Law – Page 10 – a sibilant intake of breath

Trudeau’s carbon pricing plan

Today Prime Minister Trudeau announced that the federal government will require all provinces to have a carbon price of at least $10 per tonne by 2018, rising in $10 increments to $50 per tonne in 2022. There’s a lot of politics at work here. The Alberta government says they will only accept the plan in exchange for an export pipeline, while climate activists emphasize that the whole point of a carbon price is to prevent such projects. Trudeau seems to think he has split the opposition in Parliament, and set up an approach that most Canadians will support:

Polls suggest there is overwhelming support for the idea of carbon pricing, and that many Canadians back the imposition of a national climate change target. Trudeau alluded to that generosity of spirit when he said Canadians are prepared to work together and follow through on the commitments to fighting climate change made in the Paris Agreement on climate change. But such good will has its limits.

Environmental groups rushed Monday to condemn the planned price as being too low to take a bite out of Canada’s emissions. Dale Marshall of Environmental Defence said the carbon price needs to rise at the same rate beyond 2022 — a point on which Trudeau was mute.

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It’s a perfectly sound strategy, provided he forsakes his environmentalist allies. It is becoming clearer by the day, they are not going in the same direction as he is.

Trudeau needs to have the courage to tell Canadians that fossil fuels are on the way out as a source of jobs, tax revenue, and economic prosperity. Building new extraction and export projects is wholly at odds with the direction Canada and the world need to go. A price on carbon is a mechanism for discouraging fossil fuel projects, not an excuse for letting them proceed.

Consultation on elections in Canada

Parliament’s Special Committee on Electoral Reform is holding an online consultation about Canada’s electoral system. It covers issues including mandatory voting, voting machines, and possible changes to our electoral system.

People can submit written evidence, ask to appear before the committee, or complete an online consultation. The online consultation closes October 7th.

If you take part, I encourage you to tell the committee to reject online voting and any electronic voting machine that doesn’t produce paper records for voters to check and to be used in routine verification and re-counts. Without such hard copy records, the voting system would be terribly vulnerable to fraud.

Arms control and MIRVs

President George H.W. Bush followed up these arms control initiatives. In 1991, he signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which called for reducing the number of ICBMs and warheads on both sides; ICBMs were reduced to 1,600 and deployed warheads to 6,000. In January 1993, just before President Bush left office, he signed another Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), of enormous significance for strategic stability because it banned MIRVs on ICBMs. Considering the well-known theory that a MIRV might “invite” a surprise attack because of the economy-of-destruction of one attacking Soviet warhead taking out a US missile (still in its silo) armed with ten warheads, the ban on MIRVs was seen as enhancing strategic stability by eroding any incentive for an “out-of-the-blue” attack. Hence this treaty solved the problem that all the MX mobile-basing modes [including missiles on airplanes; trains; trucks; submerged on the continental shelf; or always moving between a huge number of shelters (p. 49-50)] of the past had eventually been judged incapable of solving. (Unfortunately, START II is no longer in effect. As I will discuss later, the Russians withdrew from the treaty and began building a new class of MIRVed ICBMs after the George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the ABM Treaty with the Russians.)

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.72-3 (paperback)

Is environmentalist solidarity with Indigenous peoples opportunistic?

During the last few years, solidarity with Indigenous peoples has been a major area of emphasis for environmentalist, climate change activist, and anti-pipeline groups. In part, this seems to be based on the view that indigenous peoples have the strongest legal tools for blocking new fossil fuel projects, at least in Canada.

This raises the question of how genuine the support for Indigenous people really is. Do these environmental groups provide such support principally for the narrow (yet essential) purpose of avoiding catastrophic climate change? Is it somehow automatically the case that indigenous communities will choose low-carbon energy if given more power to influence political and economic choices? When Indigenous groups support fossil fuel development, for whatever reason, what is the appropriate response for those seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change? And even if the impulse to prevent catastrophic climate change is morally laudable, how should indigenous communities feel about being used as a means to that end?

The Energy Gang on “clean coal”

For a few months, I have been listening to The Energy Gang podcast. They cover a range of issues, but I think they are distinguished by being wonkier than usual, very U.S.-focused, and more focused on economics and business than most climate change commentators.

Their most recent episode discusses a recent New York Times article questioning the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a way of making coal-fired facilities compatible with a stable climate. One of the panellists stressed the need for an “all of the above” clean energy strategy, in which CCS may help prevent some coal facilities from becoming stranded assets. Others argued that the economic evidence so far shows that CCS won’t save anything, and that the health impacts alone of coal are sufficient to justify its abandonment.

Ludicrously, the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention calls coal “clean” even without CCS being included.

