Canada – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

Greyhound shutting down in Canada

After shutting down everywhere in Canada except Ontario and Quebec in 2018, Greyhound is now shutting down in Canada completely, aside from some routes across the border by the American company (Toronto to Buffalo and NYC; Montreal to Boston and NYC; Vancouver to Seattle).

When the government is so keen to help out those who drive or fly, I can’t understand why they are willing to let intercity bus services come to an end. Particularly given the safety concerns about hitchhiking or traveling informally in remote areas, I think it would make sense for the government to take over intercity bus services as a nationalized entity if there is no commercial operator willing to do it. With passenger train services as slow, expensive, and infrequent as they are in Canada, there ought to be an option for people unable to afford flying or unwilling to use such an emissions-intensive form of transport.

China emitting over 14 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent

In a development that illustrates the global dynamics of climate change China’s emissions now exceed those of the entire developed world put together.

Since at least the 1990s the basic nature of a global deal to control climate change has been clear. States like Canada with the highest historical and per capita emissions need to cut their fossil fuel use dramatically. At the same time, rapidly developing countries need to choose a lower carbon development path than the states that preceded them.

Canada is massively reneging on this deal. We have never hit our climate targets and our leaders continue to act as though continued fossil fuel development can somehow be compatible with climatic stability. We also treat the emissions from the fossil fuels we produce as someone else’s problem, just as we treat the emissions that go into our imports (some of those Chinese emissions are making stuff for the benefit of Canadians, and people in all rich countries).

Persisting with the status quo is a suicide pact, yet states and citizens have not yet displayed the wisdom of recognizing and acting upon that. With so little time left to change course and avert the worst impacts of climate change we cannot keep accepting governments that abstractly promise that emissions will fall in the far future while working in practice largely to protect business as usual.

Will China invade Taiwan?

This week’s issue of The Economist has Taiwan on the cover and describes it as the “most dangerous place on Earth”.

It is widely reported that a central purpose behind China’s military buildup and particularly the acquisition of naval and amphibious warfare capabilities is the country’s ambition to conquer its democratic neighbour. The implications thereof could be profound, including in terms of China and Taiwan’s domestic politics, Taiwan’s crucial global role as a microprocessor manufacturer, and the confidence of America’s regional allies in America’s security guarantees. If their confidence is sapped by a Chinese takeover, increased regional militarization and perhaps nuclear proliferation are plausible.

China’s conduct toward Taiwan may also be illustrative of its long term geopolitical role as it continues to rise in affluence and military strength, potentially going beyond maintaining an oppressive, nationalistic, and militarist system at home into the actual domination or conquest of foreign territory (though China’s government asserts that Taiwan has been part of China all along).

The question of China and Taiwan also influences domestic national security policy in countries including China. Based on recent decades of use, the likely role for new military platforms like the ships being built for the navy and next-generation fighter jets long under contemplation would be a combination of continental defence under NORAD (arguably with no nation states as plausible enemies in this sense) and expeditionary use in multilateral coalitions for peacekeeping or (as in Afghanistan to begin with) warfighting. If China is developing into a threat that western countries will need to meet with military force, however, it will be indispensable to have advanced weapons and forces capable in their use ready before the conflict begins.

US to withdraw from Afghanistan

The Biden administration has announced that most US forces will withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11th.

What have we learned since 2001 and what have the consequences of the war been? Could Al Qaeda have been expelled or destroyed without the invasion? How will the US / NATO / Canadian intervention affect Afghanistan’s long-term future?

COVID’s second spring

My winter thread is now behind the times, so this will be a new place to track COVID stories of interest and importance.

One I saw today is not encouraging: More young Canadians getting severe COVID-19, being hospitalized: experts

According to new modelling from the Public Health Agency of Canada, Canada is on track to see a “strong resurgence” of COVID-19 cases across the country if these variants continue to spread and become more commonplace, and if public health measures remain at current levels.

The new long-range projections, released on Friday, show that the highest incidences of COVID-19 are currently being experienced in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and parts of Ontario, while the overall incidence rates are highest among young adults aged 20 to 39 and have declined among older Canadians.

Let’s all do what we can to combat complacency and sustain the public determination to keep acting protectively toward one another.

UBC’s financial analysis of divestment

During the U of T campaign, a validating source like this memo from the University of British Columbia’s Vice-President Finance and Operations would have been amazing for responding to the argument that divestment is financially irresponsible:

Results of Mantle’s analysis (full report attached as Appendix A) indicate that the link between climate change and the financial viability of investment assets is clear. Carbon intensive companies will be exposed to climate related financial risk as the world commits to reduce carbon emissions through regulatory, legal, market or technology shifts away from fossil fuels. Rapidly evolving trends – such as greater corporate disclosure of climate risk, commitment to a “Paris Aligned” future, the acceptance of a “carbon budget” – are greatly increasing the risk in holding shares of companies whose value is derived from the continued growth and expansion of global fossil fuel use.

Seeing the arguments about the carbon bubble from Bill McKibben’s movement-instigating article and our own divestment brief affirmed by university executives and their consultants demonstrates the degree to which the argument against continued investment in fossil fuels is sound, as well as how it has diffused beyond activists into the thinking of decision makers.

Tonight’s thesis reading will be more than unusually encouraging, between this and today’s Supreme Court of Canada ruling on the carbon tax.

Canada and Toronto’s housing markets

Perhaps the hardest thing about doing a PhD in Toronto is finding decent housing and paying for it with the kind of income the university’s funding package and TA work provides. Since the 2008 financial crisis, governments around the world have undertaken exceptional monetary and fiscal stimulus to try to sustain employment and economic growth. Those ultra-low interest rates, however, have affected asset prices in at least two ways. First, since they cannot even earn the rate of inflation from savings accounts, people have been prompted to invest in all manner of speculative assets, from frothy tech stocks to bitcoin to the housing bubbles inflating around the world. At the same time, low interest rates have facilitated massive borrowing for house purchases, also helping to drive up the level of house prices.

Those dynamics have several unwanted current and future impacts. For one thing, I worry that the sense of affluence it fosters among house owners is contributing to an erosion of empathy. It is also worsening the intergenerational inequalities between people who bought houses decades ago and have experienced a huge jump in wealth as a result and the younger people who in past generations would have been entering the housing market now. When interest rates do finally need to rise (once inflation rises above target levels) many home owners risk being in the unfortunate position that the 2008 crisis caused for so many: being ‘underwater’ with a mortgage now larger than the market price of their home.

I think it would be prudent for governments to pay more attention to asset price levels alongside the inflation and employment rates when setting policy. Their efforts to juice their way out of the last crisis seem to be setting up the next one. It would also be desirable for countries to start requiring comprehensive disclosure of wealth as a prelude to wealth taxation.

House prices in Canada

Cultivating a conservative climate movement

Let’s begin with two simple premises:

The amount of climate change the world experiences depends on the total quantity of fossil fuels that get burned. As such, there is little value in avoiding burning particular coal, oil, and gas reserves in one time period if we then burn them in another
In Canada, the US, and the UK the electoral pattern for a century or more has been alternating between relatively left-wing and relatively right-wing governments

I think it follows from this that for climate change mitigation policy to succeed, it cannot only be supported by progressives or supporters of left-of-centre parties.

It’s true that the most prehistoric form of climate change denial (saying there is no problem, or it’s a problem too small to require action) is concentrated among political conservatives. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry has outsize influence over conservative politics, parties, and politicians. To me — however — these observations are akin to the argument that since 85% of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels it is imposible or unrealistic to try to replace them. In both cases, the depth of the current dependency demonstrates the need for change, rather than its impossibility.

Recently, UK Conservative MP Alicia Kearns and U.S. Republican congressperson John Curtis co-authored an article in the Times of London: The left should not dominate the conversation on climate change.

They also appeared in a recent panel hosted by the Hudson Institute:

Progressives tend to be very opposed to the argument or idea that conservatives need to be won over to climate change mitigation through fossil fuel abolition. The intersectional climate justice analysis holds that climate change is a symptom of systemic injustice and cannot be corrected through narrow solutions which do not eliminate colonialism or capitalism or patriarchy. It is a joined-together worldview that clearly motivates a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s a sound strategy for avoiding catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, I challenge the claim that only systematic change in our political or economic system can solve the problem. Progressives also tend to assert that renewable energy is cheaper and better in every way than fossil fuel, implicitly acknowledging that it could be possible to replace where our energy comes from without fundamentally changing much more about society.

I can see at least a couple of routes for moving forward with cultivating a conservative commitment to climate change mitigation.

