Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

John Kerry on the new senate climate bill

Over on Grist, there is an article written by Senator John Kerry about the new climate legislation being introduced in the U.S. Senate. His message has a sobering but pragmatic tone:

A comprehensive climate bill written purely for you and me — true believers — can’t pass the Senate no matter how hard or passionately I fight on it. No, it’s got to be an effort that makes my colleagues — and that has to include Republicans so we can get to 60 — comfortable about the jobs we’re going to create and the protection for consumers and the national security benefits — and it has to address those pieces on their terms. The good news: I think we got that balance right.

It is hard to know whether he is right about that, and I felt similarly ambivalent about the previous Waxman-Markey climate bill. That said, Kerry’s argument does highlight the trade-off the frequently exists in policy-making between how well designed a policy is, to reach its objectives, and how well crafted it is from the perspective of political possibility. It’s a shame that what is necessary in the real world can be impossible in the political world, but that is a reality that must be incorporated into our strategies.

Given the series of blows against good climate policy recently, having some sort of legislative success in the United States could be very important. It could help drive Canada towards finally doing something about climate change, and it could help revive the moribund UN process internationally. Also, like many other weak pieces of domestic climate legislation passed before, it could always be strengthened after the fact.

For what it’s worth, here’s hoping the US manages to do something, if only so as to stop providing the rest of the world with such a convenient justification for doing nothing.

Government and opposition, as theatrical roles

The other day, I watched a Parliamentary committee.

It was depressingly predictable. The opposition MPs accused the civil servants appearing before the committee of being wasteful, or being slow and inefficient, and of being hijacked by the government’s political agenda. The government MPs defended their own choices as good for Canadians, and certainly more impressive than anything opposition MPs did while in power.

If there was an election and the position of the parties was inverted, these people would just need to cross the floor and trade speaking notes. There is no real dialogue here, just the performance of previously defined and superficial roles.

I suppose that is all in keeping with my theory of democracy as constraint – a theory based primarily around very low expectations for politicians. Perhaps we cannot really hope to control what politicians do once they are in power, by listening to what they say before elections and selecting one lot rather than another. Perhaps all we can do is force that floor-crossing, note-trading exercise to take place before one particular group becomes hopelessly compromised and corrupt.

The oil sands and accumulating CO2

Over at DeSmogBlog, there is a good post about Canada’s oil sands, and why their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions are their most significant environmental consequence.

The most worrisome thing about the oil sands is that they do most of their damage when they are operating properly – not when they are killing ducks, or when toxic liquids are leaking out of tailings ponds. What makes them really harmful is the extraction, processing, and (especially) use of the oil they contain. As such, efforts to make them more environmentally friendly are ultimately doomed to be limited in scope.

Climate change and the seal hunt

Over the weekend, I found myself wondering about the relative impact of Canada’s extremely controversial seal hunt and climate change, when it comes to the prospects for Grey Seals and Harp Seals.

Given that it seems highly likely that climate change will eventually eliminate summer sea ice, and given that creatures including seals seem to be critically dependent on sea ice, it does seem possible that climate change will render these seal species extinct, eventually, or will sharply curtail their numbers.

Stage one of a comparative analysis would be developing an estimate of how many seals would have lived between the present and the non-human-induced extinction of the species. They could potentially endure until the end of the carbon cycle, or until the sun expands into a red giant. More plausibly, they might exist in large numbers until the next time natural climate change produces a world too hot to include Arctic sea ice.

If we had an estimate of how far off that probably is, and an estimate of the mean number of seals that would be alive across that span, then we can estimate how many seals would be lost if humanity eliminates summer sea ice and, by extension, wipes out or sharply curtails the number of these animals in the wild.

It is possible to imagine a chart showing seal population year by year, extending far into the future. There could be one shaded segment showing the projected seal population in the absence of human intervention, and others showing possible population crashes resulting from anthropogenic climate change. A third shaded area could show the number of seals taken annually by hunters. The relative area of the shaded regions would show the relative magnitude of hunting and climate change, as causes of seal mortality. If you think of all the seals that would have lived, if we hadn’t locked in the eventual disappearance of summer arctic sea ice, the number killed by hunters is probably quite small.

My suspicion is that hunting would be a tiny blip, compared with climate change. If so, the environmentalist campaign to end seal hunting seems misdirected. Even if protesters are more concerned about animal cruelty than about species sustainability, this argument seems to hold up. Surely it is cruel for the seals to suffer and slowly die off as their habitat loses the capacity to sustain them.

I think it would be well worth some serious organization producing an quantitative version of the argument above. Like ducks, it seems quite possible that seals are distracting us from the environmental issues we should really combating, or at least encouraging us to respond to those issues in a less effective way than we could.

