Canada – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

Canada’s two kinds of environment ministers

Based on my experience of Canadian environment ministers (whatever the department is called at a given time), there are essentially two types. The rarer type is the genuine environmentalist who thinks they can get things done through the compromises of government. They’re true believers on climate change but rarely have much support from cabinet or the prime minister because what they want to do is not actually popular. Set in the abstract, people want to keep the climate stable and protect the planet. Give them the choice between that and something concrete, however, and you have the recipe for delay and misdirection which has been ongoing in Canada for 30+ years. I would say Stéphane Dion and Catherine McKenna are the clearest example of the genuine environmentalist set, and demonstrate how people with those priorities get sidelined. When you have no natural allies in cabinet because most of the other departments are pro-fossil (industry, transport, finance, natural resources, etc) the constraints of cabinet solidarity put ministers of this type in the position of unsuccessfully demanding the bare minimum behind closed doors, before defending inadequate plans to the public.

The other type of Canadian environment minister is the public relations spinmaster whose behaviour does not demonstrate any sincere concern about climate change, but simply the need to manage it as a PR issue. This is a much easier approach to the job since you can always just say nice things, avoid hard decisions, and cut dirty deals in the background. I feel like John Baird, Jim Prentice, Peter Kent, and Jonathan Wilkinson fall in this category. My father recently collected a set of letters on climate change for Minister Wilkinson (mine is here) and the experience illustrates how Wilkinson is a PR man for a government which in practice largely serves the same interests as the Harper Conservatives, but who work to maintain a false public and media narrative that they are bold environmental champions.

Part of the problem, surely, is that politicians have a hopelessly distorted understanding of the scale against which they should be judged. They give themselves kudos for being better than some of their electoral competitors, rather than comparing the scale of the efforts they propose against the scale of what needs to be done. The consequences are that the future becomes more dire for everyone, and that Canada will have an infrastructure and economic base poorly matched to what success in a post-fossil world will require.

Forgone fossil fuels

Back in 2012, Justin Trudeau said that “there’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there.”

At an event in June organized by Bank of America, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman supposedly said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

Since avoiding catastrophic climate change is chiefly a problem of prompt global fossil fuel abolition, such sentiments are positively frightening. Trudeau’s cynicism may not be entirely justified, however, as there are examples of government choosing not to develop fossil energy, either out of innate concern about climate change or because they expect such industries to be in decline as the world decarbonizes.

For example, Greenland has banned oil exploration and Quebec’s government rejected a $14 billion LNG export project.

A few examples don’t make a trend, and enormous investments in fossil fuels continue to be made. At the same time, every noble example provides a case that can be raised with politicians who say action is impossible or that nobody will do it. If countries like Canada which have become rich on a high-carbon trajectory and which maintain excessively high per capita emissions continue to refuse to decarbonize we perpetuate a global suicide pact in which we all end up with ruin because each jurisdiction scrambled to pull in as much fossil cash as possible beforehand.

Will Trudeau gamble on a 2021 election?

For weeks, the press has been full of reports about a potential election, with the Trudeau Liberals potentially hoping to replace the 147 seat minority which he won in the 2019 election with another majority like in 2015.

Speculation has reached the point that a prominent potential Liberal candidate has told the media that he won’t be running this time because of other commitments.

There is a common view that the ongoing implosion of the Green Party may be part of the rationale for going to the polls.

Presumably, Trudeau’s team at the Prime Minister’s Office has encouraging interal voter models, since they have allowed widespread speculation on an election and encouraged it with the traditional statements that the current Parliament isn’t working. Nonetheless, it may be a risky prospect. A Nanos poll found that only 26% of Canadians want an election. Furthermore, there is good cause to worry about another big new wave of COVID cases as protective restrictions are scaled back, people change their behaviour, and variants continue to spread within populations around the world where far too many people have refused vaccinations in the places where they are available. That could leave the government punished on both sides, first from those who support strong public health policies and feel let down by the government’s willingness to contain the pandemic, and also from the mega-libertarian crowd who have hated the precautions which have been taken and will rage if they are reimposed.

From a climate change perspective, it’s hard to know what to hope for. The Liberal government’s climate change policies have been deeply inadequate and sometimes counterproductive (insisting that fossil fuel development can continue, building long-lived infrastructure to that effect, refusing to set targets that are within the time period where the government will be accountable and which are compatible with a 1.5–2.0 ˚C limit and Canada’s fair share). The Conservatives would clearly be worse, as a central part of their pitch is dismantling the carbon pricing system which has been the Liberals’ main contribution with some notion of wooly support for technological development, The NDP and Greens might theoretically be better but (a) they can’t win given first-past-the-post and the preferences of Canadians and (b) it’s not clear their climate change policies would be better. The NDP has been perhaps the most inconsistent party, torn both by anti-environmentalist union sentiment and the party’s hope of replacing the Liberals on the centre-left, making them chiefly critics of that party. The Greens have far too little support to plausibly form a government, and tend to be riven anyway by campaigns to posture for moral purity. Ironically — at a time when people are opening up to the idea that climate change is the defining challenge of our time — the focus of the Greens is elsewhere.

