Tonight’s climate change debate in Trinity-Spadina showcased two candidates – Camille Labchuk and Joe Cressy – who are well-informed, passionate, and engaged on the issue.
The video should go online soon.
Category: The environment
Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet
Busy Monday
Tomorrow is going to be packed.
After breakfast, I am attending a lecture on the history and philosophy of science being delivered by my friend Clara to a class of undergraduates.
Then, I have lunch with my rarely-seen friend Evey.
From 2:00 to 4:00, I am canvassing door to door with Trinity-Spadina Green Party candidate Camille Labchuk.
Then, from 7:00 to 9:00, I will be photographing the all-candidates’ climate change debate Toronto350.org is hosting. Unfortunately, I still only have one flash, since the one I sent back to Canon for repair is still gone.
Obama climate interview
Thomas Friedman interviews Obama on climate change, and the president explicitly states that we can’t burn all the world’s remaining fossil fuels and that we should keep to the target of keeping warming below 2˚C.
He also endorses a price on carbon.
This makes it seem that Obama does understand the key dimensions of climate change; he just hasn’t made dealing with it a high enough priority to produce the kind of progress that is necessary for achieving the 2˚C target.
Greens seeking election
The event was excellent, with a strong sense of enthusiasm in the large crowd.
The coal phase-out and Green Energy Act make me want to reward the provincial Liberals, but voting Green probably sends the same message (with little risk of accidentally contributing to a Conservative victory, in this riding). As for the federal by-election, anything with a chance of enlarging the Green caucus is encouraging.
CPSA 2014, day 3
Today I am going to “Policy and Sustainable Energy Transition: The Case of Smart Grids in Canada“, then “New Directions for Theories of Public Policy“, and finally “The Political Economy of Climate Change Policy“.
After that, it’s back to Toronto.
CPSA 2014, day 1
I was just at “Indigenous Peoples and Natural Resource Extraction: Perspectives Across Provinces“, but decided to switch things up a bit with “Remote and Preemptive Warfare“, which is largely about drones.
At 1:30pm, I have “Indigenous Peoples and Natural Resource Extraction: The Political Economy of Extraction, Enterprises and Resistance“.
Stanford to divest from coal
This is great news for the campaign at U of T, given the size of the endowment and the credibility of the school.
The divestment campaign in general has huge potential to snowball, as each decision to divest makes it easier for other schools to make the same choice.
Sea-based nuclear power stations
Sea-based nuclear power stations would offer some advantages over the terrestrial sort:
For one thing, they could take advantage of two mature and well-understood technologies: light-water nuclear reactors and the construction of offshore platforms… The structures would be built in shipyards using tried-and-tested techniques and then towed several miles out to sea and moored to the sea floor…
Offshore reactors would help overcome the increasing difficulty of finding sites for new nuclear power stations. They need lots of water, so ideally should be sited beside an ocean, lake or river. Unfortunately, those are just the places where people want to live, so any such plans are likely to be fiercely opposed by locals.
Another benefit of being offshore is that the reactor could use the sea as an “infinite heat sink”… The core of the reactor, lying below the surface, could be cooled passively without relying on pumps driven by electricity, which could fail…
At the end of its service life, a floating nuclear power station could be towed to a specially equipped yard where it could be more easily dismantled and decommissioned. This is what happens to nuclear-powered ships.
The article mentions the Akademik Lomonosov, a Russian ship-based nuclear power system with an output of 70 megawatts. It uses the same kind of reactors that power the Taymyr-class icebreakers. Unfortunately, several such stations are intended to provide power for offshore oil and gas development.
The earliest floating nuclear power station went critical in 1967, inside the hull of a Liberty ship. It provided 10 megawatts to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975.
Open thread: thorium-fueled nuclear reactors
Whenever the many problems with nuclear power are raised, there are people who suggest that everything could be fixed with a substantial technical change: moving to generation IV reactors, for instance, or the ever-elusive fusion possibility.
Another common suggestion is that using thorium for reactor fuel could limit concerns about proliferation, as well as (modest) concerns about uranium availability.
I have read a lot of contradictory things on the subject of thorium, so it seems useful to have a thread tracking information on the issue.
Weight and flying
Apparently, cutting one kilogram from the weight of a commercial airliner saves about $2,200 in lifetime fuel costs. By contrast, putting a single kilogram of cargo into space costs $25,000 (a bit of a drag for those with aspirations of asteroid mining).