on the road. The report itself acknowledges that, “it is imperative that government strategists and policymakers understand the perils of this plan without a full and proper acknowledgment of Canada’s repressive colonial past and its obligations to Indigeous Peoples and their land.” Unifor calls for alignment of resource extraction projects with Article 10 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requiring “free, prior, and informed consent” (FPIC) before permitting any mining project.

The Yellowhead Institute's new report Redwashing Extraction: Indigenous Relations at Canada’s Big Five Banks highlights what performative and superficial acknowledgement of FPIC looks like among the extractive investments made by financial institutions.

“Redwashing,” not unlike “greenwashing” is described as the general corporate response to social and legal issues that stem from resource extraction projects that infringe on Indigenous lands and rights by co-opting Reconciliation language and symbolic gestures without substantial changes in the approach to these projects. While employee training in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action may be offered at the Big Five Banks, checklist certifications  are bought signing off on Corporate Social Responsibility, and diversity hirings are attempted, these actions do not truly address the needs of FPIC when it comes to investments in extractive industries.

While this report looks primarily at investments made in the oil and gas industry, there are strong implications with respect to how FPIC is advanced in current mining projects for critical mineral supply chains. In order for banks, and extractive industries in mining, to fully adhere to FPIC and the UN Declaration, they must fully incorporate these principles throughout their organizations. For an industrial transformation to decarbonize based on principles of justice is to be realized, within the critical minerals supply chain governments and corporations need meaningful engagement on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.

While droughts and high temperatures grab headlines, truly implementing FPIC should not be seen as a roadblock to climate action, but instead be seen as an integral part to build trust and smooth relations to reduce transaction costs for a Just Transition. A federal Ministry of Just Transition would be well situated to build relations, convene industry and communities, and ensure that building a green economy also means a fair economy.

Read the full reports from Unifor and the Yellowhead Institute.

As greenhouse gas emissions ramp up, housing prices reach astronomical heights, and we all stay stuck in traffic, Paris Marx’s new book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation looks at how the quest for market share got us to this point and why visions of the future from California tech billionaires cannot solve these problems.

To understand where Silicon Valley’s ideas for the future of passenger transport are coming from, Marx looks to the origins of the automobile, where class dynamics, industrial interests, and state collusion built capitalist economies around the personal combustion engine vehicle. The Ford Model T and early cars were put on streets with a “move fast and break things” ethos that flaunted any laws, regulations, or community consultations. Despite increasing injuries and deaths to pedestrians and passengers caused by increasing speeds and instead of regulating speeds, governments chose to induce demand and build infrastructure and cities around the promise that higher speeds would make life better and that car ownership promoted individual freedom. With strong subsidies, cars were able to overtake public transit in market share despite initial unprofitability. Meanwhile, the working-class who lived on these streets lost previous access to a public good as pedestrians, became isolated on sidewalks, and faced more danger with ever-increasing automotive speeds.

Early dreams of a high-speed future are encapsulated in Marx’s description of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. This envisioned future illustrated speed, limitless interstate expressways, driverless cars, and elevated walkways that would preserve access to the public sphere of the streets without impeding faster speeds. The full promise of this industrial imagination has obviously not played out, but this vision, dreamt up by the wealthy, was sold to policymakers in capitalist countries in the post-war boom. This would lead to the decades-long financial undertaking of constructing mega highways between and across cities, transforming communities and locking-in car dependence. While stuck in gridlock created by a prior industrial dream, Silicon Valley billionaires continue to believe in this ethos to sell technological fantasy as a means of escaping traffic–an ethos that benefits the rich while leaving everyone else behind in the exhaust fumes.

This early coordinated capitalist mode of production rings familiar with the recent news of Uber’s aggressive efforts to dodge regulations and force advantageous policy concessions in cities around the world. To Marx, this news would be familiar to the whole Uber story. Road to Nowhere traces the transformative vision Uber sold on how its technology would change the future of transportation. It certainly has influenced cities today, in the increased gridlock it has produced, the dissolution of unionized taxi industry everywhere, and changes to labour policies that put workers in more precarious positions. Irrationally, Uber’s strategy in its transportation “revolution” has been to kill any alternative to transit with business practices that keep it unprofitable, propped up by cheap liquidity and share prices, with the vision that long-term sustainability comes from consumers left with no choice but to use their apps. Uber’s road to nowhere leaves behind a scorched earth.

