The environment – Page 104 – a sibilant intake of breath

Differential electricity pricing

Some forms of differential prices based on time are entirely artificial: for instance, telephone companies that charge more for calls made before 6:00pm or 7:00pm. They do this because it is profitable. It lets them charge high prices during the day to business users, while offering cheaper plans to social users later. That being said, there are situations where the economic basis for prices varies considerably depending on time of day (and year). Electricity production is one.

In the future, spikes in electricity demand may be partially mitigated through the combination of variable pricing and smart appliances that can inform users about the costs of operating at different times, or even make autonomous choices to stay within a budget. This video from General Electric provides more information.

While getting rid of daytime minutes would have little real effect on cell phone networks, shifting electricity demand from high-demand to low-demand times could have a significant impact on the electrical system, partly by reducing the need for inefficient ‘peaker’ plants, which top up supply during periods of maximum strain.

The costly nuclear option

Writing in The Toronto Star, Tyler Hamilton reveals that the AECL bid to add two new Advanced CANDU reactors to Ontario’s Darlington nuclear station was approximately $26 billion. That works out to a shocking $10,800 per kilowatt of electricity, compared with the $2,900 per kilowatt reference figure the Ontario Power Authority was using for planning back in 2007. The French firm Areva apparently put in a lower bid – $7,375 per kilowatt – but was unwilling to take on as much risk as AECL. The article also notes the untested nature of the Advanced CANDU design, which is especially worrisome given the failure of AECL to deploy two planned isotope reactors, due to design failures.

If this is the true contemporary cost of nuclear power, it seems plausible that we shouldn’t be bothering with it, given all the other associated risks. For $10,800 per kilowatt, it is quite possible we could get more value by funding energy efficiency, conservation, and renewables. Taking some cost figures from MacKay, we can compare $26 billion for 2,000MW (2GW) of nuclear with other options:

Onshore wind: $2.8 billion for 2GW
Offshore wind: $3.0 billion for 2GW
Concentrating solar in deserts : $31 billion for 2GW
Solar photovoltaic: $14.5 billion for 2GW

We also wouldn’t be taking on the additional risks associated with proliferation, accidents, wastes, and so forth. Admittedly, MacKay’s figures are approximate and there are other considerations to be made. Even so, the staggering cost of the AECL bid has to give pause to anyone who hopes nuclear could be a cheap and relatively easy solution to climate change. It may be that The Economist will be proved correct in saying: “Since the 1970s, far from being ‘too cheap to meter’—as it proponents once blithely claimed—nuclear power has proved too expensive to matter.”

More cycle-friendly Burrard Street Bridge

The Burrard Street Bridge – one of Vancouver’s prettiest – has been modified so as to be more friendly to cyclists. One of the two sidewalks has become a dedicated corridor for cyclists heading north into downtown. Meanwhile, one traffic lane has been converted for use by cyclists heading south toward Kitsilano. Pedestrians will be restricted to the other sidewalk.

The move is a very welcome one. The bridge offers nice views of the mountains, False Creek, and downtown. Making it cycle-friendly also contributes to a beautiful cycling arc extending from the University of British Columbia, along the beaches to the Granville Island area, then across the Burrard Street Bridge and along the waterfront path to Stanley Park.

Cyclists in Vancouver should definitely give this ride a try, while the six month bridge trial is ongoing.

Palin’s content-free opposition to carbon pricing

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, has produced an op-ed for The Washington Post attacking the Waxman-Markey bill, and the idea of using cap and trade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. She argues:

It will prevent economic recovery.
It will make energy too expensive.
Job losses will result.
Costs of agriculture, transport, and manufacturing will rise.
Drilling in Alaska and building pipelines is a better option.
The US has lots of coal, and could build a lot more nukes.

Notably, she doesn’t even pretend to offer a solution to climate change, the primary problem the Waxman-Markey bill aims to address. This is remarkably myopic. Even if we accept that all of her assertions are true, this op-ed brings us no closer to making an intelligent decision on climate change and energy policies, since it doesn’t really contemplate alternative mechanisms through which climate can be stabilized and dependence on non-renewable fuels can be overcome. To imply that the US can get by with a bit more drilling is deeply fallacious. Similarly, it is misleading and dangerous to suggest that the American economy would keep ticking happily along indefinitely, even if climate change was totally unrestrained and allowed to follow its most destructive course.

We can only hope that the US Senate will be a bit more far-seeing in its analysis and deliberations, more willing to consider the key motivations for energy policy, and ultimately seized of the importance of sending a strong and growing price signal, so as to progressively and deeply curb the release of harmful and threatening greenhouse gasses.

Privatizing the sea to prevent overfishing

One standard solution to overfishing offered by economists is to essentially privatize the sea by creating individualized transferable quotas (ITQs) that give individuals and firms an incentive to fish at a sustainable level. Where intellectually coherent, the approach can be criticized on a number of grounds.

This Grist post does a good job of doing so. It points out the importance and difficulty of setting an appropriate Total Allowable Catch (TAC), the enormous problem of subsidized overcapacity, as well as bycatch and social justice issues.

ITQs may well be part of a sustainable global fisheries regime, especially where it comes to well-studied coastal fisheries off the shore of a single state with a strong regulatory capacity. When it comes to dealing with the pillage of the open ocean, however, they don’t really stand a chance.

Pine beetles spreading into the US

According to the BBC, the climate-linked mountain pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia is threatening to spread south and west, into the United States. Forests with a mixture of species and small regular fires would be more resilient, overall.

In addition to mentioning the importance of warm winters in aiding the spread of the insects, the article describes how past fire suppression policies have produced huge areas of mature lodgepole pine, which are especially susceptible to the beetles.

The continuing spread represents not only an economic and environmental cost linked to climate change, but also a potentially serious positive feedback effect. It is estimated that Canada’s boreal forests alone contain about 186 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent: an amount equivalent to about 25 years of global emissions at the present level.

G8 insufficiently wary of climate change

Writing in The Toronto Star Christopher Hume has produced a short but trenchant criticism of this government’s position on climate change: Political expediency trumps fate of planet.

As Hume explains:

In the face of overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening, and faster than the most pessimistic climatologists had expected, how can such extraordinary stupidity be justified?

Inaction of this sort goes well beyond ordinary human idiocy; it represents a collective rush to self-destruction on an unprecedented scale. And through it all, our leaders smile and assure us they won’t let our standard of living be threatened.

The G8 leaders would do well to read Jared Diamond’s work on civilizational collapse, so as to better understand the extent to which civilizational success depends absolutely on maintaining agricultural productivity, which in turn depends on avoiding massive environmental degradation and responding intelligently to the problems that arise.

As I have pointed out before, it is a false to suggest that we can continue to enjoy economic and social prosperity without dealing with the problem of climate change. Runaway climate change could literally kill everyone, and even increases of as little as 2°C “stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society” according to the scientists at RealClimate.

This government needs to realize that climate change isn’t some minor political issue to be managed, but rather a major civilizational challenge for humanity. So far, Canada has influenced this process primarily be serving as an anchor, holding back those with greater vision and determination.

Who is vulnerable to climate change?

Yesterday, I attended a meeting on climate change, security, and human rights (mentioned before). One thing about it disturbed me: namely, that the entire perspective offered was a north-south narrative of industrialized states causing harm to vulnerable populations around the world. The discussion was largely about how that harm could be reduced, and whether any legal mechanism exist through which states could be called to account, for the damage they do to the prospects of vulnerable groups.

Sadly, this perspective is over-optimistic, given the world’s track record so far. While highly vulnerable groups and poor states may be hit first and hardest by climate change, the idea that they will be the only people profoundly affected is misleading and potentially dangerous. It feeds into the flawed notion that rich states can basically keep behaving as they have in the past, with the worst possible outcome being a lot of suffering for poor people elsewhere.

The reality is that business-as-usual emissions would probably produce a mean global temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. That is a massive enough change to raise doubts about the future of even some rich societies. Could Australian agriculture cope with that much of an increase? Could cities in the southern United States continue to provide the minimum level of water required to sustain their populations? (US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu suggested perhaps not.)

My fear is that people who expect that only the poor and vulnerable will suffer from climate change will not be sufficiently motivated to deal with the problem. Such a belief strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of both the best scientific and political assessments. It would be hard to read the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC and not conclude that people in rich countries face acute vulnerability to unchecked climate change. Similarly, the basic message of economic analyses like those performed by Nicholas Stern is that the costs of inaction are very high, especially when compared with the real but comparatively modest price of dealing with the problem.

Greenpeace’s Mount Rushmore protest

In one of the best Greenpeace publicity stunts I have seen, a trio of climbers hung a banner on Mount Rushmore for the American Independence Day. It read: “America honors leaders, not politicians: Stop Global Warming,” highlighting the difference between being a poll-driven populist and someone with the vision and strength to help drive your nation towards a better future.

The next six months will be extremely important for the future of the world’s climate. In the best-case scenario, the US Senate will strengthen and pass the Waxman-Markey bill, and the US and China will cooperate and help to create an effective new international regime in Copenhagen. If Obama kicks things off in that direction and then helps to sustain the drive towards decarbonization, people might decide to chip his head into that South Dakotan granite in a hundred years time.

Ethanol damaging to internal combustion engines?

The many problems with ethanol as a fuel have been mentioned here before: the climate and energy security benefits are dubious on a life cycle basis, making it from food crops harms the poor, the economics of cellulosic ethanol remain unknown, it has less energy content than gasoline, it is corrosive, it mixes with water, etc. For these reasons and others, most informed environmentalists completely reject corn-based ethanol as a climate change solution, though many remain hopeful that better feedstocks will be found. Ed Wallace raises yet another objection to its use in motor vehicles, namely that it can damage their engines.

Apparently, gasoline with more than 15% ethanol blended in can damage plastic fuel intakes, corrode surfaces even within special ethanol-tolerant ‘flex fuel’ vehicles, and can attract moisture in a way that can generate acids during storage. I don’t know enough about motor vehicle engines to comment personally, but perhaps some readers will be able to assess the probable severity of these issues.

None of this is to say that ethanol certainly has no role whatsoever in our future mix of transportation fuels. Rather, it suggests that the shift may not be as trouble-free as ethanol’s most enthusiastic promoters suggest. For a whole slate of reasons, the idea that we can easily move from fossil fuel dependence to reliance on domestic crops and ethanol-fuelled vehicles is a falsehood. The process of overcoming fossil fuel dependence will require both more intelligent lifecycle considerations of the total impacts of fuel production and, probably, a greater willingness to alter our overall transportation infrastructure.

Personally, I think hydrogen is a pipe dream and ethanol and biodiesel may find niche roles, but electric vehicles are likely to become the dominant form of ground transport over short-to-moderate distances.