Recent episodes have also discussed the climate impact of plans in the U.S. to retire 17 nuclear power plants; renewable energy; transport; climate denial; arctic drilling; and many other topics.

Open thread: Brexit

Will it really happen? Or will the U.K. find some way to pull out before invoking Article 50?

The consequences of the leave vote were evidently predictable. This is from June 18th: “If Remain wins on June 23rd, Brexiteers will tell voters they were conned. If Leave wins, Mr Cameron will go and his successor will negotiate a Brexit that does not remotely resemble the promises of the Leave campaign, which trades on the lie that Britain can have full access to the European single market without being bound by its regulations and free-movement rules.”

Also — what impact will this have on global climate efforts? Early signs are not encouraging.

Federal Court of Appeal overturns Northern Gateway Pipeline approval

The Federal Court of Appeal just ruled that the Canadian government had failed to adequately consult indigenous peoples and so quashed the 2014 federal approval for the project.

As one of the subjects of my PhD thesis, all developments on NGP are of great interest. It’s certainly a fast-moving as well as an important topic.

My shot

It’s strange that a stage show running in one city is affecting the whole continent, but New York isn’t a normal place and Lin-Manuel Miranda clearly isn’t a normal man.

The killing in Orlando originally prompted my personal doctrine in response to political violence: refuse to be terrorized. One or a few people armed and keen to kill do not affect my thinking about politics.

I cried quite unexpectedly when I saw Miranda’s sonnet.

Reading more about the musical, and revelling in my BitTorrent audio, I am increasingly impressed by the virtuoso genius of the thing. Violence has sometimes been a decisive factor historically, but there is scope to hope that ideas and arguments can be our battleground as humanity learns to live all together on this small planet.

Is the Leap Manifesto at risk of easy reversal?

Today, Toronto350.org hosted a teach-in in preparation for the climate change consultations which the Trudeau government has asked MPs to hold.

Avi Lewis — co-creator of the Leap Manifesto — was on the panel. The question which I submitted through the commendable system of written cards (to avoid tedious speeches from the self-important audience members) wasn’t posed to the panel, but I did ask Mr. Lewis about it after.

Specifically, I raised the issue of progressive climate change policies being adopted by one government and removed or reversed by the next. How can we enact policies that can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and avoid being reversed when new governments take power, especially right-wing ones?

Mr. Lewis said that the climate movement doesn’t have an answer to this question.

He began by describing how the right wing in North America has been effective at creating mechanisms to lock in its own policies. Specifically, he cited the network of right-wing think tanks and multilateral trade agreements that constrain the policy options of future left-leaning governments. To this could be added some of Sylvia Bashevkin’s analysis of how centre-left governments like those of Clinton and Chretien adopted much of the thought of their right-wing predecessors.

I went on to contrast two potential approaches to success, the hope that a coalition of leftist forces can work together to achieve all of their objectives (which seemed the underlying logic of today’s event, and much other climate change organizing) and the approach embodied by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), in which they are strictly non-partisan and seek to become a trusted source of climate information for members of all political parties and adherents to all mainstream ideologies.

Mr. Lewis said that he saw little point in the CCL approach, in part because parties like the Republicans in the U.S. are so unreceptive. He also thought this approach has been tried unsuccessfully by the climate movement already, whereas major pressure from a left-wing coalition was novel and might be able to drive change in a government like Trudeau’s.

I remain skeptical about the idea that a coalition of the centre-to-far-left can achieve durable success on climate change. These are critical years in terms of blocking big new infrastructure projects, but solving climate change will ultimately require decades of belt-tightening and sacrifice. Conservatives need to be on board if we’re going to succeed, and tying climate change mitigation too tightly to other elements of the left-wing agenda could impede that. Hence my anxiety about non-strategic linkages with laudable but not critically connected causes, from LGBTQ rights to minimum wage policy to the conduct of police forces.

The big exception in my view is solidarity with indigenous peoples. Around the world, they are absolutely central to the process of shutting down fossil fuel development. In Canada, where the Trudeau government remains either clueless or in denial, they may also be the only ones with the legal power to stop the construction of fossil fuel production and transportation infrastructure that we will all regret.

2016 Walter Gordon Symposium — Indigenous reconciliation

The 2016 Walter Gordon Symposium (Word document) was about indigenous reconciliation in Canada, following the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I attended every panel, and I am working on processing and uploading my photos.

A complex confluence of factors seem to have combined to make indigenous issues critically important politically all around the world. In particular, the resurgence of aboriginal peoples is deeply bound up with our best hopes for avoiding destroying human flourishing and life as we know it through climate change.