Marx also highlights how tech companies aiming to “revolutionize” the future of transport with novelties like driverless or flying cars, tunnels for cars, or sci-fi hyperloops. These are technological roads to nowhere that are a distraction from real alternatives to car dependency. Public relations carpet bombing promising fictional hyperloop technology coming soon, for instance, helped to break any resolve in California to build high-speed rail across the state. These technological visions of the future of transportation, again, come from the perspective of the wealthiest who believe these novelties to be solutions without considering the consequences.

As economies locked in their emissions around car dependency, electric cars today are touted as a new way to maintain the status quo in mobility while cutting greenhouse gasses. But electric cars are not novel–they’ve been around for more than a century. The technological limitation of speed that combustion promised, as well as the state’s organized effort to back fossil fuels, killed the first electric cars by the 1920s. Today, however, Marx argues they are not quite the climate solution promised by people like Elon Musk. Despite billionaire visions of solving the climate crisis through electric cars, they do not see the excesses in resource extraction and production emissions necessary to build the batteries that power them.

Without fully transforming economic and social relations around car dependency, the same inefficiencies will persist and emissions will not be drastically reduced. The proliferation of this old technology, subsidized by governments and still relying on capitalist modes of production will keep cities gridlocked. While countries in Europe and Asia continue to build public transit and choose to rebuild their cities for sustainability at a comparatively feverish pace, North America’s solution to the emissions made by cars is to build more cars. This is not to downplay the need to cut the reliance on the combustion engine, but the literal vehicle to depend on should not be the personal automobile.

These revolutionary dreams offered by Silicon Valley tech execs don’t change the status quo at all, and are primarily innovations that satisfy the rich while the working-class pay more for gas, wait for the bus, and get stuck in traffic. These tech solutions won’t save us. In an ulterior way, these are technological distractions that continue the car-centered economy while delaying or canceling badly needed public goods, such as transit, housing, and environmental protections. “Technology should be built to serve the public, not to shape how they live to increase the power and profits of major corporations,” Marx concludes. As demonstrated with real world technological innovations centered as public goods like mRNA vaccines or the internet, technology built to serve the public has more potential for revolutionizing our socioeconomic relations than apps that eat up market share.

Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published by NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, Passage, and Canadian Dimension among many others. Paris is also a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland and the host of the critical technology podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx is now available from Verso Books.

Watch our full conversation with Paris Marx about Road to Nowhere and the future of climate action and tech, held on August 16, 2022.

Every party’s platform slogan speaks to the future they want you to believe only they can bring you. Liberals say, “Forward. For Everyone”. The NDP are “Ready for Better”. The Greens call on us to “Be Daring”.  Conservatives want to “Secure the Future”. Putting slogans aside, most of us are now deeply aware that securing our future is critically tied to the actions we take to reduce climate change over the next ten years.  At the crux of it lies the fate of the oil and gas sector, and the Conservatives remain in dangerous denial of that fact.

Trying to find a silver lining in the current COVID crisis is not easy, but there is a growing realization around the world that the place to look is in the transition to a greener economy.

Though it’s difficult to measure these things, we may well be witnessing the most widespread rollbacks of environmental protections in Canadian history.

The federal government has just announced a new program to expand loans to struggling non financial corporations – the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility. It’s role  deserves serious debate.

Canada’s corporate bailouts need to cut out tax dodgers and profiteers, and show long-term commitments are attached to the money.

One of the by-products of the global COVID 19 pandemic is that all of a sudden people are paying attention to where things are actually manufactured. On Monday morning April 13, the lead headline on the CBC website was “Canada building its own PPE supply chain…in China”.  As the Toronto Star noted in its April 7, Editorial – “Canada Needs a New Industrial Policy”, when Canada is left scrambling for medical equipment, relying on goods that are manufactured halfway around the world “doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore”.

Many Canadians have, with good reason, embraced the idea of a Green New Deal. Supporters of the idea rightly say that dealing with the global climate crisis cannot be separated from the pursuit of social and economic justice. They emphasize that, with strong government leadership, a rapid transition away from the old carbon economy can generate many good new jobs in areas like renewable energy and energy conservation such that no workers need be left behind.

The movement for a “Green New Deal” has taken off in the US and Canada. The idea takes inspiration from the American post-war economic mobilization and creation of a welfare state. The Green New Deal calls on us to solve the climate crisis and provide economic security, through a big, ambitious, and multifaceted policy approach.