Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Unbalanced sea level rise

One intuitively expects that if enough of Greenland melts to raise global sea levels by, say, three centimetres, that rise will occur everywhere more or less simultaneously. Detlaf Stammer, of Hamburg University, has suggested otherwise. His research on meltwater data since 1948 shows that meltwater forms a ‘slow wave’ of “rising sea levels that gradually works its way south from Greenland, down the American coast, reaching the tip of southern Africa after about a decade.”

Fifty years after any Greenland melting occurs, Stammer’s model suggests that sea level rise will be thirty times greater around Greenland and the east coast of North America than it will be in the Pacific ocean. If true, this will have a big effect on the kind of climate change adaptation planning that needs to take place. Everyone is exceptionally worried about Bangladesh right now, but perhaps they should be more immediately concerned about Florida and the Maritimes.

B.C. Climate Action Dividend

Since I filed my 2006 taxes in British Columbia, I was eligable for the $100 Climate Action Dividend that accompanies their new carbon tax. It was an unexpected thing to receive, since I have been a legal resident of Ontario for almost a year, but welcome nonetheless.

The question is: how could I spend $100 in a way that would yield the most climatic benefits?

  • Transport: I don’t drive and am trying to avoid flying to the greatest possible extent. Within the Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto area, I travel by bus, train, and bicycle almost exclusively. There don’t seem to be too many opportunities here.
  • Home: I have been replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents as they burn out, but could take the plunge and replace them all at once. The oil furnace and poor insulation in my flat are big problems, but they are the property of my landlord and cannot be meaningfully improved for $100 anyhow. I suppose I could offer to contribute towards an efficiency improvement of some kind.
  • Food: I am already a vegetarian, but spending the $100 on local organic produce would probably have some small carbon impact. That said, it is possible that the net carbon impacts of local food in this area are actually greater than those for some imported choices. Food calculations are very tricky.
  • Carbon offsets: For C$100, I can buy about 8.3 tonnes worth of offsets from Native Energy. They offer methane capture offsets, which are much more credible than forestry offsets, but there will always be questions about whether the gasses were captured specifically because of your payment, or whether the capture would have happened anyhow.
  • Donations: I could give some or all of the money to a political or non-governmental group that is having a positive impact on climate policy.
  • Books: While buying books about climate change science and policy will not directly lower my emissions, they may help put me in a better position to help aid the transition to a low-carbon society.

Do people have any other ideas?

Carbon taxes abounding

Light with condensation

This month, the British Columbian carbon tax came into force. The tax is starting off at $10 per tonne, rising to $30 in 2012. The tax will be revenue neutral: with extra costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions being balanced overall by reductions in personal and corporate taxes. The approach seems well designed and economically sound, as well as likely to help B.C. move towards a sustainable low-carbon economy. It is quite a pity, therefore, that the provincial New Democratic Party has taken such a wrong-headed and opportunistic stance on the thing. Surely they must realize that their overall agenda of helping the poor and marginalized can only be accomplished alongside effective climate change mitigation action. It is the poor who have the least capability to adapt: to the effects of climate change, to harsher carbon pricing policies later, and to the ever-increasing prices of fossil fuels. As such, setting incentives early is an important mechanism for smoothing the transition.

At the same time as B.C. is moving forward, other jurisdictions are consolidating past actions. Norway is toughening the carbon tax they have had in place since 1991. Unfortunately, a fuel-price-induced backlash seems to be rising there too. If gasoline taxation continues to be the biggest public opinion stumbling block to carbon pricing, perhaps those who argue for its exclusion are correct. It is better to start the bulk of society on a low-carbon transition, leaving some sectors behind, than to have the whole project kept in limbo due to objections arising from short-term thinking.

While not a tax on carbon, it is interesting to note that American police departments are even imposing fuel surcharges on traffic tickets. The policy is prompted by high oil prices, rather than environmental concern, but it is an illustration of the ways in which fuel costs, economic activity, and government fiscal policy interact.

Ice-free north pole in 2008?

Orange flower

Some scientists aboad the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen are predicting that the North Pole may be ice-free for the first time in recorded history this summer. While this is not the same as saying the whole icecap will be gone, it does seem like the sort of thing likely to have symbolic resonance. At the very least, it becomes a bit harder to argue that no overall warming is taking place when huge chunks of the cryosphere start to vanish.

While there are good reasons to doubt whether this year will really see the pole bare, it is only really a matter of time:

[G]iven the rapid changes now evident in the Arctic, the ultimate fate of the North Pole—in fact, all permanent ice in the Arctic—may be all but assured. Almost all models have the Arctic completely ice free in the summer by 2100.

This raises some worrisome questions. If the sea ice is being lost at a greater rate than anticipated, is that likely to carry over to Greenland? If so, the optimistically low estimates for sea level rise published by the IPCC may prove grossly inaccurate.

Fringe Festival suggestions

The Ottawa Fringe Festival is ongoing and, while I am a big fan of theatre, I was having some difficulty in picking out which plays to see. Thankfully, I was recently able to secure some suggestions from someone familiar with the festival and those performing in it:

Between now and when the festival ends on the 29th, I aim to see and report on at least a couple of these.

Dion on gas prices and carbon taxes

Bulldog puppy at eleven weeks

Asking a politician to defend climate change policy in courageous moral terms may be asking too much. Just today, Stephane Dion had to go to great lengths to argue that the carbon tax being contemplated by his party will not increase the cost of gasoline. Designing the tax in such a way may be politically necessary now, but what it fails to communicate is the basic rationale behind taxing carbon at all. It isn’t something the government does to raise revenue. Rather, it is an intelligent intervention to correct a market failure. Even with gasoline at current prices, consumers are not paying the full costs associated with their choices. They are paying for oil exploration and the expansion of expensive alternative fuel options. They are paying to outbid increasingly affluent and fuel-thirsty people in rapidly developing countries. They are not paying the costs associated with the huge risks greenhouse gas emissions pose for future generations.

If we are to deal with climate change, there must be a profound societal acknowledgement of two things: that present-day lifestyles are profoundly harmful to others and that people do not have the right to impose such harm, even when they have been mindlessly doing so for a long time. That moral case is at the very heart of carbon pricing and climate change mitigation in general. Pretending otherwise cheapens the debate, as well as making it shallower. Carbon taxes now may indeed be a useful vehicle for encouraging people to make smart investments in the face of rising fuel prices, but that is not and should never be the core of the justification for them.

A bad new copyright bill

Canada’s proposed new copyright act is unacceptably poor, most importantly because of its treatment of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Under the new law, circumventing any such system – no matter why – is against the law. This means that if the company that sold you a song decides to stop letting you access it, you are out of luck. Under the new law, it would be a crime to copy music from a DRM-protected CD that you bought to an iPod that you own, with an associated fine of $20,000.

The law would also mean that organizations like libraries cannot have any confidence in their future ability to use digital materials today and people with disabilities will not be able to use technology to make protected works more accessible. It would make it a crime for me to use VideoLAN player to watch DVDs I bought in Europe, just because people selling DVDs have decided to use monopolistic regional codes to boost profits. Indeed, it would criminalize the distribution of VideoLAN itself.

It must be remembered that the purpose of copyright law is to serve the public good, not copyright holders. We allow copyrights because they create a legal environment in which it is possible to profit from a good idea. As a result, copyright protections help to ensure that people are furnished with new and high quality music, books, etc. By failing to protect the legitimate needs of consumers, this bill fails to enhance the public interest. As such, it deserves to be opposed and defeated.

Evening spring ride in Ottawa

I just completed my most aesthetically pleasing bike ride for a long time. Residents of Ottawa should consider doing the following:

  1. Begin in the park near 111 Sussex, right around sunset.
  2. Ideally, start on the far side of the series of two white metal bridges spanning the water near there.
  3. About ten minutes after sunset, on a spring evening, begin following the route below.
  4. Ride to 111 Sussex and follow the path that hugs the water beside it. The path in question follows the water’s edge in this picture.
  5. Cross Sussex drive.
  6. Ride along it, past DFAIT headquarters.
  7. Continue past the Saudi embassy.
  8. Follow the curve of the road past the Kuwaiti Embassy and the National Gallery.
  9. Ride into Major’s Hill Park.
  10. Ride to the terrace beside the Chateau Laurier. Follow it to the stairs parallel to the Rideau Canal locks.
  11. Carry your bike up the stairs.
  12. Walk across the bridge towards Parliament.
  13. Carry your bike down the stairs to the path beside the Rideau Canal locks.
  14. Follow the riverside path west as far as you care to go.

The whole route looks gorgeous in the fading evening light, when the sky still offers a bit of competition for the artificial lights.

Theism in Canada

Sketching a robot

A study mentioned in The Globe and Mail suggests that a quarter of Canadians, and a third of men, say that they do not believe in a god. At least some of those who do believe in a ‘god’ probably believe in the sort that does not intervene in human affairs.

I see the steady process of declining religious faith as relatively good news. It’s a sign that people are increasingly willing to question the religious beliefs they (normally) inherited from their parents. The more you know about the world, the less necessary a god becomes for explaining the world. At the same time, greater knowledge about the world invariably shows the contradictions inherent to religious belief, whether it is the problem of evil, or the difficulty of reconciling the diversity of faiths with the idea that one conception of the supernatural is ‘correct.’

While there is no guarantee the world will improve as more and more is drawn from the ‘supernatural’ into the simply ‘natural,’ the decline of faith in modern societies does seem like reason to hope for a future in which ideas are more rigorously and fairly examined.