Category: The environment

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

Harrison on bureaucrats and the courts

In Chapter 2 it is suggested that even if politicians are inclined to shirk their environmental responsibilities, they could be undermined by zealous bureaucrats in ministries or departments of the environment. The picture that emerges from Chapters 3 through 6, however, is one of conscientious bureaucrats severely constrained by limited administrative resources and political support. Since new regulations require cabinet approval, bureaucrats could only accomplish so much within the confines of hollow enabling statutes. Similarly, when regulations turned out to be flawed, as was the case with the regulations issued under the Fisheries Act, bureaucrats’ hands were tied in the absence of cabinet support for regulatory reforms. (p. 172 hardcover)

…

Thus far, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of the courts. Although historically the courts have been a bit player in Canadian environmental policy-making, in the aftermath of Oldman Dam the role of the courts clearly demands greater attention. As an institution, the courts do not fit neatly within the categories of federal and provincial governments. Moreover, because there are no mechanisms to hold judges accountable to either politicians or the public – indeed lifetime tenure is designed to insulate the court from the whims of popular opinion – the institution of the courts may be especially responsive to institutional or ‘good policy’ motives of its members. ‘Rogue judges’ may ultimately exercise greater influence than ‘rogue bureaucrats.’ (p. 173)

Harrison, Kathryn. Passing the Buck: Federalism and Canadian Environmental Policy. 1996.

Harrison on federalism and environmental policy

While not denying the existence of either constitutional limitations or resistance from at least some of the provinces, I argue that the explanation for federal and provincial roles in environmental protection is not complete without considering governments’ electoral incentives to extend or defend their jurisdiction over the environment in the first place. Environmental protection typically involves diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, and thus offers few political benefits but significant political costs. One can expect the opponents of environmental regulation to be better organized, informed, and funded than the beneficiaries. Moreover, since environmental protection typically involves the imposition of costs on business, strengthening environmental standards can run counter to voters’ concerns about the economy and unemployment. Thus, the absence of electoral incentives, rather than constitutional constraints or provincial opposition per se, may explain why the federal government did not pursue a larger role in environmental protection throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The reality may be closer to a federal surrender than the provincial victory implied by many authors. (p. 5 hardcover)

Harrison, Kathryn. Passing the Buck: Federalism and Canadian Environmental Policy. 1996.

Strangers Devour the Land

Boyce Richardson’s Strangers Devour the Land is not an academic text, but rather a series of personal narratives interspersed with selections of courtroom testimony. The book describes the traditional lifestyle of the Cree of northern Quebec, and the influence the James Bay hydroelectric developments had upon their lives between the inception of the project in the 1970s and the author’s return visits during the 1990s. Richardson is clear in his advocacy of the Cree perspective and is open about his willingness to edit his work to meet with the approval of his Cree subjects and rebut the arguments made by their opponents at Hydro-Quebec and within the Quebecois government. (p. 204, 289, 290 paperback) Nonetheless, the account comes across as a sensitive, sympathetic, and honest one for all parties concerned – a text that both furnishes detailed observations of what has transpired and which engages in a nuanced way with the political and moral complexities that accompany them.

The dynamic at the heart of the book – between First Nations people trying to maintain their most important traditions and an encroaching world hungry for natural resources – continues to play out in Canada. While the parallels between the James Bay hydroelectric projects of the 1970s and today’s oil, gas, and mining projects are numerous, it is not fully clear what the experience with the former can help us improve about the latter. If anything, the contemporary parallels show how the tension between peoples seeking to perpetuate traditional lifestyles on territory they have held for centuries and others who wish to disrupt those lifestyles for economic or nationalistic purposes persists and how Canada has a poor record of reaching equitable outcomes through fair means.

