Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

GDP growth versus emissions growth in Canada

The blog of the Pembina Insitute has a very interesting post on how annual greenhouse gas emissions are changing in different Canadian provinces. Since 1990, they are way up in Alberta, up a good bit in B.C. and Saskatchewan, up a little in Ontario and Manitoba, and flat in Quebec. Alberta alone contributed more than 50% of Canada’s GHG emissions growth.

These graphs – comparing contributions to GHG emissions growth, GDP growth, and population growth between 1990 and 2008 – are rather interesting:

The biggest story that jumps out at me from this is how Ontario and Quebec show that it is possible to achieve economic growth with moderate or non-existent growth in GHG emissions.Quebec added as much to Canadian GDP as Alberta did, at the same time as their emissions fell slightly.

The cost of prison

Apparently, imprisoning someone in Canada costs over $100,000 a year. Right off the bat, that is clearly a substantial investment of resources. It gets even worse when you consider a few further aspects.

Firstly, it seems highly dubious that prisons play a rehabilitative role. Those who are incarcerated will probably deal with a lengthy stigma afterward, perhaps for the rest of their lives. This will worsen their employment prospects and reduce the welfare of their family members. It is also plausible that having a record of incarceration increases the relative appeal of crime as a means of financial subsistence. Before you have such a record, you have a lot to lose from a criminal conviction; afterward, you have fewer legitimate job opportunities and less to lose from a longer record.

Secondly, it seems clear that the government could spend that sum of many in a great many more productive ways. You could probably finance someone’s entire undergraduate degree for that amount, or provide an apprenticeship program for a trade. You could do a lot of preventative medicine, or invest a fair bit in deploying improvements in energy efficiency or renewable energy generation.

It seems particularly absurd to imprison people with a non-violent involvement in the drug trade. It is a normal characteristic of human beings to want to experience altered states of consciousness. It is one that we positively encourage in some cases, such as the thrill from athletic exertion or Hollywood movies, and tolerate and regulate in others, such as with alcohol and tobacco. It seems utterly foolish to imprison those who seek to alter their mental state in unauthorized ways, or assist other people in doing so, when that choice is costly to everyone in terms of lost opportunities, and especially costly to the person being punished, in terms of future prospects.

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.