Perhaps the best outcome would be an election that produces little change: a similar seat count, another Liberal minority, and a continued need to cooperate with other parties to stay in power. There is a case that a majority would let them act more boldly on climate, but I would say there is a stronger case that having to maintain support from other parties pushes them to do more than their status quo backers in the finance and resource industries would prefer.

Canada submits new 2030 climate target

Canada is now promising the UN that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The government says emissions are already set to fall from 729 million tonnes (MT) in 2018 (the last year with final figures) to 468 MT by 2030.

Canada’s choice of a 2005 baseline sets it apart from the global standard of setting targets compared to 1990 emissions as required by the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, effectively forgiving 15 years in which bitumen sands output and Canadian GHG pollution rose substantially. Canada’s emissions rose from 600 MT to 747 MT between 1990 and 2005.

Linkages between the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and contention elsewhere

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Rashid Khalidi argues:

Israel’s apologists in Washington, London, and Berlin naturally trotted out the standard clichés about Israel’s right to self-defense, but they could not mask the changing tone both in the political arena and in the large demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. For perhaps the first time, public discourse in all four of those countries (which share legacies of dispossessing indigenous peoples) featured discussion of the settler colonialist nature of generations of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Activists reinforced parallels to the oppression highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, and many young Americans now connect the injustice they have seen in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, to what they saw in Sheikh Jarrah and other locales where security forces use the same U.S.-manufactured tear gas and the same militarized policing tactics.

…

Terms that were never employed in the past about Israel, such as “systemic racism,” “Jewish supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” and “apartheid,” are being debated and becoming part of U.S. and left-wing Israeli public conversations.

While it is far from my area of expertise and specialization, I do watch the media coverage on Israel’s ongoing inability to resolve a conflict between being Zionist, being democratic, and holding all the land they have.

It also crops up in intersectional climate change activism, which is based around the idea that each injustice should be understood alongside each other, and that strategies for resolving them all simultaneously should be pursued. Campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns have often experienced internal conflicts about whether it is strategic or ethically obligatory for them to express solidarity with Palestinians and condemnation for Israeli conduct. Oftentimes, this involves a discussion of whether Israel’s critics are antisemitic — one argument used to condemn and reject the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement intent on applying external pressure to Israel. This has been at the heart of recent ructions in Canada’s federal Green Party.

On the other side, those who are critical about linking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with issues like environmental protection see the debate as absorbing a lot of time and energy for little purpose. There’s little or no prospect that any statement by environmentalists will affect Israeli government conduct. Some would say the effort to link these conflicts stems from a desire for a feeling of personal moral purity among activists, rather than an assessment of what impact their actions could really have. As the catastrophic momentum and severity of climate change continue to worsen, there is a fair case to be made that we need to focus on the issue and not be diverted down unproductive tracks. Indeed, if some nefarious pro-fossil outfit wanted a strategy for distracting progressives from a focused and effective call for fossil fuel abolition, stirring up arguments about notional but passionately held disagreements in which those arguing have little or no actual influence would seem to be a sound strategy.

Crazy heat out west

In the Pacific northwest of the US and Canada’s western provinces and territories a severe heat wave is breaking all-time temperature records.

The region generally benefits from moderate year-round temperatures, both because the nearby and massive Pacific ocean takes in heat in the summer and releases it in the winter and because prevailing winds from the west come from the ocean rather than over land. As a result, homes, infrastructure, wardrobes, and lifestyles are not suited to extreme temperatures.

The insurance industry as a leverage point for fighting climate change

One of the revelations about fighting climate change that seems to have echoed broadly since 350.org started the fossil fuel divestment movement is the degree to which the industry can be suppressed by denying it access to financial services.

That includes denying it the ability to borrow from banks and institutional investors, who are increasingly concerned both about the reputational risk of supporting a world-wrecking industry and the financial risk of contributing to new fossil fuel projects which will need to be shut down to avoid worst-case climate change scenarios.

It also includes the insurance industry. To begin with, they face enormous financial risks from climate change impacts as diverse as rising sea levels, extreme storms, and wildfires. The concept of insurance is that the premiums are reasonable because things won’t go wrong for everyone at the same time; you can get affordable fire insurance, for instance, because in most cases the insurer can be confident that only a small fraction of insured properties will burn each year. That calculation changes when climate change coordinates risks for billions around the world, whether that’s coastal property at risk to rising seas and hurricanes or towns in wildfire zones that now face an existential risk every time there is a bad fire season. With those kinds of risks now evident, it’s unsurprising that the insurance industry is expressing concern and calling for action.

In addition to those insured against climate change risks, insurance is also necessary for fossil fuel project proponents. That leverage point is being made use of by anti-pipeline activists in B.C. who are pushing for insurers to refuse to cover the Trans Mountain pipeline:

Over the course of the week, Indigenous rights and climate activists from Vancouver to Kiribati to Sierra Leone called on Liberty Mutual, Chubb, AIG, W.R. Berkley, Lloyd’s of London, Starr, Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting, and Marsh to publicly pledge to refrain from doing any future business with the project.

