Category: The environment

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

Waiting for 2019 election results

Canada’s 2019 election has been another frustrating one for those who think climate change is the most urgent and important political challenge we face – with Canada’s electoral system and party structure working against us on one hand and the practical effect that the Liberals and Conservatives are controlled by oil-linked industries including finance and the auto sector on the other.

Nobody is proposing a plan for Canada to do a fair share in controlling the problem and overcoming fossil fuel dependence, except maybe the Greens who cannot form a government.

The expectation for my riding is that Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland will win, followed by NDP, Conservative, and Green candidates. That leaves me pretty free to vote as I wish. I do feel there is some purpose in rewarding the Liberals for their inadequate but still somewhat serious climate policy, in contrast with the rollback to Harper-era delay with the Conservatives plan. At the same time, the party has been incoherent on the issue (like all the others parties) vaguely supporting the general aim of decarbonization and planetary stability but making near-term economic choices that show only a superficial interest in overcoming fossil fuel dependence. The NDP may be theoretically better on the issue, but their positions in recent years have been inconsistent to the degree that they don’t seem likely to be much better than the Liberals.

In the end I’ll probably vote Liberal or Green: the former as a way of saying that the minimum standard of a rising carbon tax is crucial and must be maintained, or the latter as a way of saying climate change is much more important than the other issues being contested.

I just hope we don’t end up with a Scheer government. Living through the Harper years was painful enough for anyone who can see that we’re squandering our chance for a cheap and low-conflict route to climatic stability, guaranteeing a at a minimum that we will need to pay far more to solve the problem after industry-backed delay than we would have needed to if we really got started after the UN climate convention in 1992.

The IMF on carbon taxes

Carbon taxes have begun to play a strange role in debates on climate change politics. Designed to appeal to conservatives they are now a focus of rage on the political right. At the same time, they are supported by some big fossil fuel companies who see them as a comparatively small cost and a potential source of certainty about future policy.

Recently, the IMF commented:

The Washington-based Fund said the battle against climate change could only be won if the average carbon tax levied by its member states increased from $2 (£1.63) a ton (907kg) to $75 a ton.

The IMF said governments worried about a political backlash against big increases in the cost of heating homes and motoring, and should use the extra revenue raised from the tax to compensate consumers.

“To limit global warming to 2C or less – the level deemed safe by science – large emitting countries need to take ambitious action,” IMF economists said.

“For example, they should introduce a carbon tax set to rise quickly to $75 a ton in 2030. This would mean household electric bills would go up by 43% cumulatively over the next decade on average – more in countries that still rely heavily on coal in electricity generation, less elsewhere. Gasoline would cost 14% more on average.”

Calculations by the IMF’s economists show that a $75-a-ton carbon tax would also lead – once inflation has been taken into account – to an average 214% increase in the cost of coal and a 68% increase in natural gas. For the UK, the increases would be 157% for coal, 51% for natural gas, 43% for electricity and 8% for petrol.

The IMF has something of a reputation for thinking about policy, not politics, and it’s hard to see a carbon tax like this being implemented in any major democratic country.

From Greta Thunberg’s UN address

“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.”

Greta Thunberg’s full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

September 27th Climate Strike

After attending half of a classmate’s job talk for a law and political science position at Guelph I photographed today’s Climate Strike in Toronto. It was a big organic crowd, with some contingents from labour or specific causes who were clearly together but where most people carried home-made signs which didn’t come out of a print shop or an activists’ art build.

It’s good to see the level of concern, which is perhaps hardening into a willingness to demand action. That’s what it will take with a government as deferential to industry as Canada’s is. If Justin Trudeau hadn’t twisted a little to help SNC-Lavalin that would certainly have been the default approach in Canada’s civil service, which exists in symbiosis with the industries which it is meant to regulate. They fall over themselves to bail out the automobile industry, so the scale of changes necessary to address climate change is broadly unthinkable to them: totally outside the scope of what they see as possible to implement. They’re also the guardians of federalism, so the inter-provincial dynamics of fossil fuel and climate change politics are frightening to them, strengthening a trained impulse to generally try to muddle through with as little fundamental change as possible.

Preventing the worst effects of climate change now demands boldness far beyond what the Liberals and Conservatives are offering — perhaps more along the lines of what Green Party members whisper to each other during fearful conversations about climate change and the human future. The world of 2000 looked nothing like the world of 1900, and 2100 may be more different still. All of this can go: rapid transport options available to anyone with money, cities dominated by the private car, exotic foods in all seasons, cheap and automatic indoor climate control in summer and winter, suburbia. The populace takes it all for granted politically and ultimately emotionally, but it’s fragile. Indeed, it has never really been functioning in the way people thought, since the interactions between people behaving that way and the rest of the biosphere gradually erode away the web of life on which human survival depends. I think we’ll find that our personal options will inevitably be constrained in some ways in the future, which will produce a series of political fights which will make hyperbole about carbon taxes seem like gentle childhood provocation.

Hey, I tend to be a worrier though. Maybe Greta will provoke the world sufficiently to drive politicians everywhere to reverse their foolish commitment to continued fossil fuel dependence and implement the kind of rapid global decarbonization which is feasible with cooperation and cheap compared to suffering the effects of unconstrained climate change. The logical and ethical case for action is a slam dunk, it’s just hard to accept that we actually need to make sacrifices so that future generations won’t inherit a degraded world where changing global conditions continuously imperil them and in which the richness of life has been sharply circumscribed by our unwillingness to get over coal, oil, and gas at a rate that does justice to the inheritors of the Earth.

It’s also logically possible that some combination of technological development and political change will lead to the kind of mass renewable deployments being called for at rallies like today’s, and by organizations like 350.org. David MacKay’s book is convincing that there is enough renewable energy potential to give all the world’s billions of inhabitants a standard of living comparable to that in Europe today, based around a much more equitable distribution of global energy use.

Trudeau’s false radicalism

Geoff Dembicki has a piece out about how Trudeau’s method is to promise substantive reforms to voters, while privately comforting business with the understanding they won’t really be meaningful:

So on climate, for instance, he was presented as this kind of river-paddling environmental Adonis. He promised that fossil fuel projects wouldn’t go ahead without the permission of communities. But the Liberals create these public spectacles of their bold progressiveness while they quietly assure the corporate elite that their interests will be safeguarded. So at the same time Trudeau was going around the country and convincing people that he was this great climate hope, the Liberal party had for years been assuring big oil and gas interests that there would not be any fundamental change to the status quo.

…

The Liberal climate plan essentially is a reworking of the business plan of Big Oil and the broader corporate lobby. Most Canadians probably wouldn’t realize this because of the nature of coverage in the mainstream media and the polarized political debate about the carbon tax, but overwhelmingly there is an astonishing consensus among the corporate elite in support of a carbon tax.

The plan is to support a carbon tax and to effectively make it a cover for expanded tarsands production and pipelines. That was a plan hatched by the Business Council of Canada back in 2006, 2007. For 20 years oil companies had resisted any kind of regulation or any kind of carbon tax and fought it seriously. But they started to realize that it would be a kind of concession that they would have to make in order to assure stability and their bottom line not being harmed. The climate bargain that Trudeau went on to strike with Alberta of a carbon tax plus expanded tarsands production was precisely the deal that Big Oil had wanted.

For a long time, Canadians prioritizing climate change have had no effective political option. Under first-past-the-post Green and even NDP votes are often counterproductive protests. I’m wary about criticism of the Liberals increasing the odds of a Conservative win, but I don’t think we should lie either.

In the research

It’s 4:41am and I am in my 10 1/2th hour of thesis work since I last slept. For weeks I have been working my way through my notebooks, compiling interview reports based on my discussions with campus fossil fuel divestment organizers in Canada. I have been paying special attention to getting the details from this interview, reviewing more of the raw audio than normal. That’s because it seems like an especially valuable account which speaks informatively on many of my key research questions.

That is making me feel that despite all the frustrations and sacrifices which have been involved in the project, it has been worthwhile to seek these organizers out and get their direct accounts of what happened and what it meant to them. Even if the project ends up being of limited theoretical interest to academics, there is an undeniable empirical value about having collected this information while people still have fresh memories of their involvement. Similarly, even if activist readers of the dissertation find my analysis unconvincing, being exposed to these direct accounts will enrich their understanding of what happened, reinforcing some of what they already believed with new evidence and perhaps challenging some of what they believe by showing that people had other experiences and reactions.

I have 17 interview reports left to write. Then I will move on to coding their contents by theme, finishing my literature review, producing my first complete draft manuscript, and then beginning the process of review by committee members and making changes in response to their comments.

The Anthropocene may be an event, not an era

An informative article by Peter Brannen in The Atlantic contrasts the plausible duration of the geological evidence of human civilization against the scale at which we normally designate geological epochs. It suggests convincingly that the idea of an Anthropocene epoch is misplaced:

What humans are doing on the planet, then, unless we endure for millions to tens of millions of years, is extremely transient. In fact, there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history — wild climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes. They appear as strange lines in the rock, but no one calls them epochs. Some reach the arbitrary threshold of “mass extinction,” but many have no name. Moreover, lasting only a few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years in duration, they’re all considered events. In our marathon of Earth history, the epochs would occasionally pass by on the side of the road like towns, while these point-like “events” would present themselves to us only fleetingly, like pebbles underfoot.