Quebecois nationalism and the northern Cree

Robert Bourassa – Premier of Quebec from 1970 to 1976 and 1985 to 1994 – did more than anyone to advance the James Bay hydroelectric projects. Now, his name is attached to a 7,722 megawatt generating station and a reservoir with a surface area of 2,835 square kilometres. For Bourassa, the construction of hydroelectric capacity in the James Bay region was a vital measure for promoting Quebecois economic growth and thus the national integrity of Quebec. (p. 22, 303, 329) The scale of work envisioned was indeed vast: the entire La Grande river would cease to flow below the blockage for an entire year as the reservoir filled. (p. 191)

Richardson’s intimate account of the hunting lifestyle of the Cree contrasts sharply with the perception of the province that they had essentially abandoned their traditional practices and that the lands they inhabited were effectively empty. (p.33-4, 72, 76, 195, 280) Richardson convincingly documents the inadequacy of the environmental and social impact studies conducted by the government of Quebec, as well as their quickness to discount the importance of the land and the people reliant upon it. (p.112, 132, 163, 173, 246, 298, 344) Similarly, the Quebecois government was biased toward the over-estimation of future electrical needs, and quick to use unrealistic projections as justification for the scale of the massive James Bay projects. (p. 255-259) It is logically possible to separate procedural questions from questions about outcomes; the construction of the dams may have been much less objectionable with the full prior and informed consent of the First Nations in the region and with suitable compensation. At the same time, such an approach may still have clashed with the perceived relationship between the Cree and the land described by Richardson, and in particular with the notion of the people as perpetual stewards of the bounty of nature. (p. 89) Arguably, it would be inappropriate for any one generation or small set of generations to break that stewardship, even if compensated financially. Indeed, this perspective is highlighted in the book’s epilogue, in which the Cree who have benefitted from the 1975 James Bay And Northern Quebec Agreement were nonetheless resisting Quebecois proposals for additional dams on the La Grande River, the Great Whale and surrounding rivers, and the Nottaway, Broadback, and Rupert Rivers. (p. 347)

Court proceedings and settlement

In addition to quoting at length from the testimony given by members of the Cree community and expert witnesses, Richardson comments extensively on the legal process through which the Cree community sought to respond to the work initiated without consultation by Hydro-Quebec. He discusses the strategies employed by lawyers arguing both sides of the case, and describes Quebec Superior Court Justice Albert Malouf’s 1973 judgment in favour of the Cree, ordering the James Bay Development Corporation to “immediately cease, desist, and refrain” from construction and from interfering with the rights and territories of the Cree petitioners (orders which Richardson alleges were not followed, even during the short span before the first appeal was heard). (p. 296, 299) The book goes on to describe the subsequent Quebec Court of Appeal decisions that stripped the Malouf ruling of effectiveness and eventually compelled the acceptance of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975. (p. 296-309)

The most notable feature of the initial legal proceedings may be the way in which they demonstrated the inadequacy of the social and environmental impact studies conducted by Hydro-Quebec and the government of the province. Most startlingly, Richardson describes how construction on the first phase of the James Bay project began with no prior consultation and that even when the Cree first sought remedy through the courts, lawyers from the James Bay Development Corporation continued to argue that they had no rights which could be infringed. Later, the corporation’s own staff anthropologist Paul Betrand testified that the project would create a “crisis… in the Cree culture”, that there would be an “immense impact”, and that “the shock [was] going to be brutal”. (p. 247-248) Such testimony was effectively rejected by the various courts of appeal that assessed Malouf’s initial conclusions, preferring to see the Cree as having transitioned to a white-style life and lacking the legal right to object to Hydro-Quebec’s plans. It is therefore convincing that the subsequent settlement – though it did involve considerable financial compensation – was effectively made under duress, with the prospect of the complete dismissal of the Cree claims driving them to accept an arrangement that would not have been tolerated without coercion. Under the terms of the settlement, the hunting territory of the Mistassini (who feature prominently in Richardson’s account) is reduced from 100,000 square miles to 7,000 and their exclusive right to hunt is granted provided with the provision that it not “conflict with other physical activity or public safety”. (p. 324)

Reading Richardson in a climate change context

In one passage, Richardson neatly summarizes many of the key ethical claims of the book:

Since eighty-eight square miles of the island of Montreal support 2 million, most people cannot see how such huge territories can in equity be left to so few people. If these lands are needed in the public interest, it is argued, then unfortunately the Indians will have to adjust. The question is, however, how are the lands to be handled and how will the Indians be allowed to adjust? The manner of doing the deed reveals our quality as a civilization. For the Indians have always been there: it is not their fault that other people have arrived, making claim to the lands on which their whole culture and way of life has been built. In decency and justice, they cannot simply be trampled over: our own society would be infinitely richer if we could find the means to give Indians a genuine choice, some real control over the pace of change, as they face the inevitable arrival in force of this alien civilization. (p. 225)

To these challenges must now be added the additional challenge of adapting all of Canadian society to the needs of the global climate. Failure to do so risks imposing as large a change in circumstances as has been experienced by the Cree of northern Quebec upon people everywhere, indigenous and non-indigenous alike.

There are many parallels between the James Bay development that began in the 1970s and the expanding oil sands today. Indeed, much of the language about the economic potential of resource exploitation is nearly identical. In the context of the James Bay project, Richardson describes how politicians and engineers defending the project “rave[d] on about how hospitals, factories and schools will have to close down if the project is not built” (p. 255); in 2011, Minister of the Environment Peter Kent asserted that for Canada to meet its Kyoto target it would be necessary to “clos[e] down the entire farming and agricultural sector and cut… heat to every home, office, hospital, factory and building in Canada”. As Quebec aspired to achieve influence and prosperity on the basis of exporting hydro-electricity, Alberta and Saskatchewan now hope to do likewise with synthetic crude exports processed from the vast Athabasca oil sands reserves. In both cases, the prospect of wealth could only be achieved by appropriating vast amounts of traditional territory used by First Nations for centuries, and by severely disrupting the lifestyles of these inhabitants. In both cases, aboriginal people are presented with the question of how to respond to resource development, with a difficult choice to be made between resistance through legal or political means and accommodation, which carried the possibility of financial reward.

Richardson’s epilogue complicates the story told by the book. He describes how Cree society has evolved into the 1990s, with new deals between the First Nation and Hydro-Quebec, further expansion of white Canadians into resource industries in the region, and the development of extensive commercial holdings and civil service bureaucracy by the Cree. He highlights the persistence of a hunting culture, while also commenting extensively on the economic and social transformation that has taken place since the James Bay project was first proposed. While the physical impact of the dams is certainly on a vast scale, he concentrates more on the impact of development on the Cree way of life, which has been ambiguous.

Environmentalists and policy-makers today can no longer ignore the dangers associated with the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. This adds fresh complexity to the utilitarian calculations described in Richardson’s book, such as how the interests of relatively small numbers of hunters with lifestyles dependent on vast amounts of land integrate with the interests of southern urbanites desirous of electricity and a nationalist Quebecois society desirous of wealth and influence, both in and of themselves and as the tangible means of protecting a distinctive culture. All else being equal, the risks associated with climate change must make us more open to dams compared with fossil-fuel sources of electricity, though that rebalancing certainly doesn’t make dams appropriate in all circumstances or nullify the arguments raised against them.

Richardson himself discusses the possibility of moral dilemma “so dearly beloved of moral philosophers, in which both sides were right”. (p.289) Even that categorization may over-simplify the ethical situation presented to the Cree in the 1970s and to Canada’s First Nations today. How are the values and practices of a traditional lifestyle to be maintained or altered as resource nationalism and encroaching globalization inevitably affect Canada’s wildernesses and their traditional inhabitants? How are the possibilities of enrichment through natural resources to be balanced against the reality of degraded land, air, and water – and the increasing reality of a degraded and threatened global climate? Thinking about energy supply in the context of a changing climate also encourages perplexing counterfactual questions: had Quebec not built so much hydroelectric capacity, would people have turned to more climatically-damaging alternatives to produce the same quantity, or would demand simply have been more moderate in the face of higher prices?

