Category: The environment

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

Obama’s third book

Having just finished Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, I appreciated the chance to get his perspective on the years of his first administration. Perhaps the most consistent substantive point that struck me is the difficult and ambiguous balance between pressing a decision maker to go further on an issue like climate change and hampering that person by fracturing their support or rejecting the best available compromise. As Obama himself points out several times, it isn’t a question with a single straightforward answer. He both expresses his frustration with people who sapped support for his best efforts by demanding more and acknowledged that the science of climate change demanded more than he was able to do. He certainly provides a great deal of insight into the practical and political constraints, including the major barriers that climate change has been of lower priority to almost everybody than more immediate and practical issues like economic performance, and the difficulty in getting people to see effort and resources expended to avoid a bad outcome when compared with efforts to achieve short-term and immediate purposes.

The book documents with dismay the breakdown between verifiable facts and both public opinion and political reporting, without suggesting much about what could be done about it. Ominously, he quotes Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh saying: “In uncertain times, Mr. President, the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.” In a century where our destabilized climate is sure to produce more and more instability, we need to find a way to cooperate and take the long view.

Cultivating a conservative climate movement

Let’s begin with two simple premises:

  1. The amount of climate change the world experiences depends on the total quantity of fossil fuels that get burned. As such, there is little value in avoiding burning particular coal, oil, and gas reserves in one time period if we then burn them in another
  2. In Canada, the US, and the UK the electoral pattern for a century or more has been alternating between relatively left-wing and relatively right-wing governments

I think it follows from this that for climate change mitigation policy to succeed, it cannot only be supported by progressives or supporters of left-of-centre parties.

It’s true that the most prehistoric form of climate change denial (saying there is no problem, or it’s a problem too small to require action) is concentrated among political conservatives. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry has outsize influence over conservative politics, parties, and politicians. To me — however — these observations are akin to the argument that since 85% of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels it is imposible or unrealistic to try to replace them. In both cases, the depth of the current dependency demonstrates the need for change, rather than its impossibility.

Recently, UK Conservative MP Alicia Kearns and U.S. Republican congressperson John Curtis co-authored an article in the Times of London: The left should not dominate the conversation on climate change.

They also appeared in a recent panel hosted by the Hudson Institute:

Progressives tend to be very opposed to the argument or idea that conservatives need to be won over to climate change mitigation through fossil fuel abolition. The intersectional climate justice analysis holds that climate change is a symptom of systemic injustice and cannot be corrected through narrow solutions which do not eliminate colonialism or capitalism or patriarchy. It is a joined-together worldview that clearly motivates a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s a sound strategy for avoiding catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, I challenge the claim that only systematic change in our political or economic system can solve the problem. Progressives also tend to assert that renewable energy is cheaper and better in every way than fossil fuel, implicitly acknowledging that it could be possible to replace where our energy comes from without fundamentally changing much more about society.

I can see at least a couple of routes for moving forward with cultivating a conservative commitment to climate change mitigation.

Thinking about the span of the next couple of decades, I think conservatism in the English-speaking democracies may be posed for a huge splitting apart between comparative pragmatists who are willing to accept what science has unambiguously shown and pure ideologues whose policy preferences do not relate to what is really happening in the world. If that split can be enlarged to the point of crisis — when those on the empiricist side will no longer tolerate supporting the same candidates and parties as those on the fantasist side — those willing to consider evidence will likely have a long-term electoral advantage as those most implacably opposed to climate action die off, young people with a better understanding of climate change become politically dominant, and as the undeniable effects of climate change become even plainer.

Another plausible route to cultivating conservative support for climate change mitigation is through faith communities. The Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, and others have been outspoken from the centre of their institutions about the need to control climate change. It’s true that there are some whose theology sees the Earth exclusively as a set of resources to be exploited, or who believe that a religious apocalypse will soon bring an end to the material world making long-term problems irrelevant, but I suspect there are many more in all faiths and denominations who can be won over to the view that we have a duty to care for creation and not to pass on a degraded world to our successors.

