The environment – Page 71 – a sibilant intake of breath

Canada doesn’t deserve a UN Security Council seat

At the moment, Canada is competing for one of the ten non-permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council – the principal international body charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Canada thinks of itself as an internationalist country that has committed itself to peacekeeping and other forms of international assistance. Unfortunately, Canada is also doing virtually everything in its power to worsen the most pressing medium-term threat to international security, namely climate change.

At the moment, the United Nations process designed to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is going nowhere. While that situation has many causes, one of the most important has been the unwillingness of developed states to make real commitments and take meaningful domestic action. For its part, Canada has adopted targets that would be better than nothing, but which are neither fair now adequate. In order for the world to avoid dangerous climate change, other countries would need to pick up the slack created by Canada’s lack of ambition. Even worse, Canada has no credible plan to meet those targets, and has taken no serious domestic action on climate change.

Right now, Canada is flirting with some of the most dangerous energy options out there. These include unconventional oil and gas, including the oil sands and shale gas, as well as fossil fuel reserves in formerly inaccessible places like the Arctic. Chasing those fossil fuels is foolishness. It commits us to perpetuating an energy system that profoundly threatens future generations, and redirects resources from the task of building a sustainable basis for our society.

As long as Canada continues to behave with such reckless disregard for those outside its borders, including those who are not yet born, it doesn’t deserve the prestige associated with a Security Council seat. To be sure, some of Canada’s international actions have been and are praiseworthy, but that doesn’t counterbalance the way in which Canada is helping to commit the world to a colossal blunder. Ultimately, it may require Canada becoming an international pariah before our government will stand up to the oil and gas sector. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If Canada loses its bid for this seat on the basis of domestic and international disapproval of our environmental record, perhaps it will be a much-needed signal that our recent conduct has been unacceptable.

[Update: 12 October 2010] Canada’s bid was unsuccessful. Hopefully, the embarassment will encourage Canada to play a more constructive role in future climate change negotiations.

Debating the oil sands

On November 13th, Green Party leader Elizabeth May will be debating Ezra Levant, the author of Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands. The event is taking place at the Library and Archives Canada on November 13th.

2:30pm – showing of the film “Mine Your Own Business”

4:00pm – approximate debate start time

It should be interesting. I may show up myself to ask Ms. Levant about the oil sands, climate change, and the importance of cumulative emissions.

I found out about the event via Apt 613.

How much will the Democrats suffer?

As the mid-term elections approach in the United States, speculation about the outcome is increasing. The smart money seems to be on a pretty substantial defeat for the Democrats – probably losing their majority in the House of Representatives, but probably hanging on in the Senate (where only 1/3 of members face election this year).

To some extent, the probable Democratic defeat is the product of disappointment with the Obama administration. If so, it strikes me as deeply irrational. While you can certainly argue that the Obama administration should have been more ambitious in areas like climate change policy or financial regulation, it seems inconceivable that a Republican victory would aid progress on either front. Rather, it would serve primarily to further castrate a once-promising administration.

Hopefully, the infighting between Tea Party sorts and the rest of the Republican Party will somewhat diminish the strength of the resurgence of the right. Similarly, it is to be hoped that supporters of a progressive agenda will be willing to set aside their self-righteousness for long enough to pull a lever or two in a booth somewhere.

I say that not because I think the Democrats are an especially good party, but rather because it seems nearly certain that a Republican controlled Congress would produce even worse outcomes, both for those living within the United States and for those around the world who are affected by its politics.

Smoking and climate change

Tristan keeps telling me that ozone depletion and acid rain are poor comparisons for climate change. Yes, they were major environmental problems that were identified scientifically, and then dealt with legislatively. But addressing them only really involved a small number of organizations, and processes that could be fairly readily replaced. Addressing the issues didn’t require much social or political change.

That’s fair enough, but perhaps there is an alternative comparison that is useful: smoking. Watching Mad Men constantly reminds me of how much of a transformation there has been in the public attitude toward smoking in the past few decades. While part of that was certainly driven by personal fear (smoking will kill you personally, climate change will not), the transition also involved moral arguments about the effects of secondhand smoke on unconsenting others. And it involved government imposing increasingly harsh regulations on an industry that was highly profitable, powerful, and fundamentally opposed to having its products restrained by law.

Perhaps growing awareness of the harms fossil fuels impose on others – including those in future generations – could help to drive a similar cultural shift. We have promising alternatives to fossil fuels, but our political system is still unwilling to take on the industries that want to keep us reliant on them. Perhaps smoking suggests that could change.

Reasons to be hopeful

Climate change is a daunting problem, about which humanity is doing far too little. While all the characteristics that make climate change a massively difficult thing to deal with are daunting, there are also numerous reasons to be hopeful about humanity’s future. Those who are alive now are likely to live to see the question of how much the climate changes decided, either in favour of unconstrained burning of fossil fuels accompanied by unconstrained warming, or shifted decisively toward zero-carbon forms of energy and a sustainable future.

That potential shift represents a major opportunity for humanity. For tens of thousands of years, human societies functioned using renewable forms of energy: primarily sunlight embedded in crops and biomass. Since about 1750, humanity has benefited from the massive burst of embedded energy accessible in fossil fuels. The evidence of that energy is everywhere: from highways to high rises. Now, we are obliged by pragmatism and ethics to swap out the unsustainable core of all our society’s undertakings and replace it with one that is compatible with the potentially unending string of human generations which could follow this one. If the generations alive now, and those that will be born soon, manage to achieve that transition, they will have effected one of the most importance changes in the history of humanity: a great shift from a global society built on the weak and threatening foundation of fossil fuels to one that can be relied upon indefinitely.

The rate of change in human societies is easy to underestimate, and yet the world has been transformed to an enormous extent in each of the past few centuries. Those transformations have largely been uncoordinated – arising from disparate actors making choices in response to the local incentives they face, as well as their worldviews and ideologies. Functional worldviews now must be exactly that: perspectives that are capable of taking seriously the bounded, finite, and interconnected nature of the world in which we live. If we are capable of driving the emergence of such worldviews, it seems as though the benefits could be numerous. Dealing with climate change requires that we act selflessly in anticipation of problems that science has uncovered, lurking out in future decades. If we can learn to respond intelligently to that threat – and press the emergence of a political and economic system that has that capability – it seems that humanity will be knit together in a newly intentional way. A way that includes the recognition of mutual interconnection and vulnerability, which appreciates how changes that unfold across long timescales can nonetheless require present and enthusiastic action, and which may be capable of addressing the many other problems which threaten humanity, albeit not as profoundly as climate change seems to.

In a way, the fossil fuel industry itself demonstrates the kind of human capabilities that are now required. Whereas extracting oil was once a comparatively simple matter, the global network of systems that extracts, processes, and uses fossil fuels is the product of a massive investment of resources and ingenuity across decades. Capabilities like deepwater drilling and the upgrading of heavy oils demonstrate what the combination of capital and human intellect can produce. Until now, most renewable forms of energy have been bit players from a societal perspective. As it becomes increasingly clear that the future of our energy system lies in the use of such technologies, it is fair to hope that some of those resources and intellectual capabilities will be turned to the project of their deployment and improvement.

The challenge facing us is an enormous one: one that requires a new level of global coordination across all continents and across the decades and centuries ahead. It is reasonable to see it as a test of humanity – whether we can behave collectively in an intelligent way, responding to a problem that is anticipated rather than immediately obvious, or whether we really are just a swarm which cannot be coordinated. While my reasons for hope may not be wholly rational, pressing ahead with the possibility of success in mind is surely preferable to despairing at the difficulty of the problem.

DDT and evolution

Naomi Oreskes’ book about climate change deniers makes some interesting points about the pesticide DDT. Apparently, there has been a kind of campaign recently to challenge the history of the substance and its ban, with some anti-regulation groups claiming the regulation of DDT was unneccessary and caused many human deaths. They argue that if DDT use had not been regulated, malaria could have been eradicated.

Oreskes seems to rebut this argument convincingly. Critically, she points out how DDT had been stripped of its effectiveness through over-use, particularly in agriculture. She makes the point that the consequences of different sorts of DDT use for the genetics of the mosquito population can be very different. Spraying indoors exposes only a small minority of mosquitoes to the chemical, leaving most of the population isolated from it. As a consequence, there is only a small advantage for those mosquitoes that are more resistant to the poison. By contrast, widescale agricultural spraying exposes whole populations of mosquitoes to the toxin. Those who are a bit resistant to it have a huge advantage, and soon come to dominate the population. Over time, the indiscriminate use of DDT breeds mosquitoes who are troubled less and less by the toxin.

Oreskes documents how the banning of DDT took place only after its effectiveness was lost, as well as how the environmental and human health effects of the substance were sufficiently worrisome to justify the ban. She argues that the recent attempt to change the historical narrative is not about DDT itself – which nobody is seeking to reintroduce. Rather, it is intended to foster and enlarge a general sense that taking precautions to protect human health and the environment is unjustified, and that science that supports the regulation of industry and individual behaviour is ‘junk’.

A related situation that I have written about before is the abuse of antibiotics in the livestock industry. Just as the agricultural use of DDT provided ideal circumstances for insects to evolve resistance, today’s factory farms may as well have been custom designed to render our antibiotics ineffective. Crowding huge numbers of unhealthy animals close together, flooding them with chemicals to make them grow as quickly as possible, feeding them unnatural diets, and then using antibiotics to try and keep them from dying too early, is a string of compounding errors. Not only does it demonstrate considerable disregard for the welfare of the animals in question, but it demonstrates a lack of foresight when it comes to maintaining the effectiveness of our drugs and the relative manageability of the bacteria out there.

Of course, the political system tends to favour the small group of farmers that benefits from the status quo and which would suffer significantly from a change in policy, rather than the great majority of people who are incrementally harmed by the emergence of ever-more-dangerous superbugs, and the dilution of the effectiveness of the relatively small class of chemicals capable of safely killing bacteria inside human beings, without causing undue harm to the person.

What’s possible?

Right now, the majority of educated Canadians seem to believe that one or both of the following is impossible:

For the world as a whole to reach carbon neutrality – the state where net greenhouse gas emissions are zero – before 2100
For the global economy to be restructured to run on forms of energy that are zero-carbon and renewable

And yet, both of these intertwined changes seem to be necessary if we are to avoid dangerous or catastrophic climate change.

My question to readers is: what would make the majority of people in Canada and around the world accept those two situations as at least possible? That is a necessary prerequisite to them being seen as desirable and, ultimately, necessary.

Ottawa’s ‘Beaver Barracks’

The rather unfortunately named ‘Beaver Barracks‘ is an ecologically oriented housing development, being put up by the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation (CCOC). Two buildings are under construction now, at 464 Metcalfe and 160 Argyle, and they are expected to accept their first residents in November and January, respectively. The building on Argyle will be four stories, while that on Metcalfe will be eight, with a roof terrace. Two additional buildings are expected later. In the middle, community gardens will be put in when construction is finished. The whole complex is located just south of the Nature Museum.

I first found out about the place by means of Zoom’s blog.

Sustainability features

For me, the most notable feature of the buildings is how they will be the largest residential development in Canada heated and cooled using ground-source heat pumps. Sylvie Trottier, CCOC’s Green Animator, sent me some details on the system:

The system we are building is a central distribution loop designed to deliver a specific temperature (70 degree F) to heat exchangers located at each of the four buildings. As well, it will provide this same 70 degree temperature to the domestic hot water system via a double wall heat exchanger. The geothermal ground loop is designed to provide 70% of the peak load of the system via the heat pumps; this design actually provides 90% of the annual load. The boilers plumbed to the central loop are incorporated to assist the geothermal heat pumps in maintaining the design temperature of 70 degrees during the peak demand period. The Domestic Hot Water system (DHW) is connected to the central loop through a double wall heat exchanger. The central loop provides the DHW heat pump with a temperature of 70 degree. The DHW heat pump raises the temperature to 150 degree F. The boiler attached to the DHW system is used for the peak periods when the heat pump system requires assistance in maintaining the design temperature. During the cooling season the heat being removed from the building is captured by DHW heat pump system and used to supply the DHW. This feature enhances the overall efficiency of the central plant system. Also important to note is that the central distribution system will maintain itself through a balance of heating and cooling during the shoulder seasons, when the loop temperature is simply maintained through the space conditioning requirements of the tenants.

