The environment – Page 114 – a sibilant intake of breath

Seeking information on green buildings

While this site has seen a lot of discussion of electricity generation, vehicles, and fossil fuels there has been less discussion of ways in which low-carbon buildings can be encouraged. I would be quite interested if people could provide book or article suggestions on any of the following:

Materials
Certification standards like LEED
Lighting
Heating and cooling
Appliances and smart metering
Zoning and urban design
Cogeneration of heat and power
District heating
Cooling using bodies of water, as in Toronto
Green designs and construction techniques
Retrofits to improve efficiency
Solar water heating
Distributed electricity generation
Policies to encourage green buildings, such as financial incentives

And anything else relating to the sector.

On the complexity level of climate policies

When it comes to policies for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, complexity can conceivably serve three purposes. Two of them have some justification, while the third is largely reprehensible but entirely obvious and largely unavoidable. Unfortunately, it is the two dodgier options that are overwhelmingly more likely to emerge.

The first purpose is environmental effectiveness. For instance, we might add complexity to a pure carbon tax by also banning the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Doing so is likely to reduce emissions somewhat further, especially given that once a coal power plant is built, it takes a brave politician to refuse to grant an exception that will stop a carbon tax from bankrupting it, tossing out those who work there, and nullifying the investments of the financial backers.

The second purpose is economic efficiency. In some cases, it may be that a more complicated policy can achieve the same level of emissions reduction at a lower cost than a simpler one. It may also be that other economic objectives need to be sought in concert with greenhouse gas mitigation. For instance, we might want to increase the total portion of our energy use that comes from domestic sources.

The third purpose is being able to grant hidden favours to friends and contributors. As soon as you start giving away ‘grandfathered’ permits, creating tax exemptions, and the like you, open the door to both soft and hard forms of corruption. The more complex the set of regulations, the easier it is to conceal this. Once you start stacking on special rules for new facilities, different modes of compliance, and complex interactions between carbon policies and other forms of taxation and subsidy, you gain a dense canopy of rules, under which all sorts of shady business can be undertaken.

A government that realized the scope of the threat we face could put a simple policy in place in a matter of weeks or months. They could say:

“If we continue to emit at the level we are now doing, we will probably destroy the ability of the planet to sustain human civilization. This may well happen by the end of this century, especially if our emissions remain on an upward trajectory. To respond to this risk, we are implementing an economy-wide carbon tax. Every time fuel that generates greenhouse gasses is produced or imported, the producer or importer will pay the tax. The cost will then spread through the rest of the economy. This year, the tax will be $20 per tonne of CO2 equivalent. It will rise by $5 per year until at least 2030. We will use the revenues to provide financing for efficiency improvements in all sectors.”

Instead, we are likely to see governments that fail to appreciate the magnitude of the danger, but fully appreciate the opportunities new regulations provide for them to strengthen their electoral positions. As a consequence, there is a very strong possibility that we will fail to respond effectively to the threat of climate change before it becomes impossible to avoid catastrophic harm.

Free book on the oil sands

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent is a book written by Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary journalist. The publisher, Greystone Books, has decided to make it available as a free PDF until Friday, March 20th. The book’s description suggests that it is very critical of the oil sands industry, overall:

This out-of-control megaproject is polluting the air, poisoning the water, and destroying boreal forest at a rate almost too rapid to be imagined. In this hard-hitting book, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands and argues forcefully for change.

Getting the PDF requires that you give them your email address. Of course, you can always buy the book if you prefer.

More about this is on Gristmill.

Monbiot on adaptation and mitigation

George Monbiot’s dire new column highlights how the enormous danger associated with climate change has produced action that is grossly inadequate. Furthermore, it challenges the idea that we will be able to deal with it later by ‘adapting.’ He argues that the costs of doing so will be massive, some impacts will be impossible to lessen through any level of spending, and that rich nations presented with the immediate reality of massive climatic challenge will never have the will to assist poorer states.

It remains vital to understand that adaptation is pointless without mitigation. There is no adaptation possible, if the 5.5 to 7.1°C ‘business-as-usual’ path projected by the Hadley Centre is the one we follow. In order to have a world where adaptation remains a physical possibility, we need to be aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions, making sure their peak concentration does not reach a level where feedbacks will re-organize the world into something deeply hostile to humanity.

Institutionalizing concern for future generations

Within political and bureaucratic processes, nobody really speaks for future generations. In the area of the environment, there may be some voters, politicians, environmental non-governmental organizations (eNGOs), and bureaucrats who are concerned about the effects of current policies and behaviours on future generations. What is lacking is an organized mechanism through which those concerns can be made influential. At present, near-term concerns have an overwhelming grip on political influence. This is because of election cycles, as well as the willingness of almost everybody to delay pain and difficult decisions.

The question, then, is whether any political or bureaucratic mechanism could help shift the balance of influence towards those who are not yet here to express their preferences. Most depressingly, we could conclude that only extreme prosperity puts people in a position where they are willing to make small sacrifices for the benefit of future others. Arguably, Norway’s stabilization fund is an example of this. Most optimistically, it could be argued that all that is necessary is to provide clear information on the future consequences of present actions, and people will make changes voluntarily. Between those views is a perspective that focuses on building institutions that think for the long term. Doing so is certainly challenging, since such organizations must be shielded from year-to-year demands in order to function. That challenge is made even more acute by the necessity that, if any such organization is to be effective, some organization that currently exists and operates will need to cede some power to the new body.

