Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

How dangerous is Pickering?

Among environmental groups, Greenpeace has a reputation for being hostile to technologies like genetically modified foods and nuclear power, as well as of often saying poorly justified and hyperbolic things about them. As a civil servant, I remember learning never to trust figures or claims found only in a Greenpeace report, but to seek corroboration from someone a lot more credible like the Pembina Institute.

A comment in an article from today about premier elect Doug Ford promising to keep the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station open to 2024 provides a case in point:

“If an accident happened at this station, which we don’t want to happen, it would be way worse than Chernobyl or Fukushima,” said Shawn Patrick Stensil, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada.

This is nonsense. Chernobyl had a design massively less safe than any western nuclear power station, and as a consequence the release of radioactivity was far greater than from the three nuclear meltdowns in the General Electric boiling water reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Those meltdowns happened because a tsunami swamped the emergency diesel generators needed to run pumps to cool fuel rods after an emergency shutdown, and because the on-site electrical distribution system was destroyed by the tsunami. Barring an asteroid impact, nothing comparable is possible at Pickering. Even if a colossal disaster caused similar damage to the plant, the situation would not be comparable to the devastation in Sendai after the tsunami and either emergency power to the pumps or emergency cooling water to the reactor cores would prevent any meltdown. Following Fukushima, North American nuclear operators pre-positioned emergency equipment precisely to deal with such a station blackout.

When environmentalists choose to use fear as a motivator, it’s natural to extend it to hyperbole when people aren’t giving you the reaction you want. It’s also easy to unthinkingly buy into frightening claims when they correspond to your existing ideological viewpoint and preferred policy positions. Such emotional reflexes, however, cannot be allowed to drive our public policy choices when deciding how to address climate change. It may be that nuclear power is not a cost-effective climate change solution, or that the Pickering station doesn’t make sense to keep running. Baseless comparisons to the world’s worst nuclear disasters, however, obscure rather than clarify the issue.

Canada’s message to the world

Yesterday I photographed two rallies outside Toronto-area offices of Members of Parliament and Ministers of Finance and Foreign Affairs Bill Morneau and Chrystia Freeland.

With Freeland we asked if Canada was now going to withdraw our signature from the Paris Agreement. The sentiment was crafted to be possible to express in one photograph, but the issues are nonetheless closely related. The Paris Agreement’s central operative clause is an aspiration to: “Hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.

I say “aspiration” because the agreement says little about implementation. This is a treaty negotiated with the participation of every country on Earth and there are many who would have objected to explaining what those temperature targets mean in terms of greenhouse gasses, fossil fuels, and public policy. There are some who hope a magical technology will let us burn all these fossil fuels without dangerously warming the planet, but there are good reasons to question the efficacy and ethics of both geoengineering and carbon sequestration. As for a marvellous new energy technology so much better than both climate-safe options like nuclear fission and renewables and fossil fuel options, I don’t see that happening during the critical window of only a couple of decades where we will decide if the Paris targets can ever be attained or not.

The Paris Agreement is ambitious in its ultimate objective but frighteningly imprecise about the means of getting there. That means that for the decades ahead the locus of diplomacy will have to be convincing countries facing major problems of poverty and regional insecurity to commit fully to decarbonization as well. To achieve that, countries which have historically used the largest amounts of fossil fuel and where emissions per person continue to be the highest will need to be seen to be doing their part, cheerfully and in a spirit of global cooperation.

The clearest signals we’re sending are the big energy choices we make. A new pipeline says that the bitumen sands can continue to grow and that we expect fossil fuel use to remain as high as it is now for decades to come. It says that we’re not serious about Paris or avoiding dangerous climate change.

Canadian politicians want an easy answer that can satisfy Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the oil industry while also showing that sort of global leadership. That isn’t possible. At some point all of Canada needs to have a hard conversation about shutting down the oil sands industry, and that process needs to begin now by definitively stopping expansion.

To some degree the fights over Keystone XL, the Northern Gateway pipeline, and Energy East have already sent important signals to industry. If you want a big fossil fuel project now, it is going to be a fight. That message is actually reinforced by the Trudeau government’s decision to buy the Trans Mountain project. They think they’re telling industry that the federal government will step in to get things done, but they’re also suggesting that projects like this aren’t viable without exceptional government support. Even if Trudeau welds the last section of pipe personally, and the government’s dream of recovering taxpayer funds by selling the pipeline to the private sector is fulfilled, there will be big questions about how much sense any further bitumen sands expansion will make.

The climate case against Trans Mountain

Writing in The Globe and Mail Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch have a solid explanation for the incompatibility between the Trans Mountain pipeline and the climate commitments Canada has chosen for itself:

For these [pipeline] opponents, further massive investment in the extraction and export of some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel on Earth is nonsensical – idiotic, even. In a dangerously warming world, we should be investing in a clean-energy future, not entrenching Canada more deeply in the economic past.

Continued investment in the oil sands generally, and in the Trans Mountain pipeline specifically, means Canada is doubling down on a no-win bet. We’re betting that the world will fail to meet the reduction targets in the Paris Climate Agreement, thus needing more and more oil, including our expensive and polluting bitumen. We’re betting, in other words, on climate disaster. If, however, the world finally gets its act together and significantly cuts emissions, then Canada will lose much of its investment in the oil sands and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, because the first oil to be cut will be higher-cost oil such as ours.

There are more sophisticated analyses of the situation which are necessary, concerning global budgets and international negotiations, but it’s fair and accurate to say that Canada’s progress toward decarbonization depends on not making heavy new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. If the Trudeau government or any other keeps pushing in that direction, Canada seems likely to end up the poorer while the world will be further imperilled both by the emissions we generate and the diplomatic consequences of putting fossil fuel profits before collective action to avert planetary disaster.

B.C.’s latest move against the Kinder Morgan pipeline

When it comes to stopping unsustainable fossil fuel development, anything that creates investor uncertainty can be useful. By that metric, the British Columbia government’s announcement of a diluted bitumen shipment expansion moratorium while it studies how a diluted bitumen spill would unfold is a small contribution to shifting Canada to an acceptable development pathway.

Still, I wish governments would look squarely at the real problem: the fundamental contradiction between continued fossil fuel exploitation and the climatic stability objectives that states including Canada asserted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement, and in their own climate announcements. Making it all about local issues may be politics as usual, but it misses the main ethical issues at play.

Canada is still in denial about climate and the bitumen sands

Canada’s bitumen sands continue to be the largest source of growth in Canada’s greenhouse gas pollution, and the biggest barrier to Canada’s fair participation in a global climate change mitigation strategy.

Not only does continued bitumen sands investment perpetuate an industry which undermines Canada’s claim to be serious about Indigenous reconciliation, but giving the industry specially lax environmental treatment would force other sectors to pick up the slack, if that is even possible given the industry’s relentlessly growing pollution.

An article by University of Toronto professor Danny Harvey and Lika Miao now argues that only an oil sands phaseout would allow Canada to meet its (insufficiently ambitious) 2030 emission reduction targets. They see a complete bitumen sands phase out by 2030 as necessary to meet the targets, alongside major action in sectors like energy generation, and emphasize how meeting the more ambitious temperature targets of the Paris Agreement would require much more aggressive action.

All this highlights the chasm between Canadian politics and what would be necessary to curb climate change. Prime Minister Trudeau either doesn’t understand the relationship between fossil fuel use and climatic stability or is choosing to mislead Canadians for political reasons, continuing to assert that Canada’s fossil fuel reserves are usable. That kind of timidity or misdirection serves us all badly, leaving the bulk of Canadians misled into believing that the industry can somehow be compatible with a stable climate.