Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

“2030 Emissions Reduction Plan: Canada’s Next Steps for Clean Air and a Strong Economy”

The Trudeau government’s latest climate change announcement is a plan to cut emissions by 40% by 2030.

The plan also aims to cut oil and gas sector emissions from 191 megatonnes to 110 megatonnes, though the government says it won’t reduce production “not driven by declines in global demand.”

Whether out of political calculation, the influence of the industry, or a simple lack of understanding, this announcement perpetuates the idea that “emissions” can be cut in a meaningful and sustainable way while continuing to expand fossil fuel production. This conforms with earlier analysis of how Trudeau promises action to the public while at the same time comforting business with promises that not much will change.

As long as Canadian politicians are too afraid to acknowledge that avoiding catastrophic climate change requires abolishing fossil fuels we will keep getting plans predicated on the nonsense that we can solve the problem without addressing its chemical causes. It’s fair enough at this point to attribute some of the blame to Canadian voters, who keep proving by their electoral choices that they want the government to express concern about climate change while not even meaningfully slowing down the pace at which we’re making it worse.

It also doesn’t help that the plan’s title sounds exactly like something the Harper government would have created. Climate change isn’t an issue of how “clean” the air is, and setting up clean air beside “strong economy” sticks to the narrative that good policy is about trading one against the other. That’s at best a distorted way of thinking about a fossil fuel dependency which threatens to undermine the very basis of human civilization. For people used to playing for only political stakes, gambling with the future of the whole species is outside of their training and conventional mindsets.

Canadian trains worse for the climate than flying?

I last flew in 2007, avoiding the practice since because of its unsustainability and the damage it does to the climate.

Nonetheless, my objection is to the unsustainable fossil fuel use and not to flying per se. I just think flying makes people travel more frequently and farther than they would otherwise be willing to go, and thus the damage from flying comes when people come to feel entitled to it and build lifestyles that depend on it.

Over the years I have seen a lot of inconsistent numbers on CO2 emissions from flying versus the train or other options. Today, the CBC posted some figures from Ryan Katz-Rosene, “a University of Ottawa professor who studies sustainable transportation”:

Taking VIA’s “Canadian” service from Toronto to Vancouver would generate 724 to 4,287 kilograms of CO2 per person. In comparison, an economy flight between those two cities would generate 464 to 767 kilograms of CO2 per person.

VIA’s “Ocean” service between Montreal and Halifax generates 218 to 1,292 kilograms of CO2 per person, compared to 152 to 482 kilograms of CO2 per person for an economy flight.

Katz-Rosene published the findings in the journal The Canadian Geographer and wrote about them on the University of Ottawa website in 2020. He tried to confirm the numbers with VIA, but they did not confirm or deny the figures, despite multiple conversations with him.

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Katz-Rosene blames “diesel-guzzling locomotives hauling fairly empty trains” — including sleeping and dining cars — on those lines.

English’s study found that just adding a snack car can increase a train’s greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 19 per cent, and that increasing seating density was one of the easiest ways to cut emissions and energy use.

Back in 2009, my friend Matt did some calculations of his own to estimate Toronto to Vancouver flights as around 330 kg of CO2 each way in an 80% full 767 or A320.

I have known all through the PhD that I would need to do at least one last trip to Vancouver, to clear things out of storage at my parents’ house and ship everything I want to keep back to Toronto. With my brother getting married in August, the plan is now to combine those purposes into one trip, along with seeing the old sights and friends who are still in town. Enduring a four day train voyage each way was broadly unappealing even before COVID, but now I would expect it to be a vexing mixture between feeling constrained by public health protection rules and feeling frustrated and worried about other passengers not following them. Four days in a rolling box, sharing the air with people who I can’t control, is not my idea of a nice break from work or great scenic way to see the country. If the climate impact is worse than flying, there seems no reason to do it.

Open thread: 2022 Liberal-NDP consent and supply agreement

The Trudeau Liberals have made a supply and confidence agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP.

According to the CBC, the climate-related elements are:

“A commitment to phasing out federal government support for the fossil fuel sector — including funding from Crown corporations — starting in 2022.

A commitment to finding new ‘ways to further accelerate the trajectory’ to a net zero economy by 2050.

A ‘Clean Jobs Training Centre’ to support retraining for energy workers as Canada moves away from fossil fuels.

Pretty weak sauce, I’d say, when we’re beginning to experience a potentially civilization-ending calamity, but that’s the state of Canadian politics today.

Russia’s threshold for nuclear weapon use

Christopher Chivvis has an article in The Guardian about the danger of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine crisis:

There are possible other paths toward further escalation, but they all eventually lead toward the nuclear threshold. Scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine make it clear that Putin would probably use a nuclear weapon if he concludes that his regime is threatened. It is hard to know exactly what turn of events would scare him enough to cross the nuclear threshold. Certainly a large Nato army entering Russian territory would be enough. But what if events in Ukraine loosened his grip on power at home? Indeed, achieving regime change in Russia indirectly by making Putin lose in Ukraine seems to be the logic behind some of those who are pushing for escalation today.

Moving across the nuclear threshold wouldn’t necessarily mean an immediate, full-force nuclear exchange – in other words, global thermonuclear war. But it would be an extremely dangerous, watershed event in world history.

The nuclear option that has been most frequently discussed in the past few days involves Russia using a small nuclear weapon (a “non-strategic nuclear weapon”) against a specific military target in Ukraine. Such a strike might have a military purpose, such as destroying an airfield or other military target, but it would mainly be aimed at demonstrating the will to use nuclear weapons, or “escalating to de-escalate”, and scaring the west into backing down.

Some analysts have questioned Russia’s ability to actually carry out such an operation, given its lack of practice. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only or even the most likely option available to the Kremlin. Based on war games I ran in the wake of Putin’s 2014 invasion, a more likely option would be a sudden nuclear test or a high-altitude nuclear detonation that damages the electrical grid over a major Ukrainian or even Nato city. Think of an explosion that makes the lights go out over Oslo.

Those war games indicated that the best US response to this kind of attack would be first to demonstrate US resolve with a response in kind, aimed at a target of similar value, followed by restraint and diplomatic efforts to de-escalate. In most games, Russia still responds with a second nuclear attack, but in the games that go “well”, the United States and Russia manage to de-escalate after that, although only in circumstances where both sides have clear political off-ramps and lines of communication between Moscow and Washington have remained open. In all the other games, the world is basically destroyed.

The more elevated the crisis, the greater the risks of misunderstandings and panicked decisions.

350.org, fossil fuel divestment, and the campaign in a box

From a social movement perspective, one of the most interesting things about 350.org’s fossil fuel divestment campaign is how they have proliferated the strategy among (often newly formed) independent groups.

One mechanism has been written documents. Bill McKibben told me that reading the Carbon Tracker Initiative’s 2011 report “Unburnable Carbon: Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble?” was part of what prompted him and Naomi Klein to start promoting fossil fuel divestment. One of the main ways he got attention for the idea was his 2012 Rolling Stone article: “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

350.org also undertook a “Do the Math” tour in 2012, visiting 21 cities in part to seed divestment campaigns.

350.org and other NGOs that worked to proliferate fossil fuel divestment held convergences for university divestment organizers at Swarthmore College (where Swarthmore Mountain Justice had first tried using divestment against mountaintop removal coal mining) in 2013, as well as in San Francisco and Montreal in 2014.

There are also written materials on setting up and advancing campaigns. A campus guide was released in 2012 and a trainers’ handbook in 2013. There has also been a similar document on their gofossilfree website since 2016.

I won’t get into analysis of the implications of this approach to organizing here, but I was prompted to write this because I have found the “campaign in a box” idea strangely undocumented online, despite how I thought it was a widely discussed feature of the movement.

Putin’s war in Ukraine and nuclear energy

Theoretically, nuclear fission could play a big role in providing energy-rich lifestyles to people around the world without climate change.

At the same time, there are severe economic, social, and political headwinds to even maintaining existing capacity, much less building more.

Now, I fear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will add further causes for concern. Ukraine has four nuclear plants and 15 operating reactors — any of which could be damaged intentionally or unintentionally by combat, or which could experience a station blackout if the electricity grid goes down.

Russia’s actions are calling into question longstanding assumptions about global stability. If conflict will again be a feature of life in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia then potentially nuclear operators who already have public acceptance and cost competitiveness against other forms of energy generation as major concerns will have another reason to be wary of reactors. If an incident actually occurs at a Ukrainian nuclear facility, those public and elite concerns will be far more salient.

Canada’s climate change record

I have rarely seen such a concise and numerically-backed summary of Canada’s climate change policy outcomes than this one from Steve Easterbrook’s blog in 2016:

Several things jump out at me from this chart. First, the complete failure to implement policies that would have allowed us to meet any of these targets. The dip in emissions from 2008-2010, which looked promising for a while, was due to the financial crisis and economic downturn, rather than any actual climate policy. Second, the similar slope of the line to each target, which represents the expected rate of decline from when the target was proposed to when it ought to be attained. At no point has there been any attempt to make up lost ground after each failed target. Finally, in terms of absolute greenhouse gas emissions, each target is worse than the previous ones. Shifting the baseline from 1990 to 2005 masks much of this, and shows that successive governments are more interested in optics than serious action on climate change.

At no point has Canada ever adopted science-based targets capable of delivering on its commitment to keep warming below 2°C.

In my July 2021 letter to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson I defined the term “gapology” as: “the process going back to the Chrétien era of setting a GHG reduction target for political reasons and then performing economic analyses to compare potential mitigation measures and the GHG reductions expected to accompany them against the political target, always finding a gap in which some further action would be required.”

Trudeau’s net zero promise is an extension and reiteration of the gapology strategy: safely pushing accountability for meeting the target to long beyond his own time in office.

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Political coalition building and Canada’s antivax blockades

Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building:

Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

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Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.

Jonathan Smucker reminds us: “Politics is not a clubhouse. Politics is messy. It is meeting everyday people where they are. It’s not an enclave. It’s not being the enlightened, ‘super‑woke’ people together, learning a special vocabulary, shaking our heads and wagging our finger at all these backward other people. That is a manifestation of the same social elitism that is actively structured by neoliberal society. Instead, politics needs to be woven into the fabric of all of our lives.”

Jackson is aspiring to a populist progressive movement that advances the whole left-wing agenda of economic redistribution, racial justice, further corporate regulation, and so on. I am more interested in the politics of building a consensus around fossil fuel abolition to avoid catastrophic climate change, in which agreement on other issues isn’t a prerequisite for legitimate participation. I think that will have to be comprised of people who broadly disagree about many political issues, but who nonetheless accept that maintaining the planetary stability which is the foundation of all political projects must be prioritized. A fired-up, more inclusive movement which still advocates for the entire progressive shopping list won’t do that, and arguably feeds polarization with the idea that only a new progressive society can fight climate change. Instead, it needs to become an issue where the voters who elect the mainstream centre-right and cente-left parties that form governments will demand rapid and substantial action, and not be placated about promises that someone else will solve the problem by a ‘net zero’ 2050.

Restoring and sustaining a democratic politics that can confront the challenge of climate change requires cultivating a politically influence branch of the conservative movement which respects empirical evidence instead of choosing what to believe based on their ideology. I don’t think anyone can see the path from here to there (and events like these trucker blockades are strengthening the fantasist wing), but I think it must involve a retreat from maximilist positions and arguments that one group’s entire political agenda must be implemented as the only way forward.

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