Category: Economics

Matters of money

Alberta’s 2015 climate plan

There’s a mass of news coverage and punditry about Alberta’s newly-announced pre-Paris climate change plan:

To me, this seems like a useful step forward: an acknowledgement that Alberta must act to curb climate pollution and that fossil fuel expansion cannot continue forever.

That said, this is all happening late. We should have stopped expansion decades ago and by this point jurisdictions like Canada with high GDP per capita and very high GHG pollution per capita should be on the downslope of cutting back aggressively.

Keystone XL rejected

From today’s announcement from Barack Obama:

Today, we’re continuing to lead by example. Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.

As long as I’m President of the United States, America is going to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold the rest of the world. And three weeks from now, I look forward to joining my fellow world leaders in Paris, where we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.

If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now. And I’m optimistic about what we can accomplish together. I’m optimistic because our own country proves, every day — one step at a time — that not only do we have the power to combat this threat, we can do it while creating new jobs, while growing our economy, while saving money, while helping consumers, and most of all, leaving our kids a cleaner, safer planet at the same time.

This action is a major statement about the need to transition away from fossil fuels and avoid developing them in their most damaging form. It will surely add even more energy to efforts to block other bitumen sands pipelines and otherwise drive the transition to a climate-safe global economy.

Marching again for fossil fuel divestment at U of T

Tomorrow, Toronto350.org and UofT350.org are holding our second march in support of fossil fuel divestment. The one we held back in November 2014 involved about 200 people.

Right now, Toronto’s weather is pretty miserable. After today’s dentist appointment I swung by MEC to get a waterproof silicone cover to protect my backpack (better than my crude black garbage bag cover) and some ‘Darn Tough Vermont’ merino wool socks.

Hopefully, tomorrow’s evening weather will be OK and we will see a strong turnout. The march is timed to coincide with a meeting of the Governing Council, who will hopefully be walking out of Simcoe Hall at the same time as we have people giving speeches there.

Open thread: Trudeau on climate

Now that he has been elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is going to have to make some crucial decisions on climate: how much fossil fuel infrastructure he will allow (including for export); the degree to which he will promote zero-carbon energy; whether he will establish a price on carbon; how he will engage internationally; etc.

Oil prices below break-even

The Guardian is reporting that global oil prices are at less than half of the cost of production in Saudi Arabia, contributing to a budget deficit of 20% of GDP.

For the same reason raising fossil fuel prices with a carbon tax is expected to reduce demand, it can be expected that lower fossil fuel prices will lead to more usage. At the same time, low oil prices could be the result of global economic weakness, in which case the amount of fossil fuel consumed may not rise much even with falling prices. In the longer term, low oil prices almost certainly reduce investment in the development of new oilfields, pipelines, refineries, and so on. Given the urgent need to stop investing in such projects to control climate change, low oil prices may be at least partly desirable from a climate change perspective.

The plausibility of driverless cars

There is a widespread expectation that autonomous or driverless cars of the sort being developed by Google will soon become commercially available and active on public roads. A recent Slate article makes some strong arguments for why that expectation may be premature:

But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one. Since maps are one of the engineering foundations of the Google car, before the company’s vision for ubiquitous self-driving cars can be realized, all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you’d ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment, most of them around the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.

Another issue is what will happen to driverless cars when they get into a situation where they cannot function (say, a construction site includes temporary stop lights, or you turn onto a road which isn’t mapped)? I can’t see passengers being very happy when their car simply won’t go anywhere anymore, and they need to abandon it and find some other form of transport.

Ultra-processed foods

New dietary guidance from the Heart and Stroke Foundation warns against “ultra-processed foods”, those that are “nutritionally unbalanced foods high in sugar, fat and salt manufactured in a way to promote over-consumption and are associated with weight gain and high blood pressure”. They include “soft drinks, packaged fruit juices, cookies, ice cream, salty snacks, ready meals and bottled sauces”.

With money tight and limited access to food storage and cooking facilities on campus, I have definitely been eating too much of this sort of stuff.

The machinations of the food and flavour industries are fairly disturbing: