Category: The environment

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

Divest McGill arguments rejected

A committee formed by the administration of McGill University has rejected the argument from Divest McGill that the school should sell its stock in “corporations involved with the production, refining, transport and sale of fossil fuels” and “financial institutions which have not adopted a policy of making no further loans to corporations that produce, refine, transport of sell fossil fuels”.

Rather startlingly, the committee concluded that: “Since the Committee is not satisfied that ‘social injury’ has occurred, no action was considered or is recommended.”

Given that climate change is the ‘greatest market failure the world has ever seen’ the case that fossil fuel companies are doing social harm is very strong. While the committee’s decision is disappointing, it is useful for Toronto350.org insofar as it shows what sort of things the committee that will eventually be formed here is likely to focus on. For instance, no discussion of science and a strong emphasis on law. Knowledge that we derive from this response will help us make our own brief stronger.

We are also calling for a different set of actions from the University of Toronto, which I think will make it easier to establish our case. Specifically:

  • Make an immediate statement of principle, expressing its intention to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies within five years,
  • Immediately stop making new investments in the industry,
  • Instruct its investment managers to wind down the university’s existing holdings in the fossil fuel industry over five years, and
  • Divest from Royal Dutch Shell by the end of 2013.

This seems easier than asking a Canadian university to divest from all financial institutions which invest in fossil fuel companies, which probably includes all those in Canada.

The McGill committee never got to questions of practicality or financial impact on the university, since they rejected the basic claim that fossil fuel companies are doing social harm. If we are able to establish the second point to the satisfaction of the University of Toronto, we will still need to address concerns in the first two areas.

Our brief still requires a lot of work, so if you know anyone in Toronto who would be willing to help, please encourage them to get in touch with us. We could especially benefit from anyone with expertise in law or finance.

Some tidbits on the B.C. election

Some articles about the recent election in British Columbia:

I was hoping the NDP would win and immediately kill the Northern Gateway pipeline. Regardless of the outcome, the fight against fossil fuel expansion (pipelines, fossil fuel export terminals, etc) will need to continue.

One item from the first piece caught my eye: “voters 55 or older made up half of all voters” (they represent 35% of the population). These people will be dead long before the worst effects of climate change are felt. If today’s young people are going to stop serving as a punching bag for older people, they are going to need to get active politically.

Toronto350.org highlights climate risk to giant pandas

Climate activists at the Toronto Zoo panda opening day

Toronto350.org visited the Toronto Zoo to raise public awareness about the threat climate change poses to pandas and other endangered species. We also circulated a petition to the Chinese Ambassador to Canada and Canada’s Prime Minister, calling on both countries to do more to combat climate change and protect endangered species.

Different journalistic interpretations of the same scientific study

Google News stories about antarctic melting 2013-04-15

Here’s the actual abstract from “Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century“, published in Nature Geoscience:

“Over the past 50 years, warming of the Antarctic Peninsula has been accompanied by accelerating glacier mass loss and the retreat and collapse of ice shelves. A key driver of ice loss is summer melting; however, it is not usually possible to specifically reconstruct the summer conditions that are critical for determining ice melt in Antarctic. Here we reconstruct changes in ice-melt intensity and mean temperature on the northern Antarctic Peninsula since AD 1000 based on the identification of visible melt layers in the James Ross Island ice core and local mean annual temperature estimates from the deuterium content of the ice. During the past millennium, the coolest conditions and lowest melt occurred from about AD 1410 to 1460, when mean temperature was 1.6 °C lower than that of 1981–2000. Since the late 1400s, there has been a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity from 0.5 to 4.9%. The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature.”

From the full text: “The nonlinearity of melt observed in the JRI ice-core record also highlights the particular vulnerability of areas in the polar regions where daily maximum temperatures in summer are close to 0˚C and/or where summer isotherms are widely spaced, such as along the east and west coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula. In these places even modest future increases in mean atmospheric temperature could translate into rapid increases in the intensity of summer melt and in the poleward extension of areas where glaciers and ice shelves are undergoing decay caused by atmospheric-driven melting.”

Two James Hansen updates

James Hansen getting arrested at an August 2011 protest against the Keystone XL pipeline outside the White House
James Hansen getting arrested at an August 2011 protest against the Keystone XL pipeline outside the White House
James Hansen after getting released from Anacostia jail, 2011-08-29
James Hansen after getting released from Anacostia jail, 2011-08-29

NASA climatologist James Hansen

Bonus: a demonstration of why I can’t just hand my camera to passers-by to take a picture

After 32 years as the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, climatologist James Hansen is retiring (New York Times, Nature). He now intends to devote more of his time and energy to pushing for action on climate change.

One recent publication of Hansen’s: “Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power” in Environmental Science and Technology. From the abstract:

Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces.

Related:

Toronto350.org bibliography party

One element of developing Toronto350.org has been learning how to do complex cooperative work using a devoted group of volunteers.

This afternoon, we are having a ‘bibliography party’ for our University of Toronto divestment brief.

We will be taking all the sources people have collected and putting them into biblatex format. It will then be easy to incorporate them into our LaTeX document and produce nicely formatted footnotes and a good bibliography.

Then it will just be a matter of finishing each section of the brief and sending it out to experts for comment. It will need to be run by some people who can comment on the science, others who can comment on the law, and others who are familiar with the U of T administration.

In the end, we should have an authoritative and meticulously cited document explaining why divestment makes ethical and financial sense, and why it is in keeping with the university’s existing divestment policy.

Line 9 and the National Energy Board

If you want to get approval for a huge project with many risks and serious associated problems, one strategy is to get decision-makers to split up the question into tiny pieces. Forbid the people on one team from considering the issues another team is looking at. That way, you can prevent the consideration of interactions between effects and cumulative impacts.

This seems to be what Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) does for pipelines. For instance, they have hearings upcoming in Toronto related to the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline. Currently, it carries conventional crude oil from east to west. The company wants to reverse the flow so it can carry diluted bitumen from the oil sands from west to east.

In these hearings, the NEB is only allowed to consider the direct effects and risks from the pipeline right here in Toronto. They are explicitly not going to consider the effects ‘upstream’ from oil sands extraction and processing. Likewise, the climate change damage ‘downstream’ cannot be considered.

The fact is, we need to be phasing out fossil fuels – not building infrastructure to facilitate their use into future decades. We’re past the point where building additional fossil fuel infrastructure makes sense, but the NEB isn’t allowed to consider the reasons for that.