Category: The environment

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

Media attention to the case for divestment

I was heartened yesterday to see the CBC publishing an article about one of the scholars behind the case for divestment which was made successfully at Cambridge: Academic from Saskatoon plays key role in Cambridge University divesting from fossil fuels.

The report they link — Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge by Ellen Quigley, Emily Bugden, and Anthony Odgers — is particularly notable for its inclusion of a broad range of scholarly work on divestment from a range of fields.

Belliveau on the CFFD movement

Having missed its importance after putting it on a to do list back in May 2019, I have printed off Emilia Belliveau’s 2018 master’s thesis from UVic about the fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada, and particularly how it has affected the movement’s organizers.

That’s my main research question as well, making it surprising that I didn’t see the extent of this document’s overlap until I rediscovered it.

I will have a few different responses in my dissertation once it is published, but it’s a relief to say that this document hasn’t called attention to anything massive which I have missed. Incorporating it, therefore, it mostly a matter of adding additional references in the lit review and footnotes.

Related:

Shue on intergenerational climate responsibility and vulnerability

“Doing nothing” about climate change in the sense of simply continuing business as usual is — far from actually doing nothing — continuing to change the environmental conditions that future generations will face for the worst. To persist in the activities that make climate change worse, and thereby make living conditions for future generations worse, is not merely to decline to provide protection. It is to inflict danger, and to inflict it on people who are vulnerable to us and to whom we are invulnerable. The relationship is entirely asymmetric: they are at our mercy, but we are out of their reach. Causation runs through time in only one direction. Lucky for us.

Shue, Henry. “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities” in Pachauri, Rajendra Kumar, Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue. Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 151

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Strident progressivism versus incrementalist centrism

The debate on the left about what lessons to take from the 2020 US election has the same contours as the main debate within climate change activism, with one side arguing that the success of the right demonstrates that Democrats have compromised too much with Republicans while a strongly progressive candidate and platform would have done better with voters while the other argues that since most of the available votes are to the right of progressives the Democrats’ promotion of policies which appeal to their most fervent base turns off centrist voters while energizing the conservative base.

This is a lot like the debate between climate justice advocates who favour a broadly intersectional progressive agenda including economic redistribution and the endorsement of a broad range of social justice causes and climate-energy or CO2-energy advocates who think the most plausible path to success is to remain focused narrowly on climate in ways calculated to not offend or challenge those with more conservative political views.

Since both arguments rely on counterfactuals (if only we had done this or that) the debate is hard to resolve. Either can be reconciled with the political outcomes we have observed, though each has contradictory implications for what the best approach moving forward is.

On climate specifically, I think one crucial element is the ability of decarbonization policies to endure between changes of government and party. If decarbonization is integrated into a progressive left agenda there is both the risk that the elements with more immediate political benefits will be given priority over the more painful changes needed to deal with climate change and the danger that the next right-wing government will dismantle the whole assembly.

To function, democracies need a consensus that the decisions of past governments were legitimate and that society as a whole needs predictability in what laws and regulations will be in force so that they can make appropriate long-term decisions. The historical pattern so far in climate change policies has been to see comparatively ambitious but still dreadfully inadequate proposals from left-wing governments and then their dismantling and contradiction by succeeding right-wing governments. Breaking out of that pattern somehow seems like our only path to the durable consensus on decarbonization which will need to hold for decades if we’re to avoid catastrophic climate change.

British Columbia’s 2020 election

I’m not celebrating NDP premier John Horgan’s successful gamble on an election to secure a majority government. For one thing, I think minority governments which sometimes seek support from the Greens are likely to enact more responsible climate change policies. For another, I have been consistently frustrated by the NDP’s inconsistent and inadequate positions on climate change.

Both federally and provincially I think it would be desirable for the left-wing parties (Liberals, NDP, and Greens) to adopt a Pact for Humanity in which they pledge to at least keep in place their predecessors’ climate change mitigation policies. That would help give some certainty to industries, municipalities, and individuals who are deciding whether to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure or alternatives. Of course, there would still be uncertainty from possible future Conservative governments which will roll everything back, but it’s better than having the left remain split on what approach to take and left-wing parties competing with each other about whether to support industry at the expense of the environment, keep tightening carbon restrictions in line with the best scientific and economic advice, or keep jumping unproductively between one approach to GHG regulation and another.

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Is plastic recycled?

There’s a story doing the rounds about how plastic recycling has always been a scam. Consumers started to get concerned about the ecological consequences of throwing plastic away and — despite knowing it was infeasible and uneconomical to actually recycle — they slapped little logos on everything implying that they can and will be recycled, thus alleviating the consumer concern without doing anything about the problem.

NPR’s Planet Money did a show on whether recycling is worthwhile at all.

In particular, people argue that recycling as a solution suits the corporate agenda by shifting responsibility from the firms creating the problem to individuals, regardless of whether they are at all positioned to make things better. This can be equated to the ‘carbon footprint’ idea and the approach to climate change mitigation based on individual action, helping the fossil fuel industry avoid regulation and responsibility.

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Living without limits

I find it’s good practice to approach literally anybody, from a municipal worker who I am passing on the sidewalk while they’re performing official duties to clerks in shops with an immediate attempt at a substantive conversation, not just a rote exchange of greetings or well-wishes. By that means the other morning I got the chance to ask why Toronto had removed all the foot-pedals from the municipal garbage and recycling bins (you can see one on the right here), which had been a convenient way to avoid touching the machine and not having to push a spring-loaded cover back with the refuse you’re trying to deposit. The two crewmembers told me it is because people did too much illegal dumping with the footpedal-enabled system, and it let to too much disruption as waste went bad and was gotten into by creatures.

Open thread: steel without coal

The most pressing challenge for bringing climate change under control is replacing the world’s energy sources for electricity production, building heating and cooling, and transport. At the same time, humanity needs to learn how to do everything necessary to maintain a technological civilization without fossil fuels. That includes agriculture, as well as the production of crucial raw materials including steel.

This may be one area where hydrogen is a real solution:

[O]ne of the biggest industrial sources of carbon dioxide is not directly energy-related at all.

This is the reduction of iron ore (usually an oxide of iron) to the metal itself by reacting the ore with carbon monoxide made from coke. That produces iron and carbon dioxide. React the ore with hydrogen instead, and the waste product is water. Several firms—including ArcelorMittal, a multinational steelmaker, and a conglomerate of SSAB, a Finnish-Swedish steelmaker, LKAB, a Swedish iron-ore producer, and Vattenfall, an energy company, also Swedish—are examining this possibility.

Climate-safe sources of raw materials are necessary both practically and politically, since people point to the use of fossil fuels in their production as reasons why they cannot be abandoned.