The central distribution loop will then feed heat pumps in each unit that will provide tenants with control over their own heating, cooling, and hot water.

Geothermal heating and cooling seem ideally suited to Ottawa, given how the city experiences extremes in both summer and winter temperatures. Other sustainability enhancing features include a green roof, low-flow fixtures, efficient lighting and appliances, and a high performance building envelope.

The architects are Barry J. Hobin & Associates Architects Inc.

Unit selection

I attended one of their information sessions yesterday, and ended up submitting an application to live in B^2 (as I prefer to think of it). My top two applications were for 683 square foot one-bedroom apartments in 160 Argyle, with this layout:

The balcony and windows look south, into what will eventually be the central garden area. For the immediate future, they will overlook a construction site.

Reading floorplans isn’t something I have much experience with, so if any readers have the mental ability to turn these pictures into an image of what the apartments will be like, I would appreciate your feedback.

The other unit I applied for, as a third choice, is a 602 square foot one-bedroom apartment, located on the 5th floor of 464 Metcalfe. It has this floorplan:

The bedroom window would look north, toward the Museum of Nature, with the balcony above the central garden area.

The rent for each unit is $956, plus various expenses. For the units I selected at 160 Argyle, heating and cooling are $62.83 per month. For that at 464 Metcalfe, it is $55.39. HST, electricity, laundry, and internet would be on top of that. Both places are significantly more expensive than my current place, but I think it would be worthwhile for a couple of reasons: primarily, for the benefit of living in a situation where I would be more likely to meet new people, and in order to encourage more sustainable construction.

Lots of other unit types are available: ranging from bachelors to three bedroom units. Heating and cooling costs are set per square foot.

[Update: 1 October 2010] I got word from CCOC. I will be moving into a place modeled on the first floorplan, on 1 January 2011. It will be on the fourth floor of 160 Argyle. It will be my second non-university-residence home.

What will the future condemn?

Over on Climate Progress, Joseph Romm makes a good case that future generations will condemn us for ignoring climate change. He argues that there are three signs of a behaviour that is common in a society at one point, but which is later widely condemned on moral grounds:

“people have already heard the arguments against the practice”
“defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity”
“supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit”

All of these factors seem to be in play, when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions and the changes in climate they are producing.

As I have done, Romm compares greenhouse gas emissions now with slavery in previous times. Both were once central to the economic sytems of some places, but both impose intolerable burdens on innocent people.

Sprawl and municipal services

On his blog, David Reevely makes a convincing case against urban sprawl that I hadn’t heard previously:

The trouble is, sprawl has costs. It’s incredibly expensive for us all. Light-density housing is great to live in, but it’s brutal to supply with public services. Take fire stations: their response times are primarily a function of how far the firefighters have to drive to get to a call. That means that to maintain minimally acceptable standards, you need to have a fire station every so-many kilometres. If 10,000 people live within that radius, then 10,000 people share the cost of supporting that fire station, its firefighters and their equipment. If you pack 100,000 people into that radius, then the cost is divided among 100,000 people, and you have a lot left over from their property taxes for other things. But if you have too few, and their property taxes aren’t enough to pay for the fire station, then you need to bring in money from somewhere else.

It’s a bit ironic, really. We discussed before how people living in rural areas can get a false sense of their own self-sufficiency. It’s ironic that rather than being bold frontierspeople, living off the land, those who populate the less dense fringes of urban centres might impose disproportionate costs on the municipal authorities.