I think part of the progressive wariness about outreach to conservatives arises from how the intersectional view ties climate change into the social justice and economic redistribution agendas which animated the left long before climate change became a mainstream concern. Cooperating with conservatives on the narrow issue of replacing fossil fuels would not advance the general project of abolishing capitalism or re-ordering the global system. Some see climate change as a crisis which would be ‘wasted’ if our response only sustains planetary stability. Others convincingly point out that even without climate change as a problem the idea that resource use and waste production can increase indefinitely is fundamentally at odds with a finite planet. All that said, climate change seems to be the most pressing and serious societal problem facing humanity, and resolving it would give us more time and a more stable global environment in which to pursue other aims of justice.

I don’t believe either progressives or conservatives can or should win one another over to their entire worldview. The progressive climate change movement is an enormous success and source of hope, and I am not calling for it to be dismantled or fundamentally altered, though they ought to give more consideration to cross-ideological alliances on certain vital issues. As long as effective climate change policies are something which one side assembles and the other dismantles we cannot succeed, and so winning over conservatives to climate action is an indispensable condition of success.

Related:

Canada and a just transition off fossil fuels

At a town hall tonight on a just transition away from fossil fuels — organized by 350.org and attended by Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May and NDP climate change critic Laurel Collins, but which environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson declined to attend — May repeatedly brought up the Task Force on Just Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities as a model. In particular, she emphasized the importance of countering the narrative that escaping our fossil fuel dependence will be bad for jobs, and of respectfully consulting with the most affected communities when making policy.

The central nonsense of Justin Trudeau’s climate change policy is his unwillingness to accept that only fossil fuel abolition will let us avoid catastrophic climate change. Canada has already more than used up our fair share of the global carbon budget, and building new long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure will only increase the costs of our transition when we need to scrap them early and scramble even faster to build climate-safe replacements. Canada’s assertion that we can keep expanding bitumen sands and LNG production and exports is also entirely at odds with what fairness and pragmatism demand globally. The richest and dirtiest states need to lead the way, not keep making excuses, or the global logjam against sufficient action will be impossible to overcome.

Nuclear energy policy

This week’s Economist has a pretty solid middle-of-the-road editorial position on nuclear energy in a world with a climate crisis:

Solar and wind power are now much cheaper, but they are intermittent. Providing a reliable grid is a lot easier if some of its generating capacity can be assumed to be available all the time. Nuclear provides such capacity with no ongoing emissions, and it is doing so safely and at scale around the world.

Despite this, safe and productive nuclear plants are being closed across the rich world. Those closures and the retirement of older sites mean that advanced economies could lose two-thirds of their nuclear capacity by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. If new fossil-fuel infrastructure fills the gap, it will last for decades. If renewables do so, the opportunity cost will be measured in gigatonnes of carbon. Renewables replacing nuclear capacity would almost always be better deployed to replace fossil-fuel capacity.

Sometimes the closure of nuclear plants is largely a matter of economics. In places where emitting carbon dioxide comes with no price, such as America, the benefits of being emissions-free are hidden from the market. That hurts nuclear, and it should be rectified. When closure is political, the onus is on Green politicians, in particular, to change their tune. To hasten the decline of nuclear power is wilfully to hobble the world in the greatest environmental struggle of all.

Related topics:

Papers on nuclear energy:

Canada’s nuclear industry:

Nuclear waste

Nuclear economics

Nuclear energy and climate change

New reactor types and designs

Nuclear energy and weapon proliferation

Accidents and safety

Open thread: British Columbia’s Site C Peace River dam

There’s already a thread on dams and climate change, but B.C.’s Site C project raises many different subjects of interest: how different climate-safe energy options compare, what purposes new generation will be serving, and who gets to make the decisions, with particular regard to Indigenous rights.

Related:

Lessons from successful fossil fuel divestment campaigns

Divest Canada — a self-initiated, volunteer-run effort to support fossil fuel divestment campaigns at Canadian universities — recently hosted a webinar on lessons learned from recent successful campaigns:

It is encouraging on several fronts. It’s great to see all these groups patiently implementing strategy on their own initiative and yet in parallel. It brings hope to see the commitment and dedication of the activists. Above all, it suggests that the most important success factor for a divestment campaign is being able to survive long enough for an opportunity to arise with sympathetic administrators, all the while building the intellectual and moral case along with campus-wide support.

