Canada – Page 60 – a sibilant intake of breath

Another shot at shutting down InSite

Disappointingly, the federal government is going to the Supreme Court to try to shut down InSite – Vancouver’s safe injection site (mentioned here before). It seems astonishing to me that any government would want to emulate the hard anti-drug stance embraced in the United States, given the extent to which drug prohibition has wrecked their justice system. It defies both evidence and logic to suggest that the proper response to drug use is to lock up the people doing it.

Here’s hoping the Supreme Court rules that facilities of this sort are permissible, given the proven success of harm reduction programs in diminishing the negative effects of drug addiction. Giving InSite a clear legal mandate to exist could encourage the emergence of similar programs in other areas where drug problems are a major concern.

[Update: 10 February 2010] There is a good post about InSite and the Conservative government over on Knitnut: Ideology trumps evidence: Conservative drug policy.

Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take

Back in 2008, I wrote about whether ‘runaway’ climate change might be possible on Earth. At one point, Venus had liquid water on its surface. Then, the sun grew brighter and Venus warmed. Its oceans evaporated and huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) got baked out of the crust. The heat made the water break up into hydrogen and oxygen: the oxygen bonded with carbon to make more CO2, and much of the hydrogen escaped into space. Venus became permanently hostile to life, with surface temperatures of 450°C.

Could burning all of Earth’s fossil fuels produce the same outcome?

Some people take comfort from the fact that there have been times in the history of the planet when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than now. The world was very different, but there was no runaway greenhouse and life endured. James Hansen devotes the entire tenth chapter of Storms of My Grandchildren to considering whether this assessment is valid. Three things give him pause:

The sun is brighter now than it was during past periods with very high greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2% additional brightness corresponds to a forcing of about 4 watts per square metre and is akin to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
For various reasons, the greenhouse gas concentrations in past hot periods may not have been as high as we thought.
We are introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far more quickly than natural processes ever did. This might cause fast (positive) feedback effects to manifest themselves forcefully, before slower (negative) feedback effects can get going.

He also explains that the sharp warming that took place during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) were not caused by fossil fuels (which remained underground), but rather by the release of methane from permafrost and clathrates. If human emissions warm the planet enough to release that methane again, it could add a PETM-level warming on top of the warming caused by human beings.

Hansen’s conclusions are, frankly, terrifying:

The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane clathrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming.

After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.

To re-emphasize the point, averting catastrophic or runaway climate change is the most important ethical and political task for those alive now, even if most politicians don’t yet realize it or don’t yet understand what that involves.

That last line also offers something to throw back, next time someone says the billions of dollars of revenue from exploiting the oil sands are simply too valuable to not collect.

Media from the anti-prorogation protests

Today’s Ottawa protest against the prorogation of Parliament drew fewer people than the Fill The Hill climate protest, though it enjoyed much nicer weather.

Here is a slideshow of all of my photos from today. Higher resolution versions are available on request.

One of the more entertaining parts of today’s rally was Trevor Strong‘s song “The Wild Proroguer.” This member of the Arrogant Worms modified a traditional song to include lyrics about Canada’s second prorogation in about a year. The MP3 is on his website; I uploaded a video of the performance on Parliament Hill to YouTube.

This might be the funniest sign I saw today. The owner will never need to make another one, regardless of how many protests or counter-protests they decide to attend.

Note: all this content is covered by a Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it for non-commercial purposes, with attribution.

[Update: 24 January 2010] Other Ottawa bloggers also attended the event: Zoom, Watawa Life, and Coyote.

CES Franks on democracy in Canada

CES Franks, of Queen’s University, has written an interesting essay describing the state of parliamentary democracy in Canada: “The Functioning of the Present-Day Canadian House of Commons: a paper prepared for the conference in honour of Peter Aucoin.” It focuses to a considerable extent on the reality of minority governments in Canada today, though also considers broader factors and long-term trends. For instance, the number of days per year in which Parliament is sitting has fallen by a third since the 1950s and the proportion of government bills eventually receiving Royal Assent has fallen from over 90% to just over 50%.

Franks also highlights the drift towards a bigger role for the provinces, with fewer national strategies and initiatives:

[M]y findings leave me with a sense of slight unease, and I am prepared to argue that the role of Parliament has diminished in recent decades and is continuing to diminish, to the detriment of good government in Canada. Further, much of the reason for this diminished role does not lie in the fact that we now have a Pizza Parliament with four parties and a likelihood of continuing minority parliaments. The causes lie elsewhere, and many are beyond the control of Parliament and government. They lie in fundamental changes in recent decades in the political economy of the Canadian Federation, in the increasing role of provincial governments as compared to the federal government, and in the unwillingness, rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, of recent federal governments to establish national programmes, policies, and national standards for the services Canadians expect from their governments.

In some ways, wider variation between the provinces doesn’t seem problematic. After all, there is nothing objectionable about populations with different perspectives being governed under differing rules, selected through democratic processes in which they participate. At the same time, there does seem to be reason for concern about the possible diminishing of the entity that is Canada. For one thing, there are major cross-cutting challenges that all provinces need to address, and it makes sense to do so in a cooperative way. For another, the temptations to make policy with only an eye turned towards the short-term consequences might be even greater for individual regions than they are for the confederation as a whole.

