Category: The environment

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

Conspiracy theories among climate change activists

Climate change activists often (plausibly) assert that “the science is settled” and present themselves as the informed contrast to people whose lack of scientific understanding or manipulation by fossil fuel actors has left them with the false belief that climate change isn’t happening.

At Toronto’s smallish Rise for Climate march on Saturday, I saw at least four people who were trying to convince people that chemtrails from aircraft are actually secret nefarious geoengineering by governments. Along with a large banner with pictures of aircraft chemtrails and frightening claims, they were distributing a colour handout:

It’s a bizarre document. It claims that chemtrails (themselves a conspiracy theory that has been around for many years) are a secret “form of climate change mitigation” via solar radiation management (SRM). It also claims, however, that “SRM aerosol cloud canopies trap more heat than is deflected by SRM programs”, so the supposed chemtrail program actually makes climate change worse. It also claims that along with the chemtrails “associated microwave transmission atmospheric manipulation” is “decimating the ozone layer”. It’s a fever dream re-interpretation of contemporary environmental politics, marrying an old conspiracy theory with new concerns about the real potential technology of geoengineering by solar radiation management. They throw in that the geoengineering chemtrails cause autism, along with allergies and dementia, and claim that the program “was fully deployed immediately after WWII”.

It’s crazy from top to bottom, from the claim that the secret program is somehow “illegal” to the contradictory claims that the program is “officially denied” but also that there are “countless official documents which confirm” it. It’s also a bit ironic given how self-conscious the public conversation about geoengineering has been, including about whether any sort of testing could produce unwanted side-effects and how any geoengineering ought to be governed.

When you lose trust in formal sources of information like governments and scientific bodies, it becomes impossible to have an informed position on climate change. The internet is full of nonsense, as everyone expects, and the environmentalist movement includes many who are highly credulous when it comes to claims that they are inclined to believe, whether those are about health and nutrition or about government conspiracies.

India and coal

One frequent talking point from people who see no problem with continuing to enlarge the bitumen sands is that action by countries like Canada is pointless as long as larger places like India and China continue to build large amounts of coal capacity.

The Economist recently reported (in an issue with a cover story about how “the world is losing the war against climate change“):

Although coal is horribly filthy, India is utterly dependent on it. It generates more than three-quarters of the country’s electricity. Mining it and turning it into power accounts for a tenth of India’s industrial production. It provides jobs as well as power. Coal India, a state-owned coal miner that is the world’s largest, employs, at last count, 370,000 people, and there are up to 500,000 working in the coal industry at large. Far from reining in production, Coal India plans to increase it, from 560m tonnes in 2017 to 1bn tonnes by 2020. The government’s target for national production is 1.3bn-1.9bn tonnes by 2030.

…

Coal’s life will be made harder by increased competition from cheap solar and wind. Because of that, Mr Subramanian suggests that Mr Modi, his solar-evangelist boss, should slow down his roll out of renewable energy. “In my ideal world India should do a bit less renewable and a bit more coal for the next 10-15 years,” Mr Subramanian said in May. Some dismiss his comments as deliberately provocative. Yet he has rubbed salt into the wounds of environmentalists by describing efforts to wean energy-poor countries such as India off fossil fuels as “carbon imperialism”.

Coal’s staying power may be reinforced by India’s sense of immunity from international pressure to clean up its act. India resists the idea that it cannot put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere simply because the rich world, which produced much more per head during its own development, has used up all the available “carbon space”. In fact, the government continues to support coal projects to keep them afloat. A report by the Centre for Financial Accountability, a think-tank focused on India, says that coal projects in India received almost three times as much support as renewable-energy projects in 2017, mostly from government-owned banks.

Dealing with climate change is only possible on the basis of broad and effective international cooperation. States like India which are still building huge amounts of new energy infrastructure have the capacity to make choices that will make avoiding catastrophic climate change impossible. Persuading them to make different choices requires many things, including financial and technical assistance, but critically it requires that countries like Canada be willing to move first and accept what seems like an economic sacrifice for the sake of a better future for everyone. I say “seems” like a sacrifice because in a world with extreme climate change the cash Canada is banking through continued fossil fuel development is liable to be meaningless.

Everyone who has to give something up or adjust their lifestyle about decarbonization seems to raise some kind of ‘fairness’ argument: why should I give up what I feel I deserve? Why should I act when others aren’t doing so? Countries like India where extreme poverty remains widespread have a genuine and convincing case that they should not have to sacrifice important human welfare developments for the sake of global decarbonization. Still, coal is so awful once you add up the health, environment, and climate costs that even the poorest places with the worst problems should not still be deploying it. For Canada and other rich states to credibly encourage that requires both far more aggressive domestic action to stop fossil fuel development and the determination to provide sufficient technical and financial assistance to help states like India decarbonize quickly enough to help us all avoid global catastrophe.

Australia’s climate change vulnerability and inaction

You would think a country where the entire state of New South Wales, responsible for a quarter of their agricultural output, is currently in drought and where water scarcity threatens their long-term viability as a country wouldn’t be such a climate change villain. Their wildfires keep worsening and their most important river is drying up. Alas, as with Canada’s oil-selling obsession, Australia seems more concerned about selling as much coal as possible to China as with maintaining a habitable continent.

Even without factoring in such exports, their emissions of greenhouse gas pollution have been steadily rising since 2013 after a period of general decline going back to 2005. Perhaps that’s unsurprising as they repealed their carbon tax in 2014.

This ties into a frightening possibility: as the most vulnerable rich countries are hit harder and harder by climate change they may not draw the lesson that international cooperation is necessary, retreating instead into self-defeating selfishness.

