climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet
Does anybody know of any climate-related jobs in Toronto?
All of these sectors are potentially of interest: government (federal, provincial, municipal), academia, non-profits, and the private sector.
I am interested in work in a wide variety of sectors including:
Feel free to email me at rather than post comments here.
As discussed recently, there seem to be a few key ideas about climate change that aren’t yet widely recognized or discussed, much less accepted. The major purpose of BuryCoal.com is to help spread these: arguing that we don’t need to burn all the world’s fossil fuels; that doing so would be extremely dangerous; and that we can choose to leave the carbon embedded in these reserves safely underground forever.
I have personally spent much of the past five years reading and writing about climate change issues. As such, there are a lot of ideas (and a lot of terminology) which is already very familiar to me, where it might not be to most educated people.
If readers are willing, I would really appreciate if they would have a look at BuryCoal.com and the ‘Why bury coal?’ page and identify elements that are confusing, too technical, or otherwise problematic. It doesn’t have much value if is simply serves as a forum for those who agree with the message. It needs to be able to speak to those who have different views, as well.
As always, the site is also looking for contributors.
Virtually all moral systems incorporate some notion similar to John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle – the idea that a person’s freedom to act can be legitimately restricted, when the actions of that person cause harm to others.
It is now beyond question that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, and that climate change is harmful to people all over the world. Also, there is a strong case that subjecting future generations to the risk of catastrophic or runaway climate change is morally unacceptable. Moral philosopher Henry Shue equates doing so to forcing someone to play Russian Roulette; even if they don’t end up getting shot, you have still imposed a risk on them in an immoral manner.
As a consequence of what we know about climate change, and what ethical theories tell us about freedom and harm, it seems safe to say that people no longer have an unlimited right to burn fossil fuels. As I mention in a comment on BuryCoal, however, there is a further wrinkle that deserves consideration:
One moral case that does have a bit of traction is based on ignorance and historical trends. Places with abundant coal – for instance – invested heavily in coal-based infrastructure before they were aware of the existence and threatening character of climate change. A strong case can be made for them to be given time to adjust, now that everybody knows that burning those fuels is deeply harmful. That being said, the world’s current legal regimes strongly defend the rights of resource owners to dig up and sell these fuels as they wish. There is little danger of them being immediately ordered to stop. As such, adjustment time is being provided based on the sheer length of time it is taking for the legal and political systems to take climate change into account.
To me, it now seems fair to tell the world’s fossil fuel users and extractors that their adjustment time has started. They should consider themselves on notice, when it comes to future restrictions on their right to extract and use fossil fuels.
If they are smart, they will be using this time to develop alternatives. That way, investments in appropriate infrastructure can be done efficiently and gradually, rather than in a time of crisis. When our legal and political systems finally catch up to the reality of climate change, they will no longer have much of a legitimate claim for transition time. That is especially true when it comes to some of the grossly inappropriate infrastructure that is being built now, such as coal-fired power plants and unconventional oil and gas projects.
I think I should spend more time standing in or in front of fields of solar panels:
I think it would make me more optimistic.
I have written before about some of Google’s energy-related undertakings: their RE<C initiative, their interest in geothermal power, and their PowerMeter project, for example.
The latest Google energy initiative is their $200 million investment in an Atlantic wind power transmission grid. The underwater Atlantic Wind Connection Project is expected to eventually power 1.9 million homes in Virginia, New York and New Jersey at a final cost of about $5 billion.
According to the official Google blog, the line will be able to connect up to 6,000MW of wind capacity to the grid. When geographically seperated wind farms are linked together – along with other forms of sustainable generating capacity – the problems associated with the intermittancy of wind can be mitigated. In total, the area has an estimated wind power potential of 60,000 MW.
At the moment, Canada is competing for one of the ten non-permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council – the principal international body charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Canada thinks of itself as an internationalist country that has committed itself to peacekeeping and other forms of international assistance. Unfortunately, Canada is also doing virtually everything in its power to worsen the most pressing medium-term threat to international security, namely climate change.
At the moment, the United Nations process designed to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is going nowhere. While that situation has many causes, one of the most important has been the unwillingness of developed states to make real commitments and take meaningful domestic action. For its part, Canada has adopted targets that would be better than nothing, but which are neither fair now adequate. In order for the world to avoid dangerous climate change, other countries would need to pick up the slack created by Canada’s lack of ambition. Even worse, Canada has no credible plan to meet those targets, and has taken no serious domestic action on climate change.
Right now, Canada is flirting with some of the most dangerous energy options out there. These include unconventional oil and gas, including the oil sands and shale gas, as well as fossil fuel reserves in formerly inaccessible places like the Arctic. Chasing those fossil fuels is foolishness. It commits us to perpetuating an energy system that profoundly threatens future generations, and redirects resources from the task of building a sustainable basis for our society.
As long as Canada continues to behave with such reckless disregard for those outside its borders, including those who are not yet born, it doesn’t deserve the prestige associated with a Security Council seat. To be sure, some of Canada’s international actions have been and are praiseworthy, but that doesn’t counterbalance the way in which Canada is helping to commit the world to a colossal blunder. Ultimately, it may require Canada becoming an international pariah before our government will stand up to the oil and gas sector. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If Canada loses its bid for this seat on the basis of domestic and international disapproval of our environmental record, perhaps it will be a much-needed signal that our recent conduct has been unacceptable.
[Update: 12 October 2010] Canada’s bid was unsuccessful. Hopefully, the embarassment will encourage Canada to play a more constructive role in future climate change negotiations.
