Category: The environment

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

Writing my first book

Nothing about my PhD so far has been easy. As long-time readers may recall, my first comprehensive exam was only passed after two attempts and a lot of effort. The strike was painful, and has made me particularly question the quality of undergraduate education that U of T provides, in terms of class and tutorial sizes, the selection of professors, and support for and integration of teaching assistants into the learning process. I am now edging toward a formal research proposal for departmental approval and ethics review.

I originally wrote a longer document which talked more about methodology and many other things, but my supervisor encouraged me to write something more concise with the essential features of the proposed research project.

The plan now is to make sure the short document is a plausible nucleus for a successful PhD, including through a presentation to a brown bag lunch at the U of T Environmental Governance Lab on October 27th; to incorporate what has been left out in the older longer proposal; and to seek departmental and ethical approval before beginning first round remote interviews.

My supervisor has intelligently cautioned me about seeking too many critiques of these documents – a factor which has complicated and delayed my efforts so far, and which may be drawn from my experience as a civil servant. I have also been warned by Peter Russell that I am starting to write my thesis in the form of the proposal. So no comments please, unless they are strictly limited and focused on the process for making this proposal viable.

Open thread: nuclear refurbishment in Canada

About 16% of Canada’s electricity generation comes from the 19 nuclear reactors at Pickering, Darlington, Bruce, and Point Lepreau.

For years, politicians, regulators, environmentalists, and the public have been contemplating whether it makes sense to refurbish some reactors to extend their lives, particularly as climate change has become a greater concern.

Today, World Nuclear News reports that Bruce Power signed an agreement with SNC-Lavalin for up to C$400 million of work “for Bruce Power’s engineering needs including field services and an incremental program to refurbish six Candu units. The company will be responsible for the tooling to remove pressure and calandria tubes, the installation of new components and the deployment and maintenance of a number of reactor inspection tools.”

WNN also reports that Intrinsik Environmental Sciences have estimated that refurbishing the reactors at Darlington could avoid almost 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between 2024 and 2055.

All the familiar issues with nuclear are at work here: what sort of power would be used in the alternative? Could energy storage and demand management do the same job? Is it technically and financially feasible to extend the operation of existing nuclear facilities?

Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion

This is a thoroughly intriguing development:

First Nations communities from Canada and the northern United States signed a treaty on Thursday to jointly fight proposals to build more pipelines to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands, saying further development would damage the environment.

The treaty, signed in Montreal and Vancouver, came as the politics around pipelines have become increasingly sensitive in North America, with the U.S. Justice Department intervening last week to delay construction of a contentious pipeline in North Dakota.

The document itself calls “[t]he expansion of the Tar Sands… a truly monumental threat bearing down on all Indigenous Nations in Canada and beyond”.

The document identifies risks from pipeline spills, train derailments, and tanker accidents. On climate change, it identifies “effects that have already started to endanger our ways of life and which now threaten our very survival”. The document calls for signatories to “officially prohibit and to agree to collectively challenge and resist the use of our respective territories and coasts for the expansion of the production of Tar Sands, including for the transport of such expanded production, whether by pipeline, rail or tanker”

According to CBC News it has been signed by 50 aboriginal groups in North America, including the Standing Rock Sioux tribe which is resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Energy East.

Related: Is environmentalist solidarity with indigenous peoples opportunistic?

At the intersection of entitlement and slaughter

My current home in Toronto’s annex neighbourhood is a weird place and time in which to live. Many of the people up and down my street are simultaneously funding cosmetic renovations to their houses, like installing smooth new bricks and stairs. At the same time, there are people who I see daily and who seem to earn their living by picking liquor bottles out of the city’s big blue wheeled recycling bins.

It all makes me feel like people here don’t understand what is going on. The rich landowners are shelling out in hopes of boosted social status or because of psychological insecurity. At the same time, glass and metal containers which could be recycled just as well by the standard municipal recycling service are worth collecting and bringing to specific stores, at the same time as society largely ignores the harm associated with alcohol, and even encourages its use. In Canada, the four kinds of drugs that cause the most damage to individuals and society are alcohol, tobacco, opiates, and benzodiazepines. People who spend their labour collecting liquor vessels provide no benefit to society, since it doesn’t matter whether municipal recycling or Ontario’s liquor sales system collects the glass and aluminium. Within three blocks of here, restaurants burn methane to encourage customers to sit outside.

This is all magnified by my concern about climate change. All the credible science shows that continuing with business as usual will destroy nations, yet people continue to feel entitled to burn as much fossil fuel as they can afford. People find the flimsiest excuse to justify wasting energy on heating or cooling large spaces, flying thousands of kilometres in jets, and constantly adding to their stocks of material possessions. If there are people in the future, they will probably be right to judge us harshly: as the ones who knew the ruin they were imposing for their own fun and convenience and who chose like psychopaths to do it all anyway.

Trudeau’s carbon pricing plan

Today Prime Minister Trudeau announced that the federal government will require all provinces to have a carbon price of at least $10 per tonne by 2018, rising in $10 increments to $50 per tonne in 2022. There’s a lot of politics at work here. The Alberta government says they will only accept the plan in exchange for an export pipeline, while climate activists emphasize that the whole point of a carbon price is to prevent such projects. Trudeau seems to think he has split the opposition in Parliament, and set up an approach that most Canadians will support:

Polls suggest there is overwhelming support for the idea of carbon pricing, and that many Canadians back the imposition of a national climate change target. Trudeau alluded to that generosity of spirit when he said Canadians are prepared to work together and follow through on the commitments to fighting climate change made in the Paris Agreement on climate change. But such good will has its limits.

Environmental groups rushed Monday to condemn the planned price as being too low to take a bite out of Canada’s emissions. Dale Marshall of Environmental Defence said the carbon price needs to rise at the same rate beyond 2022 — a point on which Trudeau was mute.