The market knows best, except when it comes to green technology

In another demonstration of how many conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the environment, we have the sorry example of Canada’s billion dollar green energy fund.

Contrast these two situations:

  1. You oblige people to pay a fee when they emit greenhouse gases, and pay other people a reward if they can remove these gases permanently from the air.
  2. You set up a giant fund of cash, and give it away to some companies because they think they might find a costly way to maintain business as usual (carbon capture and storage) and then give the rest to whoever can get the most political traction.

The former approach demonstrates faith in innovation and market mechanisms. The latter approach suggests that the indefinite combination of government analysis and lobbying can somehow do better.

If we want to address climate change in a fair and effective way, we should be making firms and individuals pay the true costs of what their actions impose on everyone, while banning the most destructive activities. We should not be setting up weird mechanisms for political patronage.

Climate Change Accountability Act vote

This Wednesday, Bill C-311 (Climate Change Accountability Act) will be debated at Report Stage. This NDP-sponsored bill includes targets of a 25% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below by 2050. It also obliges the government to produce an emissions target plan for 2015, 2020, 2025, 2030, 2035, 2040 and 2045.

I don’t know that the bill’s prospects for passing are, but it seems likely to have little effect in any case. Parliament previously passed the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, in the face of government opposition. The government refused to alter its climate change mitigation plans in response, and the Supreme Court Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the law was ‘not justiciable’ and therefore not for the courts to enforce.

The only importance this bill seems likely to have is a mild and symbolic one. If it passes, it will show continued dissatisfaction on the part of opposition parties about the government’s climate plan. If it fails, it risks showing the opposition parties divided on the issue, or unwilling to make it a priority.

[Update: 13 April 2010] This post originally made reference to the Supreme Court of Canada, whereas it should have made reference to the Federal Court.

[Update: 15 April 2010] The bill passed the Report Stage and will go to Third Reading, probably via committee. The motion to send it to Third Reading passed by 155 to 137.

Some good climate news from Ontario

The Ontario government has just announced $8-billion in renewable energy projects, to be undertaken by dozens of companies with the aim of increasing renewable capacity by 2,500 megawatts.

Investing in the energy systems of the future just makes sense. Ontario could improve on this further by accelerating their planned coal phase-out from 2014 to this year.

Tracking what is in the atmosphere

The Economist recently published an article lamenting how little funding is devoted to tracking the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. States do produce bottom-up records of emissions, based on what various facilities and vehicles emit. But it is also possible to track the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere directly, and to infer things about emissions from regional variations in concentrations and from isotopic ratios which can help to identify the sources of gases like CO2 and methane. As explained in the article, little of this is being done, largely because of a lack of funding. The unfortunate destruction of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory is also a contributing factor.

It is both saddening and surprising that so little funding is devoted to collecting this basic information, especially given that it could provide the earliest signs of significant changes in the functioning of the carbon cycle. For instance, it could identify things like the rate of methane release in the Arctic, or changes in the world’s carbon sinks. Greenhouse gases affect the climate system, regardless of whether they are released directly by human beings or whether humans merely induce their release indirectly. As such, top-down tracking is vital for developing and maintaining a comprehensive sense of what is going on.

In Canada, at least, the state of climate science funding seems to be worsening. While promises of a ‘High Arctic Research Station’ continue to be made periodically, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) is being shut down for lack of funding, and Canada’s climate scientists remain muzzled.

Ice roads and climate change

As climate change continues, the Arctic is warming more than any other part of the world. This year’s mild winter is having an effect on northern communities, by making ice roads they depend upon impassable. Now, a state of emergency has been declared:

Mild weather shut the roads down after just under a month, which cut off more than 30,000 people from the south. Normally, the 2,200 kilometres of temporary routes over frozen swamps, muskeg and lakes are open for up to eight weeks.

About 2,500 shipments of fuel, groceries, construction materials and general freight are brought in at a reasonable cost using winter roads. Otherwise, goods have to be flown in at great expense.

Of course, there has always been variation in the severity of winters, arising from the complexities of the climate system. What climate change does is shifts the distribution: making the mean winter warmer, and increasing the number of very unusually warm winters relative to very unusually cold ones.

The specific case of ice roads and Arctic communities also demonstrates a broader situation. Every community in the world has evolved into its current form based at least partly on the climate in which it exists. This includes everything from transportation and housing infrastructure to energy generation facilities and emergency response capacity. The more climate change takes place worldwide, the greater the mismatch will be between the climate communities were built for and the climate they actually experience.