Author: Milan

Starlink in the Canadian north

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation promises to provide low-latency high-bandwidth internet to anyone on the planet.

In November or so, the company announced a beta release in Canada. Some northern communities are already being connected, notably Pikangikum in northwestern Ontario with the charitable assistance of FSET Information Technology and Service.

With my brother Mica starting to teach at the Chief Jimmy Bruneau School in Behchoko, about 125 km down the highway from Yellowknife, we both wondered whether the satellite internet package might be useful for them.

So far, I have found three explanations for why Starlink isn’t available in the region yet:

  1. SpaceX doesn’t yet have the necessary satellites to support access from that latitude
  2. SpaceX needs ground stations in areas where there will be customers
  3. Starlink needs to negotiate with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) for use of the Ka radio band

I have reached out to bureaucrats and people in ministers’ offices to try to get authoritative information on what the issue is.

This post — based around this map — shows a station in Kaparuk, Alaska. I sent a message to the map’s creator for verification, since I can’t see how satellites going from pole to pole could cover Alaska but not the Canadian territories. This post shows a Starlink ground station in St. John’s Newfoundland.

If you have any relevant information please contact me. If you are also looking into getting a Starlink connection in northern Canada I don’t have any further information for now but I will provide updates when I do.

UVic’s partial divestment

It’s hard to know what the exact count is when you count partial divestments, but UVic has joined the set of Canadian universities acting on fossil fuel divestment by transferring $80 million to a short-term bond meant to reduce the CO2 intensity of their portfolio.

All told they have about $225 million and they have pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of the portfolio by 2030. I don’t know if the carbon intensity of a portfolio is really a meaningful idea (how do you divide responsibility for Boeing’s emissions between shareholders and customers, for instance?). I’m likewise skeptical about targets set beyond when the current leadership will hold power.

The hope with divestment is that universities would be persuaded by the arguments that investing in fossil fuels is unethical and financially dubious. Universities have found many ways to act which fall short of condemning the fossil fuel industry and withdrawing all financial support. These precedents arguable erode the case for action, since they substitute the idea that the fossil fuel industry is uniquely dangerous and unworthy of support with the idea that essentially business-as-usual investment management can somehow deal with the problem of climate change.

A 2021 Canadian federal election?

I am hearing rumours and media speculation about a Canadian federal election this year, and my response to the state of Canadian politics remains weary disappointment blending into anger.

Trudeau and the Liberals are objectively a poor government. If they succeed in their policy preferences, they will be among the villains rightly condemned for the rest of history as knowing climate arsonists who chose to threaten and impoverish humanity indefinitely to protect the short-term profits of their status quo supporters.

The Conservatives would be objectively worse, but they are the other plausible party of government. The NDP might theoretically be better, but I have no confidence in that. If they ever pull off the unprecedented and form a government, it’s not clear to me that fossil fuel abolition and climate change mitigation would be their priorities — especially with some unions supportive of new fossil fuel projects.

People don’t like to believe that they’re governed by incompetents who are making choices that will destroy their societies (and/or pure panderers with little interest in what’s true), so many people I know socially leap to defend Trudeau’s Liberals. Broadly I would say this is indicative of our society-wide denial about how bad the choices we’re making are and how severe the long-term consequences will be. People are psychologically unwilling to believe that, so they conjure instead a fictional but comforting reality where their choices make sense and Trudeau’s nonsense about needing new oil pipeline revenue to abolish fossil fuels is anything but politically expedient incoherence.

Heat pumps

David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air emphasizes heat pumps as a decarbonization tool:

Notice that heat pumps offer a system that can be “better than 100%- efficient.” For example the “best gas” power station, feeding electricity to heat pumps can deliver a combination of 30%-efficient electricity and 80%- efficient heat, a “total efficiency” of 110%. No plain CHP [combined heat and power — where waste heat from energy production is used for heating] system could ever match this performance.

Let me spell this out. Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condensing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas. If you want to heat lots of buildings using natural gas, you could install condensing boilers, which are “90% efficient,” or you could send the same gas to a new gas power station making electricity and install electricity-powered heat pumps in all the buildings; the second solution’s efficiency would be somewhere between 140% and 185%. It’s not necessary to dig big holes in the garden and install underfloor heating to get the benefits of heat pumps; the best air-source heat pumps (which require just a small external box, like an air-conditioner’s) can deliver hot water to normal radiators with a coefficient of performance above 3.

There is also some evidence now that US house owners are sufficiently mindful about long-term energy costs to see their economic advantages reflected in house prices. In Nature Energy Xingchi Shen et al. conclude: “Residences with an air source heat pump enjoy a 4.3–7.1% (or US$10,400–17,000) price premium on average.” (See also)

Some of the usual impediments to environmental retrofits apply here. You generally need to pay for the system up front and then recoup savings over a long period, which means you need to be able to finance it initially. Also, there can be a lack of coordination between renters, landlords, and building owners. Still, technologically heat pumps are promising and we need non-fossil alternatives for building heating and cooling.

Plastic without fossil fuels

Alongside the staggering challenge of replacing the 85% of global energy that currently comes from fossil fuels, humanity must also reckon with how the critical systems which we depend on rely on fossil fuels as inputs. We need to learn to make steel without coal and fertilizer without natural gas.

We also need something aside from fossil fuels as a feedstock for plastics, which are now indispensable in every area of human endeavour from spaceflight to surgery. Research of the sort is taking place. For example, Professor Shu-Hong Yu’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has produced non-petroleum based plastics which are twice as strong and tough as engineering plastics.

Constraining social media use

Alie Ward’s Ologies postcast about gratitude was a reminder of the benefits of in-person activities and the problems which arise from the incentives of social media firms. Like casinos that profit mostly from people mindlessly putting money into slot machines, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are just designed to keep people on and coming back, no matter whether they become misinformed through the process. In response, I changed my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram passwords on December 14th and put them on a card at home to look up if I ever specifically decided to check these platforms. I’ve done so a couple of times since and had the strong impression that I haven’t missed anything.

One reason for using these platforms less is how ongoing social media monitoring is dragging out the completion of my dissertation, since there are always developments and new news on divestment. It’s better to get the thing published than to keep dragging it out with new information, so I am no longer actively monitoring social media.

Secondly, during the time surrounding America’s disastrous election (still a disaster, even though Trump lost) I realized that I don’t need endless amateur commentary on what is going on, and that getting it is needlessly emotionally provocative.

I took Twitter off my phone in 2017 but this is much more complete. In particular, it helps break a cycle of checking social media out of habit, seeing links to outside resources, and then getting caught up with reading them before returning to social media.

I am trying to read more books now, and to hike outside.