The full Word document is online, and linked from the Macleans website.

The MSC and BCs sockeye salmon

I have written before about how the certification of a fishery by the Marine Stewardship Council is not sufficient cause to think it is genuinely sustainable (even before factors other than fish numbers, such as fossil fuel use by ships, are taken into account). More evidence for this has been forthcoming recently. Now, they have decided to certify the British Columbia sockeye salmon fishery, despite how the fish numbers are dwindling and subject to an ongoing inquiry. Last year’s run on the Fraser river was less than 10% of what had been expected. The recent history of salmon in BC is a catalog of failure. The decision to certify regardless certainly doesn’t leave the MSC looking very credible. Their decision doesn’t become official until a 15-day complaint period has concluded, and people will hopefully be able to persuade them to think differently during that span.

For those who really care about environmental issues and are willing to make personal choices to reflect that, I recommend avoiding fish (and other sorts of meat) entirely. Keeping fishing activity at a sustainable level just seems to require more political integrity and long-term thinking than any of the world’s governments can muster. It’s so much easier to grab a haul now, earn a bundle, and leave the mess for those who will come later.

Emissions drop from Canada’s biggest GHG polluters

One curious thing about those who are determined to avoid the emergence of effective climate change policies is how they argue that climate science is far too uncertain to serve as the basis for decision-making, while simultaneously claiming that their economic models prove that going low-carbon will produce certain economic ruin. That claim is especially poorly defended over the long-term, given that economic models cannot effectively incorporate the consequences of technology and capital changes across a span of decades. Also, the idea that fossil fuel based prosperity will be everlasting faces a fundamental challenge from the scarcity of those fuels, and the political volatility of many of the regions in which they are found.

Near-term data also suggests that Canadian companies can cut emissions without suffering economic ruin. According to Tyler Hamilton’s blog:

[Canada’s] Top 10 industrial CO2 emitters reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 9 per cent in 2008 compared to 2007. At the same time, the Canadian economy grew by 0.5 per cent. Given that the impacts of the economic downturn were felt mostly in 2009, an even greater drop is expected this year. Canada’s Top 350 emitters reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 6 per cent during the same period.

Of course, that does not prove, in and of itself, that effective climate change policies would be painless in terms of costs or jobs. Still, just as the onus must be on climate scientists to both refine their models and acknowledge their limitations, those who assert that good climate policies will be economically ruinous must address both evidence and arguments that suggest that this may not be so.

Socrates and modern America

In their always-worthwhile Christmas issue, The Economist has an article on what Socrates might think of the state of discourse in the United States, especially political discourse:

In 1968 Stringfellow Barr, an historian and president of St John’s College in Maryland, wrote a Socratic critique of American discourse: “There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, ‘I think that…,’ as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each ‘discussant’ from really listening to another speaker”.

Socrates’s alternative was “good” conversation or dialectic. To converse originally meant to turn towards one another, in order to find a common humanity and to move closer to the truth of something. Dialectic, in other words, is decidedly not about winning or losing, because all the conversants are ennobled by it. It is a joint search. Unfortunately, as Mr Barr put it, it is also “the most difficult” kind of conversation “especially for Americans to achieve”.

Quite possibly, the worst discourse of all is that surrounding climate change, both in the United States and Canada. People deny that it is happening or suggest absurd causes, they interpret policies to reduce its severity in absurd and hyperbolic ways, and they singularly fail to either convey the most important aspects of the issue to the observing public or engage one another in meaningful discussion.

We have to hope that the climate isn’t as sensitive as the scientists endorsing a 350 part per million target believe; if so, we will probably toast the planet long before our discourse on climate change reaches a level of maturity sufficient to generate good policies.

LC^3T: Part II

Compared with Part I, the second voyage was more chaotic but also more visually appealing. Not having something terribly exciting to look forward to contributes to a certain lack of focus and discipline on the voyage. On the positive side, I actually passed through some scenic areas during the daytime.

My video camera also suffered several cold-related battery failures, which explains some of the smash cut editing near the end.

LC^3T: Over and done with

The bus journeys were often uncomfortable and grindingly boring, but my low-carbon expedition out west went wonderfully, all told. I spent some excellent time with my family during Christmas and at Yellow Point Lodge; I saw a heap of long-neglected friends during the span of a frantic night’s partying; and I got to devote a solid block of time to catching up with Emily.

It will probably take me a while to adjust to the cold (and to normal working hours), though I will be aided in the former by an excellent woolen coat my brother Mica gave me. While the return journey involved the loss of a treasured green Pilot G2 pen, the whole expedition can only really be counted as an incredible success. My thanks again to everyone who contributed to that.

LC^3T: Thunder Bay

We are now departing from Thunder Bay – leaving me about 22 hours from Ottawa. While the journey west felt a bit like a measured and disciplined march towards an objective, the ride east has the feeling of a disorderly retreat. That said, I have read and eaten significantly more while heading in this direction.

Ottawa will probably be a shock after Vancouver, but I am looking forward to being able to sleep horizontally and eat something moderately healthy.