Sources on fossil fuel divestment

Even while working to adapt my thesis chapters in response to comments from my supervisor, I still regularly come across new popular and scholarly writing about the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement.

Tonight, that is former McGill professor Gregory Mikkelson’s article: “Divestment and Democracy at a Canadian University“.

It’s frustrating that I talk so much with people about divestment but cannot share my dissertation contents until they have gone through review by my supervisory and examination committee members. My growing bibliography is public, however, since almost everything I am citing is available in libraries or online.

UVic’s partial divestment

It’s hard to know what the exact count is when you count partial divestments, but UVic has joined the set of Canadian universities acting on fossil fuel divestment by transferring $80 million to a short-term bond meant to reduce the CO2 intensity of their portfolio.

All told they have about $225 million and they have pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of the portfolio by 2030. I don’t know if the carbon intensity of a portfolio is really a meaningful idea (how do you divide responsibility for Boeing’s emissions between shareholders and customers, for instance?). I’m likewise skeptical about targets set beyond when the current leadership will hold power.

The hope with divestment is that universities would be persuaded by the arguments that investing in fossil fuels is unethical and financially dubious. Universities have found many ways to act which fall short of condemning the fossil fuel industry and withdrawing all financial support. These precedents arguable erode the case for action, since they substitute the idea that the fossil fuel industry is uniquely dangerous and unworthy of support with the idea that essentially business-as-usual investment management can somehow deal with the problem of climate change.

A 2021 Canadian federal election?

I am hearing rumours and media speculation about a Canadian federal election this year, and my response to the state of Canadian politics remains weary disappointment blending into anger.

Trudeau and the Liberals are objectively a poor government. If they succeed in their policy preferences, they will be among the villains rightly condemned for the rest of history as knowing climate arsonists who chose to threaten and impoverish humanity indefinitely to protect the short-term profits of their status quo supporters.

The Conservatives would be objectively worse, but they are the other plausible party of government. The NDP might theoretically be better, but I have no confidence in that. If they ever pull off the unprecedented and form a government, it’s not clear to me that fossil fuel abolition and climate change mitigation would be their priorities — especially with some unions supportive of new fossil fuel projects.

People don’t like to believe that they’re governed by incompetents who are making choices that will destroy their societies (and/or pure panderers with little interest in what’s true), so many people I know socially leap to defend Trudeau’s Liberals. Broadly I would say this is indicative of our society-wide denial about how bad the choices we’re making are and how severe the long-term consequences will be. People are psychologically unwilling to believe that, so they conjure instead a fictional but comforting reality where their choices make sense and Trudeau’s nonsense about needing new oil pipeline revenue to abolish fossil fuels is anything but politically expedient incoherence.

Heat pumps

David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air emphasizes heat pumps as a decarbonization tool:

Notice that heat pumps offer a system that can be “better than 100%- efficient.” For example the “best gas” power station, feeding electricity to heat pumps can deliver a combination of 30%-efficient electricity and 80%- efficient heat, a “total efficiency” of 110%. No plain CHP [combined heat and power — where waste heat from energy production is used for heating] system could ever match this performance.

Let me spell this out. Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condensing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas. If you want to heat lots of buildings using natural gas, you could install condensing boilers, which are “90% efficient,” or you could send the same gas to a new gas power station making electricity and install electricity-powered heat pumps in all the buildings; the second solution’s efficiency would be somewhere between 140% and 185%. It’s not necessary to dig big holes in the garden and install underfloor heating to get the benefits of heat pumps; the best air-source heat pumps (which require just a small external box, like an air-conditioner’s) can deliver hot water to normal radiators with a coefficient of performance above 3.

There is also some evidence now that US house owners are sufficiently mindful about long-term energy costs to see their economic advantages reflected in house prices. In Nature Energy Xingchi Shen et al. conclude: “Residences with an air source heat pump enjoy a 4.3–7.1% (or US$10,400–17,000) price premium on average.” (See also)

Some of the usual impediments to environmental retrofits apply here. You generally need to pay for the system up front and then recoup savings over a long period, which means you need to be able to finance it initially. Also, there can be a lack of coordination between renters, landlords, and building owners. Still, technologically heat pumps are promising and we need non-fossil alternatives for building heating and cooling.