On November 13th, Green Party leader Elizabeth May will be debating Ezra Levant, the author of Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands. The event is taking place at the Library and Archives Canada on November 13th.
2:30pm – showing of the film “Mine Your Own Business”
4:00pm – approximate debate start time
It should be interesting. I may show up myself to ask Ms. Levant about the oil sands, climate change, and the importance of cumulative emissions.
I found out about the event via Apt 613.
As the mid-term elections approach in the United States, speculation about the outcome is increasing. The smart money seems to be on a pretty substantial defeat for the Democrats – probably losing their majority in the House of Representatives, but probably hanging on in the Senate (where only 1/3 of members face election this year).
To some extent, the probable Democratic defeat is the product of disappointment with the Obama administration. If so, it strikes me as deeply irrational. While you can certainly argue that the Obama administration should have been more ambitious in areas like climate change policy or financial regulation, it seems inconceivable that a Republican victory would aid progress on either front. Rather, it would serve primarily to further castrate a once-promising administration.
Hopefully, the infighting between Tea Party sorts and the rest of the Republican Party will somewhat diminish the strength of the resurgence of the right. Similarly, it is to be hoped that supporters of a progressive agenda will be willing to set aside their self-righteousness for long enough to pull a lever or two in a booth somewhere.
I say that not because I think the Democrats are an especially good party, but rather because it seems nearly certain that a Republican controlled Congress would produce even worse outcomes, both for those living within the United States and for those around the world who are affected by its politics.
Tristan keeps telling me that ozone depletion and acid rain are poor comparisons for climate change. Yes, they were major environmental problems that were identified scientifically, and then dealt with legislatively. But addressing them only really involved a small number of organizations, and processes that could be fairly readily replaced. Addressing the issues didn’t require much social or political change.
That’s fair enough, but perhaps there is an alternative comparison that is useful: smoking. Watching Mad Men constantly reminds me of how much of a transformation there has been in the public attitude toward smoking in the past few decades. While part of that was certainly driven by personal fear (smoking will kill you personally, climate change will not), the transition also involved moral arguments about the effects of secondhand smoke on unconsenting others. And it involved government imposing increasingly harsh regulations on an industry that was highly profitable, powerful, and fundamentally opposed to having its products restrained by law.
Perhaps growing awareness of the harms fossil fuels impose on others – including those in future generations – could help to drive a similar cultural shift. We have promising alternatives to fossil fuels, but our political system is still unwilling to take on the industries that want to keep us reliant on them. Perhaps smoking suggests that could change.
Climate change is a daunting problem, about which humanity is doing far too little. While all the characteristics that make climate change a massively difficult thing to deal with are daunting, there are also numerous reasons to be hopeful about humanity’s future. Those who are alive now are likely to live to see the question of how much the climate changes decided, either in favour of unconstrained burning of fossil fuels accompanied by unconstrained warming, or shifted decisively toward zero-carbon forms of energy and a sustainable future.
That potential shift represents a major opportunity for humanity. For tens of thousands of years, human societies functioned using renewable forms of energy: primarily sunlight embedded in crops and biomass. Since about 1750, humanity has benefited from the massive burst of embedded energy accessible in fossil fuels. The evidence of that energy is everywhere: from highways to high rises. Now, we are obliged by pragmatism and ethics to swap out the unsustainable core of all our society’s undertakings and replace it with one that is compatible with the potentially unending string of human generations which could follow this one. If the generations alive now, and those that will be born soon, manage to achieve that transition, they will have effected one of the most importance changes in the history of humanity: a great shift from a global society built on the weak and threatening foundation of fossil fuels to one that can be relied upon indefinitely.
The rate of change in human societies is easy to underestimate, and yet the world has been transformed to an enormous extent in each of the past few centuries. Those transformations have largely been uncoordinated – arising from disparate actors making choices in response to the local incentives they face, as well as their worldviews and ideologies. Functional worldviews now must be exactly that: perspectives that are capable of taking seriously the bounded, finite, and interconnected nature of the world in which we live. If we are capable of driving the emergence of such worldviews, it seems as though the benefits could be numerous. Dealing with climate change requires that we act selflessly in anticipation of problems that science has uncovered, lurking out in future decades. If we can learn to respond intelligently to that threat – and press the emergence of a political and economic system that has that capability – it seems that humanity will be knit together in a newly intentional way. A way that includes the recognition of mutual interconnection and vulnerability, which appreciates how changes that unfold across long timescales can nonetheless require present and enthusiastic action, and which may be capable of addressing the many other problems which threaten humanity, albeit not as profoundly as climate change seems to.
In a way, the fossil fuel industry itself demonstrates the kind of human capabilities that are now required. Whereas extracting oil was once a comparatively simple matter, the global network of systems that extracts, processes, and uses fossil fuels is the product of a massive investment of resources and ingenuity across decades. Capabilities like deepwater drilling and the upgrading of heavy oils demonstrate what the combination of capital and human intellect can produce. Until now, most renewable forms of energy have been bit players from a societal perspective. As it becomes increasingly clear that the future of our energy system lies in the use of such technologies, it is fair to hope that some of those resources and intellectual capabilities will be turned to the project of their deployment and improvement.
The challenge facing us is an enormous one: one that requires a new level of global coordination across all continents and across the decades and centuries ahead. It is reasonable to see it as a test of humanity – whether we can behave collectively in an intelligent way, responding to a problem that is anticipated rather than immediately obvious, or whether we really are just a swarm which cannot be coordinated. While my reasons for hope may not be wholly rational, pressing ahead with the possibility of success in mind is surely preferable to despairing at the difficulty of the problem.