The injustices so articulately described by Richardson cannot be denied. They include the influx of thousands of outsiders into their traditional territories, the flooding of trapping land, the diminishment of animal population, and the contamination of fish and drinking water from methyl mercury. (p.344) Without question, Cree families that had subsisted by fishing, hunting, and trapping for centuries had strong grounds to object to construction projects dreamed up for the benefit of outsiders that caused enormous damage to their way of life and culture. Unfortunately, the imposition of undeserved suffering on one group by another is a deeply engrained feature of globalized, capitalist, industrialized society. Indeed, the choices humanity is making now about fossil fuel use threaten to permanently damage the entire planet and the lives of all of its inhabitants for thousands of years, as well as totally destroy the lifestyles and cultures of those living in especially vulnerable areas like the arctic. Quite possibly, the human race has reached a point in which we can no longer avoid inflicting undeserved suffering on one group or another. The question has become how much suffering, imposed through what means, and with what (if any) compensation.

‘Shut down the oil sands’ is not an extreme position

Rather, it is the endpoint of joined-up thinking about climate science and energy policy.

On Twitter the other day, Suzy Waldman said: “Trying to envision middle ground between idea coalsands ought 2b shuttered and idea Canada’s economic fate depends on them”.

I think this perspective risks perpetuating one of the big problems in Canadian climate and energy politics – namely, the assumption that the oil sands have a legitimate future part to play in Canada’s economy and that any position that questions that is ‘extreme’ and outside the political middle ground. This may be true in terms of opinion polls and the positions of politicians, but this is because people haven’t really accepted that our current trajectory ends with planetary catastrophe.

We now have very clear and credible evidence that warming the planet by more than 2°C virtually guarantees big trouble for humanity. Crossing that threshold can be achieved by burning a fraction of the conventional oil, gas, and coal available on the planet. In short, then, we have a dangerous amount of fossil fuel available without even tapping unconventional sources like the oil sands.

Stabilizing the climate at any level of temperature increase means cutting greenhouse gas pollution to the point where the amount produced each year is absorbed by natural systems and so there is no net change in the concentration. Achieving that requires very deep cuts – essentially, the global phaseout of fossil fuel use. Stabilizing below the 2°C limit requires that all this happen extremely quickly. In such a world, it simply makes no sense to be building bitumen mining and in situ extraction facilities intended to operate for decades. Nor does it make sense to keep building pipelines to export fuels that we cannot afford to burn, if we wish to maintain a livable planet capable of sustaining human prosperity indefinitely.

This connects to the biggest problem with the oil sands: the way in which they contribute to a vicious cycle. We build more fossil fuel production capacity, so naturally we need to have transport and export capacity to serve it. The availability of fossil fuels then encourages people to keep investing in vehicles, power plants, and other facilities and equipment that require them. And so fossil fuel dependence is perpetuated.

If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to rapidly reverse that cycle. We need to be shutting down production capacity, and transport capacity, and facilities and equipment that depend on fossil fuels. That will probably make some things a lot more expensive and change the ways in which people live, but the alternative of a planet with a permanently hostile climate is clearly much worse.

Shutting down the oil sands is an extreme idea politically in Canada, but that is simply evidence of how poor the scientific basis for Canada’s energy politics is.

Some thoughts on the civil service

More than a year has now passed since I left the public service. The most surprising thing about that is how I don’t feel like I have ever regretted the choice. There are individuals who I miss, and I certainly miss the regular paycheques, but there have seldom if ever been times when I would have exchanged my current situation as a student for a magical instant return to being a full-time civil servant.

This contrasts, for instance, with my choice of PhD program. Most of the time, I remain convinced that the University of Toronto was the best choice from among the schools that accepted me. That said, there have surely been times – living in an inhospitable city where the traffic makes me too afraid to cycle – when I ponder what it would have been like to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara – and with three times as much funding, to boot. Naturally, I have also felt open at many times to the appeal of being at the University of British Columbia and back in Vancouver.