Fifty-six million years ago, the Earth belched 5,000 gigatons of carbon (the equivalent of burning all our fossil-fuel reserves) over roughly 5,000 years into the oceans and atmosphere, and the planet warmed 5 to 8 degrees Celsius. The warming set off megafloods and storms, and wiped out coral reefs globally. It took the planet more than 150,000 years to cool off. But this “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” is considered an event.

Thirty-eight million years before that, buried in the backwaters of the late Cretaceous, CO2 jumped as many as 2,400 parts per million, the planet warmed perhaps 8 degrees Celsius, the ocean lost half its oxygen (in our own time, the ocean has lost a — still alarming — 2 percent of its oxygen), and seawater reached 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) over much of the globe. Extinction swept through the seas. In all, it took more than half a million years. This was Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 2. Though it was no epoch, if you had been born 200,000 years into this event, you’d die roughly 300,000 years before it was over.

A similar catastrophe struck 28 million years before, in the early Cretaceous, and again 60 million years earlier still in the Jurassic. And, again, 201 million years ago. And halfway through the Triassic, 234 million years ago. And 250 million, 252 million, and 262 million years ago. The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 years — 400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. These are transformative, planet-changing paroxysms that last on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, reroute the trajectory of life, and leave little more than strange black lines in the rocks, buried within giant stacks of rocks that make up the broader epochs. But none of them constitute epochs in and of themselves. All were events, and all — at only a few tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of years — were blisteringly short.

…

Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.

Instead of our cities or our plastics or our radioactive isotopes, the author suggests: “The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause.” Humanity’s impact may be more perceptible in what we have taken away from the totality of life, instead of in what we have built or even the pollution we created.

Related:

The environmental effectiveness of “green” funds

It seems like a plausible rule for climate change reduction schemes that the people running them will generally prioritize other political and economic objectives over actual emission reductions. This meshes together with other forms of wishful thinking, where we give ourselves credit for overly generous assumptions about reduced emissions, then find every possible way to cheat to reduce the stringency of the system.

The latest example:

As so often, I am reminded of Stephen Gardiner 5th and 6th propositions about climate ethics from 2011:

In the perfect moral storm, our position is not that of idealized neutral observers, but rather judges in our own case, with no one to properly hold us accountable. This makes it all too easy to slip into weak and self-serving ways of thinking, supported by a convenient apathy or ideological fervor. Moreover, the devices of such corruption are sophisticated, and often function indirectly, by infiltrating the terms of ethical and epistemic argument.

And:

Given this, we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.

It’s also reminiscent of Greta Thunberg this year:

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time. Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

No climate policy ever works as well as in an ideal case because those implementing it always have higher, more local, and more immediate priorities than the policy’s effectiveness at controlling climate change.

When I was at the Treasury Board Secretariat, for instance, I was told that when it came to the money the government was giving to car companies to supposedly improve their environmental performance it didn’t matter to us if there were any actual environmental benefits from what they were proposing, and it was similarly outside our mandate to consider whether the companies would have done the same things without the money.

We’re not coming at this like people determined to solve a problem. Instead, we’re acting like people who are being nagged to take action on a problem which we half-recognize but mostly just want to ignore. That meshes menacingly with how the problem keeps turning out to be more alarming than we feared, and where drastic action is necessary immediately to avoid catastrophe.

Germany: more climate concern than successful action

Among other things, this reinforces my view that “awareness raising” isn’t very meaningful and certainly isn’t sufficient to keep us from wrecking the global climate:

At the European elections 48% of voters said climate change was their top concern. The Green Party came second in that election and now leads Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in polls. Every week “Fridays for Future” protests fill the heart of Berlin with marching schoolchildren.

…

Much of the frustration comes from Germany’s sluggish performance. In the past decade it has spent a fortune rejigging its energy system while barely reducing emissions. This embarrassment comes with a price tag; under EU rules Germany could be liable for penalties worth tens of billions should it fail to meet its 2030 target. The 2020 goal is already abandoned.

Two factors explain this. First is Germany’s ongoing dependence on coal, particularly lignite, the dirty brown sort. Thanks to hefty subsidies, renewables account for over 40% of electricity production. But Mrs Merkel’s sudden abandonment of nuclear power after a tsunami-induced meltdown at a Japanese reactor in 2011, and warped price signals that made gas-fired power uneconomical, meant that cheap coal has made up much of the rest. The last mine is due to be shuttered by 2038. Too late, say activists.

Being “aware” or even concerned about climate change doesn’t have any importance if it doesn’t change behaviour, if people continue to default to dirty forms of energy, and if people won’t tolerate costs and risks as part of decarbonization.