…

It’s a perfectly sound strategy, provided he forsakes his environmentalist allies. It is becoming clearer by the day, they are not going in the same direction as he is.

Trudeau needs to have the courage to tell Canadians that fossil fuels are on the way out as a source of jobs, tax revenue, and economic prosperity. Building new extraction and export projects is wholly at odds with the direction Canada and the world need to go. A price on carbon is a mechanism for discouraging fossil fuel projects, not an excuse for letting them proceed.

An even tighter carbon budget

When we wrote the fossil fuel divestment brief for the University of Toronto, we thought that humans could “pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees”.

If we’re aiming instead to stay below the 1.5 ˚C limit aspired to in the Paris Agreement, that falls to 353 gigatons more CO2, a figure that means “we’ll need to close all of the coal mines and some of the oil and gas fields we’re currently operating long before they’re exhausted”.

In a way, this makes the politics of climate change simple. Any new project that aims to develop new fossil fuel extraction capacity is either going to need to be abandoned prematurely as part of a massive global effort to curb climate change, or it will be another nail in our coffin as we soar far beyond the 1.5 ˚C and 2 ˚C limit.

Of course, this also makes the politics very difficult. People have a huge sense of entitlement when it comes to both exploiting resources in their jurisdiction and in terms of using fossil fuels with no consideration of the impact on others. The less adjustment time which can be offered to fossil fuel industries, and the more operating facilities that will need to be closed down to avoid catastrophic climate change, the harder it becomes for decision makers to act with sufficient boldness.

The hypocrisy argument for pipelines

Some people who favour the construction of new bitumen sands pipelines have been deploying a particularly weak argument, which echoes a couple of the points that have long been made by people who don’t want to take adequate action to avoid catastrophic climate change. They point out that — in one way or another — any person calling for new pipeline projects to be stopped uses fossil fuels. At a recent Toronto climate change consultation, Adam Vaughan pointed out that a woman wearing plastic-framed glasses was therefore an oil user. In her recent segment on The Current and on Twitter, Martha Hall Findlay has made a similar ‘argument from hypocrisy’, implying that only people with a 100% post-fossil-fuel lifestyle can call for systemic change.

This argument is weak for a number of reasons, but most glaringly it’s because a post-fossil-fuel future isn’t something individuals can ever build through personal choice. The transportation, energy, and agricultural infrastructure around us isn’t something that can be changed without society-wide policy decisions including the use of market mechanisms like carbon pricing, regulations, and sheer governmental determination to leave enough fossil fuel in the ground to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The fact that we’re presently dependent on fossil fuels is in fact a reason why we need to stop building new infrastructure that perpetuates that dependence. In a Canada where we’re seriously planning to be part of a fair and effective global transition away from fossil fuel use, we simply can’t build projects like pipelines which will lock in global fossil fuel dependence for decades to come.

The weak argument from hypocrisy is sometimes paired with a superficially more convincing but still deeply problematic argument about demand. People like Findlay assert that the real problem with fossil fuels is the enduring demand, and that we should therefore focus our policy efforts on reducing demand. This is questionable for several reasons. For one thing, if they are sincere about their desire to reduce demand sufficiently to avoid dangerous climate change, that would undermine any need for the pipelines they are promoting, which would be built to support expanded production from Canada’s bitumen sands. Furthermore, in the face of a climate crisis which requires incredibly aggressive action to reduce emissions, it makes no sense to only pursue demand-side policies. We certainly should use everything from carbon taxes to building and appliance standards to reduce demand, but we should simultaneously avoid investment in new extraction and transport infrastructure which perpetuates fossil fuel dependence.

The entitled argument that people who live on top of fossil fuel reserves have the right to dig them up and sell them regardless of the consequences for others (and that fossil fuel users are entitled to whatever demand-side activities they have become used to) is seriously faulty from an ethical perspective. We don’t have the right to impose suffering on others around the world, future generations, and nature. Now that science has made so clear that greenhouse gas pollution is terribly threatening and harmful, those whose economic systems depend on them have a strong and immediate obligation to move to other sources of energy. That moral obligation is fundamentally at odds with building new bitumen sands pipelines, and the ethical argument that supports this position is dramatically more credible than the flimsy assertion that anybody who uses fossil fuels should somehow support new infrastructure as a consequence.

Berman and Findlay on pipelines

CBC’s The Current recently ran a segment on whether Canada’s climate change goals can be reconciled with new pipeline construction. Tzeporah Berman effectively made the case that Energy East, Kinder Morgan, and the Northern Gateway would be means of increasing bitumen sands production, even beyond the unacceptably high cap chosen by the Alberta government, and argued that they are fundamentally incompatible with the climate action Canada committed to in Paris.

In the same segment, Canada West Foundation CEO Martha Hall Findlay seemed to do everything she could to evade the issue of climate change, arguing that Canada simply must enlarge its economy and its emissions and that anyone concerned about climate change should focus on reducing demand (which she expects will increase when pipelines increase Canadian wealth). Her argument boiled down to saying that Canada has an opportunity to profit now, and simply shouldn’t concern itself with what impact new oil infrastructure will have on the climate.

This argument from entitlement — sticking to the assumption that Alberta and anyone else that happens to have oil resources has the right to dig them up and burn them regardless of the impact on people around the world, future generations, and nature — needs to be challenged on ethical terms. Yes, we need to fight climate change by reducing oil demand. At the same time, building infrastructure to serve a world of higher demand is, at best, a wasted investment and, at worst, a choice to lock in pollution that will profoundly threaten the prosperity and security of people around the world.

Dakota Access Pipeline

One of North America’s most active pipeline resistance movements right now is opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would run from North Dakota to Illinois through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Some coverage: