Fossil Fuel industry actively shaping climate education in Canada: report

A new report has found evidence of a deliberate strategy by the fossil fuel industry to promote industry propaganda and viewpoints to obfuscate responsibility for the causes of climate change.

Anne Keary, co-author of the report, told Canada’s National Observer that 39 companies, 10 industry-related companies, and two industry associations are involved in shaping climate change education, resulting in an education system that, according to the report, “effectively obscured the industry’s role in driving climate change while also limiting public understanding of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.” 

Those findings were published Tuesday. The document, Polluting Education: The Influence of Fossil Fuels on Children’s Education in Canada, was led by For Our Kids, a parent-led advocacy organization on climate change, and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Major fossil fuel players like Suncor Energy, Imperial Oil, TC Energy, FortisBC and more were identified in the report.

“Of course, this is occurring in the absence of government funding and leadership on this issue,” she said. “So this has created an opportunity and a need for third-party providers because climate change education is so poorly resourced.”

Keary said the fossil fuel industry has well-supported third-party providers that pollute climate change education in Canada. Organizations like SEEDS Connections, Canadian Geographic, Inside Education and Let’s Talk Science have all received funding from fossil fuel companies to ensure lessons on climate change include industry viewpoints and confuse students by emphasizing individual responsibility over societal change. 

For example, the report points to examples of what it calls “bias-balanced” approaches to climate change education that promote positive aspects of fossil fuels.“Bias-balanced” is “the idea that all views are important on energy — all views, there's no one view that's more important than another,” Jennifer Chestnut, the other co-author of the report, said. 

Lessons using the “bias balanced” approach include role plays and debates on new developments that contain industry viewpoints and perspectives.

So instead of learning that burning fossil fuels creates more than 75 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, students are “spending time having their view balanced on fossil fuels,” Chestnut added. 

Individual responsibility is also being emphasized in climate change education, often reducing climate action to using less electricity or recycling regularly. Keary said the strategy of placing the burden of climate action on individual responsibility dates back to a BP advertising campaign in the early 2000s. The tactic soon infiltrated schools with the fossil fuel industry sponsoring programs on education materials on how to reduce someone’s carbon footprint individually. Canadian Geographic’s Classroom Energy Diet Challenge — sponsored by Shell and appearing in classrooms with Canadian Geographic branding — was one program that used this approach.

“That same strategy was used by the tobacco industry: ‘It's up to you, the individual, to stop smoking,’ which puts all the responsibility on the individual and enfaces corporate responsibility,” Keary said. “So it’s a tried and true strategy, and it's made its way absolutely into the education system.”

Keary calls it a “partial truth” that individual actions contribute to climate change. However, it is more important to arrive at systemic solutions that support making individual choices easier. In other words, for Keary, investing in transit, bike lanes and renewables will make it easier for individuals to change in a more climate-friendly direction. 

Urgency is another message that is totally absent from resources created by the fossil fuel industry. Messages from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about the need to act quickly to address climate change have been “pushed to the side and suppressed,” Keary said.

The lack of robust climate change education is currently affecting students too, Chestnut said. Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia are the only provinces that have sustainability-related governance documents. Only British Columbia has produced a policy statement on climate change education. Meanwhile, students in Canada spend between one and 10 hours a year on average on climate change education. 

Chestnut, who teaches part-time, constantly encounters students' existential anxiety on climate change. She tells a story of a student approaching her at the photocopier to tell her that she has decided to become a biologist when she grows up to “save as much life as I can.” 

“That's a child holding a lot of worries because the adult world is not providing spaces to discuss, and that's a lot of weight put on children,” Chestnut said.

Other students often voice increased anxiety and fear around climate, particularly seeing events in the news about flooding, ocean levels rising and wildfires, Chestnut said. 

And yet, teachers are often left to their own devices to find resources and learn about climate change, Chestnut said. There is a lack of support from the ministry level to add robust climate into the curriculum, and at the board level, no vetting of climate change sources, she added.

The report calls on the federal and provincial governments to devote more resources to meaningful climate education and for school boards to be more active in screening for greenwashing resources developed by the fossil fuel industry. 

“We're living in the world that [the fossil fuel industry] created, and I don't want to live in the world that they seem to be intent on creating 20 years from now,” Keary said, “So intervening now seems really critical.” 

Matteo Cimellaro / Canada’s National Observer / Local Journalism Initiative