Thinking about the span of the next couple of decades, I think conservatism in the English-speaking democracies may be posed for a huge splitting apart between comparative pragmatists who are willing to accept what science has unambiguously shown and pure ideologues whose policy preferences do not relate to what is really happening in the world. If that split can be enlarged to the point of crisis — when those on the empiricist side will no longer tolerate supporting the same candidates and parties as those on the fantasist side — those willing to consider evidence will likely have a long-term electoral advantage as those most implacably opposed to climate action die off, young people with a better understanding of climate change become politically dominant, and as the undeniable effects of climate change become even plainer.

Another plausible route to cultivating conservative support for climate change mitigation is through faith communities. The Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, and others have been outspoken from the centre of their institutions about the need to control climate change. It’s true that there are some whose theology sees the Earth exclusively as a set of resources to be exploited, or who believe that a religious apocalypse will soon bring an end to the material world making long-term problems irrelevant, but I suspect there are many more in all faiths and denominations who can be won over to the view that we have a duty to care for creation and not to pass on a degraded world to our successors.

I think part of the progressive wariness about outreach to conservatives arises from how the intersectional view ties climate change into the social justice and economic redistribution agendas which animated the left long before climate change became a mainstream concern. Cooperating with conservatives on the narrow issue of replacing fossil fuels would not advance the general project of abolishing capitalism or re-ordering the global system. Some see climate change as a crisis which would be ‘wasted’ if our response only sustains planetary stability. Others convincingly point out that even without climate change as a problem the idea that resource use and waste production can increase indefinitely is fundamentally at odds with a finite planet. All that said, climate change seems to be the most pressing and serious societal problem facing humanity, and resolving it would give us more time and a more stable global environment in which to pursue other aims of justice.

I don’t believe either progressives or conservatives can or should win one another over to their entire worldview. The progressive climate change movement is an enormous success and source of hope, and I am not calling for it to be dismantled or fundamentally altered, though they ought to give more consideration to cross-ideological alliances on certain vital issues. As long as effective climate change policies are something which one side assembles and the other dismantles we cannot succeed, and so winning over conservatives to climate action is an indispensable condition of success.

Canada and a just transition off fossil fuels

At a town hall tonight on a just transition away from fossil fuels — organized by 350.org and attended by Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May and NDP climate change critic Laurel Collins, but which environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson declined to attend — May repeatedly brought up the Task Force on Just Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities as a model. In particular, she emphasized the importance of countering the narrative that escaping our fossil fuel dependence will be bad for jobs, and of respectfully consulting with the most affected communities when making policy.

The central nonsense of Justin Trudeau’s climate change policy is his unwillingness to accept that only fossil fuel abolition will let us avoid catastrophic climate change. Canada has already more than used up our fair share of the global carbon budget, and building new long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure will only increase the costs of our transition when we need to scrap them early and scramble even faster to build climate-safe replacements. Canada’s assertion that we can keep expanding bitumen sands and LNG production and exports is also entirely at odds with what fairness and pragmatism demand globally. The richest and dirtiest states need to lead the way, not keep making excuses, or the global logjam against sufficient action will be impossible to overcome.

Nuclear energy policy

This week’s Economist has a pretty solid middle-of-the-road editorial position on nuclear energy in a world with a climate crisis:

Solar and wind power are now much cheaper, but they are intermittent. Providing a reliable grid is a lot easier if some of its generating capacity can be assumed to be available all the time. Nuclear provides such capacity with no ongoing emissions, and it is doing so safely and at scale around the world.

Despite this, safe and productive nuclear plants are being closed across the rich world. Those closures and the retirement of older sites mean that advanced economies could lose two-thirds of their nuclear capacity by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. If new fossil-fuel infrastructure fills the gap, it will last for decades. If renewables do so, the opportunity cost will be measured in gigatonnes of carbon. Renewables replacing nuclear capacity would almost always be better deployed to replace fossil-fuel capacity.

Sometimes the closure of nuclear plants is largely a matter of economics. In places where emitting carbon dioxide comes with no price, such as America, the benefits of being emissions-free are hidden from the market. That hurts nuclear, and it should be rectified. When closure is political, the onus is on Green politicians, in particular, to change their tune. To hasten the decline of nuclear power is wilfully to hobble the world in the greatest environmental struggle of all.

Related topics:

Papers on nuclear energy:

Canada’s nuclear industry:

Nuclear waste

Nuclear economics

Nuclear energy and climate change

New reactor types and designs

Nuclear energy and weapon proliferation

Accidents and safety