Explaining climate inaction

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a long and controversial article by Nathaniel Rich which purports to explain why, despite decades of strong scientific consensus about the seriousness of climate change and the action needed to keep it under control, we’re still on track for catastrophic warming: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

The account is disputed, among others by Naomi Klein who questions the idea that ‘human nature’ is to blame: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.

The Economist‘s cover story has a similar theme: The world is losing the war against climate change. I have written before about how inconsistent their coverage is and, in particular, how they have never reconciled their acceptance of the need to confront climate change with the unfaltering priority they accord to continued economic growth.

“Transition” isn’t adequate for what climate change will mean

Canada and losers in a global transition to climate-safe energy

Canada’s continued enthusiasm for new fossil fuel production not only helps undermine the world’s chances of dealing with climate change, but it also threatens Canada’s future economic prosperity as one of the dirtiest and highest-cost producers of a commodity that may see sharply declining demand.

A recent special report in The Economist said:

Yet the transition has plenty of potential to cause geopolitical friction, too. The most obvious example is the challenge it will pose to economies that depend on petroleum. A new book, “The Geopolitics of Renewables”, edited by Daniel Scholten of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, argues that the clearest losers will be those blessed with ample fossil-fuel reserves and those who bet on oil for too long without reforming their economies.

Reforming the economy means doing several politically difficult things, including progressively shutting down the politically powerful bitumen sands, getting consumers to accept higher prices for fossil fuel energy, and working with enthusiasm and determination to curtail fossil fuel energy demand. There is little sign at present that Canada’s politicians are up to any of these tasks, or that the minority of voters who really understand the need to decarbonize will be able to bring them around, especially in time to live up to commitments like the Paris Agreement.

How dangerous is Pickering?

Among environmental groups, Greenpeace has a reputation for being hostile to technologies like genetically modified foods and nuclear power, as well as of often saying poorly justified and hyperbolic things about them. As a civil servant, I remember learning never to trust figures or claims found only in a Greenpeace report, but to seek corroboration from someone a lot more credible like the Pembina Institute.

A comment in an article from today about premier elect Doug Ford promising to keep the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station open to 2024 provides a case in point:

“If an accident happened at this station, which we don’t want to happen, it would be way worse than Chernobyl or Fukushima,” said Shawn Patrick Stensil, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada.

This is nonsense. Chernobyl had a design massively less safe than any western nuclear power station, and as a consequence the release of radioactivity was far greater than from the three nuclear meltdowns in the General Electric boiling water reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Those meltdowns happened because a tsunami swamped the emergency diesel generators needed to run pumps to cool fuel rods after an emergency shutdown, and because the on-site electrical distribution system was destroyed by the tsunami. Barring an asteroid impact, nothing comparable is possible at Pickering. Even if a colossal disaster caused similar damage to the plant, the situation would not be comparable to the devastation in Sendai after the tsunami and either emergency power to the pumps or emergency cooling water to the reactor cores would prevent any meltdown. Following Fukushima, North American nuclear operators pre-positioned emergency equipment precisely to deal with such a station blackout.

When environmentalists choose to use fear as a motivator, it’s natural to extend it to hyperbole when people aren’t giving you the reaction you want. It’s also easy to unthinkingly buy into frightening claims when they correspond to your existing ideological viewpoint and preferred policy positions. Such emotional reflexes, however, cannot be allowed to drive our public policy choices when deciding how to address climate change. It may be that nuclear power is not a cost-effective climate change solution, or that the Pickering station doesn’t make sense to keep running. Baseless comparisons to the world’s worst nuclear disasters, however, obscure rather than clarify the issue.

The climate case against Trans Mountain

Writing in The Globe and Mail Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch have a solid explanation for the incompatibility between the Trans Mountain pipeline and the climate commitments Canada has chosen for itself:

For these [pipeline] opponents, further massive investment in the extraction and export of some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel on Earth is nonsensical – idiotic, even. In a dangerously warming world, we should be investing in a clean-energy future, not entrenching Canada more deeply in the economic past.

Continued investment in the oil sands generally, and in the Trans Mountain pipeline specifically, means Canada is doubling down on a no-win bet. We’re betting that the world will fail to meet the reduction targets in the Paris Climate Agreement, thus needing more and more oil, including our expensive and polluting bitumen. We’re betting, in other words, on climate disaster. If, however, the world finally gets its act together and significantly cuts emissions, then Canada will lose much of its investment in the oil sands and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, because the first oil to be cut will be higher-cost oil such as ours.

There are more sophisticated analyses of the situation which are necessary, concerning global budgets and international negotiations, but it’s fair and accurate to say that Canada’s progress toward decarbonization depends on not making heavy new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. If the Trudeau government or any other keeps pushing in that direction, Canada seems likely to end up the poorer while the world will be further imperilled both by the emissions we generate and the diplomatic consequences of putting fossil fuel profits before collective action to avert planetary disaster.

B.C.’s latest move against the Kinder Morgan pipeline

When it comes to stopping unsustainable fossil fuel development, anything that creates investor uncertainty can be useful. By that metric, the British Columbia government’s announcement of a diluted bitumen shipment expansion moratorium while it studies how a diluted bitumen spill would unfold is a small contribution to shifting Canada to an acceptable development pathway.

Still, I wish governments would look squarely at the real problem: the fundamental contradiction between continued fossil fuel exploitation and the climatic stability objectives that states including Canada asserted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement, and in their own climate announcements. Making it all about local issues may be politics as usual, but it misses the main ethical issues at play.