Wood stoves, air pollution, and climate

Yesterday, Stella reminded me of one of the many trade-offs associated with climate change and environmental policies, generally. Montreal is considering a ban on new wood-burning appliances, on account of the local air pollution they cause. Wood certainly isn’t the cleanest burning stuff, especially when it is used in stoves that fail to achieve an ideal temperature and fuel-air mixture. That being said, burning sustainably harvested wood does not add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. This is because the trees being grown to supply the wood absorb as much carbon as the stoves are emitting.

In the long run, only biomass and renewables offer the prospect of unending energy. Encouraging the development of both is thus critical to making the transition to a zero-carbon global society. At the same time, other drawbacks do need to be considered: whether it’s the land and water use associated with biofuel production, the air pollution from biomass burning, or the damage caused by dams. These trade-offs illustrate how technology is never really a self-sufficient answer to environmental problems.

There are also further complexities on the climate side. What is the source of the wood? Is logging altering the albedo of the area, leading to greater or lesser absorption of solar radiation? Are the trees being felled absorbing atmospheric carbon at the same rate as the trees that will replace them? What are the climatic impacts of the physical cutting and transportation of the wood? What effect will the aerosols from the wood burning have on climate?

In the specific case of Montreal’s wood-burning stoves, I don’t know enough about the trade-offs involved to make a sensible suggestion. Perhaps it would be better to mandate that any wood-burning appliances meet emissions standards, rather than banning them completely, or perhaps that is infeasible for some reason and only a ban will work. For instance, it might just be too costly and impractical to create and enforce emissions standards for wood-fired devices. In the end, the business of living together in a finite world is inevitably one of compromise and politics.

Climate science conference in Copenhagen

The recently concluded International Scientific Congress on Climate Change has released the ‘key messages’ from the conference. Somewhat truncated, they are:

“Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised… There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts. “
“The research community is providing much more information to support discussions on “dangerous climate change”. Recent observations show that societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk.”
“Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’ regardless of how it is defined.”
“Climate change is having, and will have, strongly differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, on this generation and future generations, and on human societies and the natural world.”
“There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches… to deal effectively with the climate change challenge.”
“To achieve the societal transformation required to meet the climate change challenge, we must overcome a number of significant constraints and seize critical opportunities.”

The conference involved 2,500 delegates from nearly 80 countries, and was intended to consider scientific issues prior to the UNFCCC negotiating meeting in December. A synthesis report on the conference will be released in June.

There is still an enormous gap between what climate scientists say must be done in the near-term and what most governments have pledged to do. Hopefully, the two will converge sharply during the next year, and the UNFCCC meeting will produce a viable successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Environmental assessments in Canada

Reading about the plans of Canada’s federal government to limit environmental assessments, I was left wondering whether the term ‘environment’ is itself somewhat marginalizing. These days, people seem to generally accept the idea that ‘environment’ and ‘economy’ are competing interests and, by extension, that the former should sometimes be sacrificed for the latter. I wonder, then, what would change if part of the environmental assessment was split off and called a ‘human health assessment.’ People seem much less willing to accept a trade-off between money and health.

If there was a separate study on things like lung diseases, cancers, and human toxic exposure likely to arise from a project, it might get a lot more attention. That being said, there does seem to be a risk that once you isolate human health from the rest of the environmental assessment, nobody will care about the nature portion. I mean, who really cares about birds, fish, or polar bears anyhow?

Recycling anesthetics to fight global warming

Blue-zone technologies is a Canadian company that works with anesthetics. These gasses are potent greenhouse agents, and only about 5% of the gas used gets absorbed by the patient. The rest is normally vented, at a rate that makes each hospital’s anesthetic emissions comparable to the annual emissions from hundreds of cars. Blue-zone’s Deltasorb canisters are installed in operating rooms and capture the anesthetic breathed out by the patient. This prevents it from entering the atmosphere and allows the company to recycle the chemicals.

While the contribution of such technologies is relatively small, I appreciate the way in which this is a closed-loop system. Rather than treating the atmosphere as a dump for wastes, it is preventing the emission of harmful gasses. Further, rather than treating the captured wastes as garbage to be disposed of, it treats them as a feedstock for a new process of manufacture.

I learned about this from Tyler Hamilton’s Clean Break blog.

Lockheed Martin’s green advertising

One page 51 of the March 7th issue of The Economist, I noticed an unusual advertisement for Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor by revenue:

When you read the text at the bottom, the error in the ad is obvious. Somehow, the advertising firm they hired failed to include any actual Lockheed Martin products. It is all well and good to express your firm’s sincere support for reduced consumption and increased conservation, but it seems important to include some evidence of the concrete actions your firm takes.

With that in mind, I took it upon myself to add one of their quality products, the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile:

These are the missiles that make up the deterrent force of the United Kingdom, another entity sincerely committed to environmental protection. Lockheed also manufactures fighter jets, munitions, missile defence systems, and satellite-launching rockets.

I encourage others with a bit of Photoshop skill to add other Lockheed products to the ad. Here is my original photo. If someone could produce a higher-quality scan, that would be excellent.