Author: Milan

Open thread: faith groups and climate politics

There are several reasons to be interested in the climate politics of faith groups. Some progressive ones like the United Church of Canada and the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have taken meaningful action by divesting. The pope’s Laudato Si encyclical may have an impact on billions around the world.

Faith groups becoming champions of a stable climate could have the potential to shift the character of the climate change debate, which is presently mostly about progressives calling for strong action (usually coupled with a social justice and redistribution agenda) and conservatives either denying that there is a problem or finding a justification to take no action. If the arguments of climate scientists can be legitimized by faith communities which conservatives care about, we might start to see progress toward a pan-ideological consensus on climate action.

One story today that reminded me of this: Why Four Christian Activists Risked Arrest to Shut Down an oil Pipeline

The Teck Frontier mine

Not only is the Trudeau government calling into question its seriousness about decarbonization by allowing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, they are considering allowing Teck to build another open-pit bitumen sands mine which will produce 6 million tonnes of CO2 per year in its operations and far more when the fuel it produces is burned.

Every Canadian government must live in fear of being the ones in power when the markets and Canadians finally realize that developing the bitumen sands has been a mistake and the industry has no future. Since every government wants to avoid the blame when that happens, they each do what they can to maintain the illusion of a future for the industry which will justify the tens of billions that have been invested. In so doing, they inadvertently tell Canadians and the world that they are willing to create a permanently destabilized global climate in exchange for as many more years of oil profits as they can get away with.

Concordia and UBC commit to full divestment

It complicates the process of completing my PhD dissertation, but there has been highly encouraging movement from administrations targeted by fossil fuel divestment campaigns. While McGill has again said no, Concordia and UBC have pledged to go beyond their prior partial commitments and entirely divest from fossil fuels:

The movement has generally had a hard time in Canada, perhaps because of the size and influence of the fossil fuel industry.

I’m working this week on finishing my NVivo coding of interviews, then moving on next week to finishing the literature review. Spending the rest of the month working on a finalized and complete manuscript, I will need to make sure to mention new developments without expressing false confidence about my ability to explain something which happened so recently and which I don’t have independent data about.

The Ford government’s climate change efforts

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysysk’s 2019 report says that the Ontario government’s proposed climate policies are insufficient to meet their (inadequate) target for reducing greenhouse gas pollution:

The province estimates that its new approach will still meet federal reduction targets of 30 per cent below 2005 emission levels, or the equivalent of 17.6 megatonnes by 2030.

But that estimate is based on an older forecast that accounted for initiatives around electricity conservation, renewable energy and cap-and-trade — programs that have all been cancelled by the Ford government.

Lysyk estimates the new plan will only reduce emissions by between 6.3 and 13 megatonnes by 2030.

Page 147 of the report says:

Emissions Estimates Underlying Plan Not Supported by Sound Evidence

The Plan projects that Ontario’s greenhouse gas emissions will be 160.9 Mt in 2030 if no further climate initiatives are taken. To reduce Ontario’s emissions by 17.6 Mt to meet the 2030 target, the Plan outlines eight areas where the Ministry expects emissions reductions to occur. We reviewed the evidence and assumptions the Ministry used to estimate the emissions projected for 2030, as well as the reductions for each area. Based on our review, several of the estimates are not supported by sound evidence. Our assessment of the assumptions and double counting of initiatives found that the Plan overestimates the emissions reductions expected. Overall, our analysis found that the initiatives in the Plan have the potential to achieve between 6.3 Mt to 13.0 Mt of the 17.6 Mt emission-reduction goal.

This reinforces how many Canadian provincial and federal governments see climate change as a public relations issue: an area of criticism where they need a rhetorical answer to manage the level of criticism they get in the press.

Macintyre on the value of espionage

Spies tend to make extravagant claims for their craft, but the reality of espionage is that it frequently makes little lasting difference. Politicians treasure classified information because it is secret, which does not necessarily render it more reliable than openly accessible information, and frequently makes it less so. If the enemy has spies in your camp, and you have spies in his, the world may be a little safer, but essentially you end up where you started, somewhere on the arcane and unquantifiable spectrum of “I know that you know that I know…”

Yet very occasionally spies have a profound impact on history. The breaking of the Enigma code shortened the Second World War by at least a year. Successful espionage and strategic deception underpinned the Allied invasion of Sicily and the D-day landings. The Soviet penetration of Western intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s gave Stalin a crucial advantage in his dealings with the West.

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer. As a classified internal CIA review put it, the ABLE ARCHER scare was “the last paroxysm of the Cold War.”

Macintyre, Ben. The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. 2018. p. 182–3 (ellipses in original)

Related:

Exploring Toronto

One of the cleverest and most philosophical limericks is:

There once was a man who said, “Damn,
It has borne in upon me I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”

It’s strange that living in Canada’s largest city I nonetheless overwhelmingly see the parts that are within an hour’s walk of my home, and I tend to see the same short stretches of street day after day when doing chores, meeting friends, or working on my research.

To deliberately defamiliarize myself a little I took the list of 75 TTC subway stations on Wikipedia, drew a random number between 1 and 75, and took the subway to York Mills to explore a new neighbourhood and take some photos.

Next time I’ll try to do a random journey while there is more daylight left, and perhaps with a friend in tow. As an experiment this time I only brought my keys, camera, and a TTC payment card — no phone, music player, cash, or wallet. I had a surprising number of conversations, perhaps just because I wasn’t listening to headphones or staring at a screen, but clearly actively paying attention to what was happening around me.

Life is a set of orderly piles: books, papers, notebooks, and manuscripts to process

While there have been times, mostly when I was at Oxford, when I made an effort to write daily for the sake of communication to people at home and documentation there is often a negative correspondence between how busy I am in life overall and how much I post.

Pretty much my entire effort is devoted to the successful completion of my dissertation and PhD, though a project of such duration is inevitably a study in the practice of survival and the maintenance of social relations as well as intellectual application and research effort.

Saudi Aramco and the future of oil

A few weeks ago The Economist ran this cover and two stories on Saudi Aramco, climate change, and the future of the global oil industry:

They claim: “Aramco’s underlying strategy is to be the last oilman standing if the industry shrinks, pointing to the upheavals to come”.

I wrote recently about the non sequiturs often used the defend the Canadian oil industry, notably the claim that Saudi Arabia’s awful human rights record makes it better to extract oil here than there. A chart from The Economist’s longer article further challenges that view:

If we can only use a fraction of the world’s remaining oil without causing catastrophic climate change, it makes sense that we should use the cheapest and cleanest oil. It makes no sense whatsoever to keep investing in the Canadian industry when the capacity already exists globally to extract all the oil the carbon budget will allow.