By contrast, memories of the civil service never leave me feeling a desire for sudden transplantation. I am grateful for the time I spent there; it is certainly a good way to learn about how this country operates. Oftentimes, however, my strongest sense when thinking about the institution is about how sad and disturbing it is that our federal civil service is so inactive about climate change. Indeed, it is probably a net contributor to the growing severity of the problem, given how much priority advocating for oil pipelines and for scrapping rules and processes for environmental protection has gotten over the actual implementation of policies with real potential to substantially diminish Canada’s greenhouse gas contribution. I feel like people in fifty years will find it surprising to learn about how unconcerned our leaders were about the problem, how wilfully blind they were about the disjoint between the policies they supported and their supposed goal of avoiding dangerous climate change, and how ignorant and complacent the Canadian population at large was about the problem. The gap between our policies and what climate science shows to be necessary is so wide that it makes our present approach look like little more than a distracting facade, designed to sustain the public misperception about how insufficient our current approaches are.

As the above probably makes clear, my main feelings about the public service are anger, frustration, and sadness. Sadness because of the gap between what we are capable of, and what we are actually doing. The civil service is full of intelligent, dedicated people who are making a substantial and genuine effort to make Canada and the world a better place. At the same time, they are confronting the chasm between an elected government that has never been serious about curbing climate change and a situation in the world where the problem is increasingly evident and threatening. The full effects of today’s emissions won’t be felt for decades, so if we are to avoid truly terrible outcomes, global emissions need to start diving soon. Yet that is far from what’s on even the ambitious side of the political agenda. The real policy we are enacting is for a perpetuated status quo of ever-growing fossil fuel production, despite the clear scientific basis for seeing that status quo as suicidal.

Much can change politically if real and immediate disaster does come to pass. The general public might finally accept the argument that imposing climate change on future generations is an intolerable wrong; or they may simply perceive it happening quickly enough to seem like a threat to themselves. Politicians may finally accept that fossil fuel companies aren’t primarily generous tax-payers and contributors to election campaigns – but rather entities working hard to undermine the habitability of the planet. Something on par with a major war may blow up the issue enough psychologically for it to rise to an appropriate level of urgency.

Wherever the impulse for change comes from, it won’t be from the federal civil service, which is entirely too contented with continuing to support policies that propel us toward planetary catastrophe. It may well not be in academia either but, at least for the present moment, the latter seems a more promising place to dedicate my energy for now.

Daniel Carpenter and Andrew Delbanco on abolitionism

Delbanco’s essay considers abolitionism as a general category of political vision, one impelled by “imprecatory prophets” whose contribution is, in part, to envision what their contemporaries regarded as “preposterous” and to make it seem possible. Abolitionists render a moral case against the existence and endurance of or or more of a society’s perceived wrongs, such as slavery and racial castes. And perhaps others: alcohol, or gender discrimination, or abortion, or the hierarchy of heterosexuality over gay and lesbian lives. The abolitionist then and now requires moral clarity in the form of a sharp division between good and evil in which the viewer and reader can tell the two apart. Abolitionism also requires a refusal to settle for half-measures; it paints these compromises themselves as part of the problem, as resting firmly on one side of the binary divide. And, not least, abolitionism must conjure a world without the evil institution whose demise it seeks: a promised land.

From Daniel Carpenter’s forward to: Delbanco, Andrew. The Abolitionist Imagination. Harvard University Press. 2012.

Perhaps climate change activists should begin calling themselves fossil fuel abolitionists.

Tim DeChristopher’s expectations about the future

Orion Magazine has posted the transcript of a highly interesting conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams:

[T]here’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

We are in the process of committing the world to a terrifying amount of climate change. It seems plausible that as it gets worse, people will eventually become less willing to work together to deal with it. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a movement strong enough to close off the worst possibilities of extreme warming, and capable of adapting to keep humanity on a comparatively sane and cooperative path in the future.

Toronto350 letter on Line 9

Toronto350.org has submitted a letter of comment on the proposed reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline.

Given the unwillingness of the Alberta and federal governments to take climate change seriously, the best strategy open to us at this stage seems to be doing what we can to reduce the scale of fossil fuel exports, particularly by stopping oil pipelines and coal export infrastructure.