Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Grant on the Massey College quad

Robertson Davies once told a group of architects that they were “the designers of the scenery against which we act out the drama of our personal lives.” Ron Thom seems to have taken this observation to heart in designing the college’s public rooms and especially the quadrangle, which, with its elegant clock tower, rectangular pools, splashing fountains, irregular walls of old gold and cinnamon brick, flagstone walkways, and pleasant lawns, has a captivating, ever-changing beauty. Shadowy morning light gradually gives way there to the direct sun of noon, the angled shadows of afternoon and evening, and the dark of night, the passage of the hours marked by the clock, by the striking of the bell, and by the flow of fellows to and from meals, classes, offices. As the seasons change, so too does the colour palette, the fresh green of spring slowly darkening into the fall, replaced in turn by the clean white of winter’s new snow. The quadrangle invites quiet contemplation from the Common Room and from residents’ windows, permitting unobtrusive observation of others’ lives. Indeed, this outdoor living room is perhaps the most observed space in the college.

Grant, Judith Skelton. A Meeting of Minds: The Massey College Story. University of Toronto Press, 2015. p. 312

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Canada if the US collapses

The most disturbing thing about the January 6th riot and Trump coup attempt has been the reaction of American politicians. Despite being witnesses and targets of the attack, politics as usual has persisted, including Trump’s dominance of the Republican party.

This suggests a substantial danger that Americans in power will choose the victory of their tribe over the other above the endurance and peace of the union.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon writes:

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

During my international relations undergrad, profs often told us about how for most of Canadian history the biggest threat to Canada’s sovereignty has been invasion from the south. If mass political violence does erupt in the US — likely accompanied by a mass sense that the federal institutions of the supreme court, congress, and the presidency do not hold legitimate power over the whole US populace — it’s hard to believe that the US-Canada border would be respected in the uproar.

Of course it’s undiplomatic to talk in public about what will happen if your neighbour and strongest ally falls into civil war or ceases to be a democracy. Nonetheless, given the pathologies in American politics and society, it’s something Canadians must consider with growing seriousness and urgency.

Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en against the Royal Bank of Canada

Yesterday I photographed a rally outside RBC headquarters, protesting their financing of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.

The measure of whether businesses and governments care about climate change is their actions, not the sympathetic statements invented for their advertising and media relations. We can never build our way out of the climate crisis with huge new long-term investments in fossil fuels.

Toronto considering a net zero target for 2040

Next week, the Toronto city council is considering a proposal to adopt a net zero target by 2040. I have written to my city councillor and the mayor supporting the idea as better than nothing, but also explaining why net zero promises risk prolonging rather than curtailing fossil fuel use:

Councillor Mike Colle and Mayor John Tory,

I am writing to you in support of the effort to establish a net zero CO2 target for Toronto by 2040, but also to warn you about the risks of the net zero concept and to advocate fossil fuel abolition as a preferable policy. Please do not be mistaken about my intent: a net zero target is better than inaction, and ought to be passed. Addressing climate change, however, will require much more.

There is a major risk that “net zero” is a delay and distraction tactic which aligns with the interests of fossil fuel producing states and corporations. It’s a way of distracting from the cause of climate change — fossil fuels — and to conjure a misleading sense that the problem can be solved without getting rid of them. By endorsing net zero targets, advocates of climate action risk playing the role of doctors advocating low-tar or filtered cigarettes: extending the life and profits of a noxious industry through the false suggestion that we can get the benefits while avoiding the consequences.

One of the clearest signals that net zero is being used to extend rather than constrain the history of the fossil fuel industry has been the enthusiasm with which such targets have been adopted by fossil fuel producers. For example, Saudi Arabia has made a net zero promise for 2060 while Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.” This ought to be a warning sign that net zero is a Trojan horse designed to delay policies and regulations to abolish fossil fuels before we catastrophically destabilize the climate.

An examination of scale also calls into question the plausibility of achieving net zero by any means other than ending fossil fuel use. Global oil production was about 88.4 million barrels per day in 2020. That’s about 32.3 billion barrels, each with about 136 kg of oil. That adds up to about 4.3 billion metric tonnes (gigatonnes) of oil taken from the ground every year. Even with COVID-related reductions, global CO2 output in 2020 was about 34.81 gigatonnes. That means to bury all the CO2 from our fossil fuel use, we would need to replicate the global oil industry more than eight times over, except with equipment to extract, compress, and bury CO2. All of this would cost energy and money to run and would produce no profit. It has also taken a century to build that level of oil infrastructure. The idea that we can solve our CO2 problem by burying it simply doesn’t make sense physically, even before you start comparing the cost of avoiding the emissions in the first place to the cost of separating and burying them.

In addition, there are enormous non-climate co-benefits from fossil fuel abolition. A 2021 journal article estimated that just the fine particulate pollution from global fossil fuel combustion causes 10.2 million premature deaths annually. This is another demonstration of how the apparent profitability of the fossil fuel industry arises only because we do not deduct the amount of harm arising from their products. Fossil fuel abolition has the promise of saving ten million lives per year, and more when pollution beyond just particulate matter is factored in.

The other risk of a net zero as opposed to a fossil fuel abolition approach is that it will fail to incentivize the right investments. If families and businesses in Toronto knew that fossil fuel use was going to be coming to an end before mid-century, it would no longer make sense to construct new buildings heated with gas, or countless other pieces of infrastructure that reinforce and prolong our fossil fuel dependence. If we let that investment continue and only get serious about fossil fuel abolition later, it will raise the total cost because we will have wasted money on inappropriate infrastructure which we will need to scrap and because we have delayed the deployment of appropriate infrastructure compatible with a stable climate.

