Economics – Page 4 – a sibilant intake of breath

Resisting fossil fuel recruitment at universities

A tactic that has developed in parallel to campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns has been activists resisting on-campus recruitment by fossil fuel corporations. With an industry that needs to be rapidly phased out to avoid climatic catastrophe, it doesn’t make sense to be training new people to join.

The UK eNGO People & Planet has a fossil free careers campaign. Birkbeck, University of London has banned fossil fuel firms from its career service. This month, three other UK universities did the same.

UN secretary general António Guterres recently said: “My message to you is simple: don’t work for climate wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future.”

Podcast episode about the early U of T fossil fuel divestment campaign

The first episode of Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva’s podcast about the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is online. This one features three organizers from the early campaign in 2012: me, Stu Basden, and Monica Resendes.

Podcast series on fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto

Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva are making a five-episode series on the U of T campaign, and an intro episode is online already.

All along one of the challenges with volunteer-driven student organizing is that few people can stick around to maintain the group’s memory across the years. Efforts like this podcast series, to document and analyze what took place, will be valuable for the people setting up the next iteration of the climate fight.

Considering student coaching

To further develop the student coaching idea:

It would be student-driven, not curriculum-driven. The starting point would be who they are, why they’re at university, and what they aspire to do in the medium- and long-term. That’s the basis for helping them find worthwhile extracurriculars and networks, as well as thinking about course planning and major selection from a holistic perspective.

I would work for the student, not the university. As a TA I have spent many hours with students one-on-one reviewing their written work either before or after submission and grading. This has all been essentially unpaid, as I didn’t have so many hours of student contact in my TA contract. I enjoyed doing it though because it felt like the only time when I was really teaching. Up in front of a tutorial I am doing am improv act, trying to weave together my prepared material with the organic discussion of the students willing to talk. One-on-one we can take our time and establish that the student is really following along. It becomes possible to see if they can repeat back the salient idea to you.

As a TA, I was chiefly paid for grading and administrative hours like keeping track of attendance. Neither is an activity that much serves to educate. They are part of the university’s sorting function rather than its residual educational capabilities. Switching sides to serve rather than sort the students is appealing.

All the student support they get at U of T is a bit like going to an emergency room doctor. Their only priority is to deal with the narrow issue in front of them, because they have no long-term relationship to any patient’s health and need to triage patients by degree of need. This student coaching service would be like a family doctor, reminding you of things it will be important to to before you’ve missed a deadline and it’s not possible, and when to get started in researching each batch of papers.

Personally, rather than pedagogically, I see great appeal in employment where I need to maintain clients but not to report to any bosses.

Princeton divesting

Princeton is not only divesting but ‘dissociating’ from fossil fuel corporations:

Divestment is a decision to refuse to invest in a company or set of companies and entails the sale of all securities associated with a company, including both direct and indirect investments, and precludes the repurchasing of those securities.

Dissociation means also refraining, to the greatest extent possible, from any relationships that involve a financial component with a particular company. It includes no longer soliciting or accepting gifts or grants from a company, purchasing the company’s products, or forming partnerships with the company that depend upon the exchange of money.

Every highly reputable school that acts makes it easier for others to say yes and harder to justify continued fossil fuel investment.

Renewable energy has drawbacks and environmental consequences

Renewable energy sources — wind, wave, solar, and the like — are generally the preferred energy sources of environmentalists. At the same time, there is no way to produce energy without some sort of environmental impact, and the more people you need energy for the greater the impact will be.

Some examples of environmental impacts from renewable energy:

Nonetheless, unintended side effects of renewable energy sometimes lead environmentalists to oppose it. In my view, they are missing how every energy source will have drawbacks and the question is how they relate to the drawbacks from alternatives, chiefly fossil fuels. Environmentalists can be too easily inclined to become perpetual and reflexive critics, always emphasizing the problems with any course of action and effectively acting as a blockage to any action.

Renewable energy options:

Environmentalist / NIMBY opposition to renewable projects:

Energy storage:

Transmission and grid interlinkage:

Demand shaping:

Politics of renewables:

Nikon leaving the dSLR business

In a surprising if not shocking move, Nikon has announced that they will stop making new digital single lens reflex (dSLR) cameras. It’s shocking to me because ever since digital cameras have existed, Nikon dSLRs have been considered among the best by professional photographers. They’re even used on the International Space Station, where shipping anything up from Earth is so costly that there’s no reason to send anything but the best, not to mention how great photos have always been a key means of outreach for the space program.

Trans Mountain would not be profitable

One of the most bizarre things the Trudeau government has ever said about energy and climate change is that building the Trans Mountain pipeline is necessary for the transition away from fossil fuels because it will raise the money needed to carry it out.

This has always been an absurd proposition. It’s ridiculous on its face that investing billions of tens of billions in fossil fuel export infrastructure which will operate for decades will help Canada do its share to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Now even the financial argument has come under serious criticism. Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux recently estimated that the cost of the project has grown from $12.6 billion in 2020 to $21.4 billion now and concluded that “Trans Mountain no longer continues to be a profitable undertaking.” At the same time, cancelling the project would yield a $14 billion loss.

Neither the federal nor Alberta government is changing course because of this analysis. Chrystia Freeland’s press secretary has said: “The Trans Mountain Expansion Project is in the national interest and will make Canada and the Canadian economy more sovereign and more resilient.” Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage said: “This project is necessary for Alberta and Canada’s energy sectors.”

All this is a reminder of how the behaviour a government needs to follow to stay in power does not consist of serving the public interest or putting forward a coherent policy agenda, but rather maintaining the support of the key societal actors that the government needs to keep in power.

Exposure of individuals’ investments to the carbon bubble

Further substantiation of the carbon bubble / stranded assets argument that if governments act seriously on their climate goals then a huge amount of fossil fuel investment will become worthless:

Nature Climate Change study: Stranded fossil-fuel assets translate to major losses for investors in advanced economies

Guardian reporting: People in US and UK face huge financial hit if fossil fuels lose value, study shows

We are losing the global fight against fossil fuels

Three examples from today:

1) Coal shortage and heatwave spark India’s power woes:

The government says it is doing all it can do to ensure supplies. Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner, has increased production by 12%, “strengthening India’s energy security”, according to the federal coal ministry. It also despatched 49.7 million metric tonnes of coal to the power generating companies in April, a 15% rise over the same month last year. The railways have cancelled more than a thousand passenger trains to transport more coal to fuel-starved plants.

2) Hydro-Québec mounts last-ditch effort to revive stalled power line project through Maine:

The planned project would carry 1,200 megawatts of electricity over a 336-kilometre high-voltage transmission line between Thetford Mines, Que., and Lewiston, Maine. Of the 233 kilometres planned on the U.S. side, 85 kilometres would cut through a forested area. Clearing work was already well underway at the time of the referendum.

According to Maine Public Utilities Commission, the project would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.6 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road.

However, the state’s largest environmental advocacy group, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, has expressed a great deal of skepticism about the real environmental benefits of Hydro-Québec energy, questioning whether the project would actually reduce GHG emissions.

3) Ontario energy grid emissions set to skyrocket 400% as Ford government cranks up the gas:

Since all renewable energy projects were cancelled when Premier Doug Ford was elected, the province currently has no other way to compensate for the looming shutdown of a major nuclear reactor in Pickering, responsible for roughly 16 per cent of province-wide power. Only natural gas is available to meet rapidly growing demand for electricity, according to the IESO projections.

The projections show that the province’s natural gas plants — which only operate about 60 per cent of the time now — will run non-stop by 2033. The additional annual emissions this will produce over the next 20 years are equivalent to a large Alberta oilsands project.