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Argo, one of the companies that currently insures Trans Mountain, recently confirmed it will not cover the pipeline or its expansion project, which would carry an extra 590,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta oilsands to British Columbia. Since then, two other insurance companies that had previously insured Trans Mountain but are not current insurers, Scor and Lancashire, have cut ties too.

No doubt this will lead to howls from pro-fossil entities, but in the long run blocking these projects has the promise of avoiding massive further investment in unusable energy.

The fossil fuel industry has been able to impose as much harm on the world as it has because there haven’t been mechanisms to make it care about the losses being suffered by others. If that freeloading dynamic changes, the world will have a better chance of avoiding climate catastrophe. Insurers can play an important role in driving the shift.

Jimmy Carter and the NRX meltdown cleanup

By [President Jimmy] Carter’s own account, his poor opinion of nuclear power originated in personal experience. In 1952 the future president was a US Navy lieutenant with submarine experience stationed at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, training in nuclear engineering under Hyman Rickover. That December, an experimental Canadian 30-megawatt heavy-water moderated, light-water cooled reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, experienced a runaway reaction, surging to 100 megawatts, exploding and partly melting down. It was the world’s first reactor accident, a consequence of a fundamental design flaw of the kind that would destroy a Soviet reactor at Chernobyl three decades later. Since Carter had clearance to work with nuclear reactors, which were still classified as military secrets, he and twenty-two other cleared navy personnel went to Ontario early in 1953 to help dismantle the ruined machine. Because it was radioactive, the calculated maximum exposure time around the damaged structure itself was only ninety seconds. That exposure would be the equivalent of a worker’s defined annual maximum dose of radiation—in those days, 15 rem (roentgen equivalent man). More than a thousand men and two women, most of them Chalk River staff, would participate in the cleanup.

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Had he known the long-term outcome of the Chalk River radiation exposures, Carter might have felt friendlier to nuclear power. A thirty-year outcome study, published in 1982, found that lab personnel exposed during the reactor cleanup were “on average living a year or so longer than expected by comparison with the general population of Ontario.” None died of leukemia, a classic disease of serious radiation overexposure. Cancer deaths were below comparable averages among the general population.

Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 316, 317

Jenica Atwin leaves the Greens for the Liberals

As every first year Canadian politics class covers ad nauseam , the first past the post electoral system is great for large parties and terrible for small ones. Since you only win MPs by winning a plurality in each electoral district, parties that have a small but significant amount of support spread between many ridings may end up electing almost nobody while the parties that win the largest share of the vote end up with an even larger proportion of the seats and usually all the influence.

The sheer difficulty of electing someone from the Green Party as an MP makes running a bit of a quixotic gesture, with most candidates, staffers, and volunteers aware that their chances of winning are negligible and so the value of participating in the election may be about contributing to the discourse rather than a hope of victory.

With each Green MP so precious and unlikely, it must be especially galling to see Fredericton MP Jenica Atwin cross the floor from the Greens to the Liberals. At least according to the CBC, one reason she chose to make the change is Green Party infighting about the Israel-Palestine dispute. To me, this is suggestive of two things. First, how the agreed portions of a ‘green’ agenda don’t really add up to a complete set of policies, and so green supporters may have to deal with an unusual amount of in-party disagreement about non-environmental matters (and perhaps also on how to solve environmental problems). To me it’s also suggestive of the emphasis on symbolism and moral righteousness or superiority within the progressive left. It’s questionable whether Canada as a whole has any meaningful influence over the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and it’s basically certain that a fringe party with just a few MPs doesn’t. That makes the dispute seem a bit like a high school student council voting on whether to praise or condemn a foreign government; it has considerable scope for generating conflict among those involved in the vote, but no real prospect of making a difference in the world at large.

Bitumen producers’ distant, unlikely, and disingenuous promises

In perhaps the ultimate demonstration that ‘net zero’ promises are a delaying tactic meant to preserve the status quo which favours fossil fuel producers, Canadian bitumen sands giants Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil, MEG Energy, and Suncor Energy have formed “an alliance to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from their operations by 2050.”

When firms that see their futures as continuing to dig up the world’s dirtiest hydrocarbons en masse it becomes clear how ‘ambitious’ promises set in the far future are a tactic to avoid meaningful regulation and lobby for additional subsidies right now. In a world genuinely heading for net zero, there will be no reason to exploit the world’s dirtiest fossil fuels, including coal and the bitumen sands. Furthermore, the idea that ‘net zero’ can apply in this context is fanciful. Using a technology like direct air capture to collect all the emissions associated with extracting, upgrading, and burning oil from the bitumen sands would cost so much that it would undermine any economic rationale for extracting the oil in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that the pollution can just be buried fails to fairly consider the scale at which CO₂ would need to be buried. There is simply no comparison between the total amount of carbon pollution we emit and the amount we might plausibly bury given the need for a vast new infrastructure to sequester carbon by the gigatonne, and the fact that this infrastructure would only consume money and energy without producing anything of value except reduced pollution. Rather than keep pounding back whisky in the hope that we can build a machine to clean our blood before we die, we really just need to abolish the practice which is creating these dire risks, namely continued fossil fuel exploitation.