To repeat my main point: adopting a net zero target by 2040 would likely have some benefits and is better than inaction. At the same time, the city council must be mindful of the risk that net zero targets are a concealed fossil fuel promotion strategy, not a strategy to stabilize the climate. It is always tempting to be told that you can get the benefits of a damaging activity while avoiding the harms, but with net zero there are strong reasons to fear that it is a marketing strategy designed to keep letting fossil fuel producers profit while others absorb the costs.

Thank you for your attention,

Milan

We’re not going to bury our way out of the fossil fuel catastrophe. What needs burying is the fossil fuel industry itself.

David Brooks on Burkean conservatism

Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks has produced a good short summary of Edmund Burke’s classical conservatism and how it relates to contemporary US politics:

This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental. Down the centuries, conservatives have always stood against the arrogance of those who believe they have the ability to plan history: the French revolutionaries who thought they could destroy a society and rebuild it from scratch, but who ended up with the guillotine; the Russian and Chinese Communists who tried to create a centrally controlled society, but who ended up with the gulag and the Cultural Revolution; the Western government planners who thought they could fine-tune an economy from the top, but who ended up with stagflation and sclerosis; the European elites who thought they could unify their continent by administrative fiat and arrogate power to unelected technocrats in Brussels, but who ended up with a monetary crisis and populist backlash.

…

Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe that human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness; most of the time our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness. They did not believe that individual reason is powerful enough even to comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

My view is that what we need more than anything is a movement of the right demanding climate change mitigation. Otherwise we end up with an endless sea-saw between strengthening and repealing fossil fuel abolition policies, at the same time as voters are only offered climate change action as part of an intersectional agenda which they may not otherwise agree with. We need to split the right between fantasists who decide what they see based on what they believe politically and empiricists who accept evidence as the adjudicator of truth.

The progressive climate movement has been a crucial development and remains the main force pushing for action. At the same time, this perspective is conspicuously lacking in humility about re-making long-standing societal institutions, with the assumption that most of what is pernicious politically in the world will disappear once everyone is wise enough to accept their ideology. It’s a perspective that concentrates support inward with ever-greater demands for moral purity and ideological conformity, whereas what we need to produce a consensus behind fossil fuel abolition in the US, UK, and Canada is the understanding that nobody’s political project is served by radically destabilizing the climate. If we want to preserve institutions that have endured and shown value over time, we need to eliminate the fuel sources that are destabilizing the physical environment in which they have evolved. There’s nothing more conservative than that.

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Trudeau’s 2021 SFT

The Trudeau government has released the Speech From the Throne to open the 44th Parliament.

There’s a section on climate action, but it goes on an on about “growing the economy” and doesn’t even mention fossil fuels, much less the need to abolish them.

It’s not super encouraging that the speech is called “Building a Resilient Economy: A Cleaner & Healthier Future for our Kids,” while an infamous 2002 memo on how to cultivate climate change denial was called “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America.”

This kind of constant prioritization of economic growth over planetary security demonstrates the government’s unwillingness to talk about the implications of what climate change mitigation requires. Arguably, it also feeds a sense in the public that the problem ought to be solvable without major societal or lifestyle changes. It doesn’t apply anything like the standard which I suggested to recent environment minister Wilkinson: “Is every project the government is supporting something which we will be glad to have in a post-fossil fuel world?”

British Columbia floods and mudslides

Following up on summers with severe wildfires, BC has received an ‘atmospheric river’ of rain, in some places a month’s worth in a day.

The floods and landslides have cut off all the highways connecting Vancouver and the lower mainland to the rest of BC and Canada, and the Port of Vancouver has closed down, holding back over $400 million worth of exports per day.

In the National Observer John Woodside has a piece about how these disasters are partly climate-caused, since lost roots and ground cover would have helped hold the soil in place to prevent landslides. Of course, the clearcutting uphill of these slides is both an important cause and an activity that worsens climate change.

Theories for why the University of Toronto divested from fossil fuels

Not mutually exclusive:

  1. They are about to launch a bicentennial fundraising campaign with themes including healthy lives, sustainable future, and the next generation. They feared negative public relations attention if they launched the campaign while continuing to refuse to divest
  2. The university’s investment managers have decided that they can better retain authority and control by choosing how to divest on their own terms, and particularly with little reference to the culpability of the industry
  3. In trying to implement the prior environmental, social, and governance (ESG) screening method, the investment managers at the University of Toronto Asset Management (UTAM) corporation decided that divestment would be easier or better based on their secret internal metrics
  4. The Harvard announcement and COP26 have added to the pressure to announce new efforts
  5. U of T perceived that it was increasingly behind when a growing number of Canadian schools had made divestment commitments
  6. A student-led volunteer campaign persisted through multiple setbacks and core cohort graduations and was sustained by the University of Toronto Leap Manifesto chapter and subsequently the Divestment & Beyond faculty- and union-led campaign after the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org effort

As in the campaign as a whole, the university’s penchant for secrecy makes it challenging to explain or understand their actions. In particular, that includes the parlour trick of setting up your own investment management corporation as a means of evading oversight, by pretending that somehow the advice from this organization should only be available to the administration in secret.

Divest Podcast on the Leap Manifesto U of T divestment campaign

The latest episode of The Divest Podcast features Julia DaSilva from the Leap Manifesto chapter at U of T, the second of three groups to organize divestment campaigns, after the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org campaign and before / concurrently with the faculty/union Divestment & Beyond campaign.