Climate action shouldn’t happen by accident

Over the last week or so, we’ve seen both major closures of petroleum-powered automobile manufacturing facilities (in part to facilitate a transition to electric cars) and major cutbacks in tarsands extraction.

Let’s be clear about a few things:

1. These didn’t occur due to government action; rather, the economic conditions are making it so that building gas-powered cars and exporting tarsands products to the US are no longer viable.
2. These are both wins for the environment, and are part of a process that environmentalists have been demanding for years.
3. This is not how any environmentalist wanted it to happen. These are coming with huge impacts on thousands of individual workers, which is a very negative result.

Climate action has to come one way or another. I, and many other environmentalists and progressives, would prefer it to be led by government, and not come as a side effect of economic circumstances. We’ve been calling for a just transition, not overnight collapses of industries.

If governments had listened to us and acted in a meaningful way, they would have been ready to go with job retraining programs to help auto and oil workers get back to work in a blossoming clean energy sector, or in building vehicles for public transportation, or some other set of green jobs that would have been there waiting for them if we’d acted soon enough.

Instead, we are at thousands of job losses and years behind on climate action, and our governments have wasted countless dollars backing up the fossil fuel and fossil fuel-dependant industries for the sake of these “jobs” that need to be phased out, not in.

When we demand climate action, it’s not just out of wanting to protect the environment, though certainly that’s a necessity. It’s about realising the very real human impact of inaction, at so many levels. We can invest in clean energy and green jobs, and build long-term infrastructure and industries that are doing good in the world. Public policy should never be about saving existing jobs for their own sake, but should be about ensuring people can afford to live in a world without unsustainable jobs.

 

An open letter to the BCNDP on pipelines

I have just submitted this request for clarification to the BC NDP. If I receive an answer, I will post it here.

Hi,

I’m wondering if I could get a clearer understanding on the BCNDP’s policy on pipelines, and specifically the Kinder Morgan pipeline. I’ve seen/heard the following quotes over the last day:

“Radically transforming the port of Vancouver into a major oilsands export terminal is not a good idea.”

“We will take back control of pipeline decisions and subject both the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan proposals to a rigorous made-in-BC environmental assessment.”

“We do not expect Vancouver to become a major oil-export port, as appears to be suggested in what Kinder Morgan is suggesting to the province and to the country…I don’t see that transformation as being the right approach for our economy or our port.”

“It seems to me that increasing from 80,000 barrels a day to 450,000 barrels a day (exported from Metro Vancouver in tankers) is a massive change in the nature of that operation…That’s a real problem.”

Despite what the media is saying, none of these things explicitly rule out allowing Kinder Morgan to expand its pipeline, though I admit it might rule out them sextupling their capacity. But saying that things are a “problem” does not mean you won’t allow them.

So I’ll ask simply: will you do everything in your power to oppose/prevent any expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, and other pipelines that will carry bitumen through British Columbia? Or will you allow some limited expansion? While the media and a surprising number of environmental lobby groups are suggesting the former, I read the quotes above as saying the latter.

I would greatly appreciate if you could clear up this confusion.

Thank you,

Neal Jennings

Postscript to notes on the revolution: The floods.

The other day I wrote an entry that very few people read about how future generations are being left with a world that is less inhabitable and will be less pleasant than that left to our parents’ generations.

One specific example I made was to recent flooding – and it’s only gotten worse.  We all know climate change will lead to different rain patterns, and in many cases increased levels of precipitation.  We also know that infrastructure in most of Canada is aging, and in many cases not being repaired properly.  Generally speaking, we’re choosing to make both these problems worse, not better.

On climate change, we all know the story by now – the current federal budget is taking what is already a bad situation and making it worse by not only not stopping the extraction of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s tarsands, but encouraging it. On a global basis, this has been called “Game Over” for the climate as we know it.  We’re also not doing anything to curb the consumption of products and energy sources that produce greenhouse gases – Canada, for that matter, has even abandoned Kyoto.

On the infrastructure level, many governments at every level are all about austerity these days. Cuts, cuts, cuts.  Why? Because we claim we can’t afford things. We don’t want to pay taxes.  What is this leaving us with?  “New” sewage treatment plants failing, subway stations flooding, entire downtown cores incapable of handling rain, and entire towns of First Nations being evacuated. This has all happened in just the last two months – most of it in the last week.  Not to suggest that we humans are better than nature – but we’re perfectly capable of handling large amounts of water in our cities.  We’re choosing not to be by choosing the cheaper option rather than the more sustainable option.  We would not be hearing stories of highways falling apart and subway stations being flooded if we actually spent the money and effort to make sure things were kept up to the highest standards and were modernised and expanded on a regular basis.

I said it before, but I’m saying it again: we can’t keep pretending that we can have a successful society without a government that is properly funded with tax dollars. We’re in this mess now, and if we’d like to prevent the mess from getting bigger, it won’t be cheap.  But neither is cleaning sewage out of your basement or subway.

Notes on the revolution… #ggi

For those who have been living under a rock, or in some country other than Canada, there’s kind of a revolution going on in Quebec right now, particularly in Montreal.  Readers’ Digest version: Students are protesting daily, and have been doing so for well over 100 days now.  The trigger was a 75% tuition increase, which inspired a student ‘strike’ (or perhaps more accurately described as a boycott), and has attracted the hashtag #ggi for grève générale illimitée (unlimited general strike).  The protests eventually attracted some violence from grève supporters, which in turn the police responded to with all sorts of violence on the entire movement.  Things continued to get out of hand, and the provincial government passed Loi 78 that severely limited the right to protest in Quebec.  Unsurprisingly, this made more people side with the students, and the movement has grown bigger and is starting to gain some support outside the province as well. The latest incarnation has been borrowed from South American protestors, the banging of pots and pans (“casseroles”) in one’s own neighbourhood, forming into a march organically rather than following organised strategies which are now essentially illegal in Quebec.  Tonight, there will be solidarity gatherings of casseroleux across Canada now dubbed “Casseroles Night in Canada.”  I’ll be attending in Vancouver and encourage others to do the same locally.

One thing has become clear to me, and many others, over the past few weeks of following these stories.  This isn’t just about tuition. This has become so popular because it’s bigger than that.  It’s about the world that the people born in the last three decades are being left with by our elders.  Our elders who, whether they intended to or not, have left us to pay the bill for their excesses.

Some thoughts on the federal budget

The one time of year my numbers-geek profession and politics-geek hobby overlaps is when the budget comes out.  It’s exciting!  I spent a few hours Thursday night reading the budget document.  Well, not fully reading (it’s 498 pages!), but scanning and reading the bits that were more relevant/interesting.  And stopping to tweet when I saw something noteworthy.  It’s late now, so I’ll post this Friday morning, but here are some random thoughts on the budget:

How much oil spill is acceptable?

Just a short entry today, I needed somewhere to show my calculations for a tweet / status update on this.

I was about to email one of my senators and mention some stuff about the Northern Gateway pipeline, and I found this site: http://www.northerngateway.ca/

This is of course Enbridge’s site to market its proposed pipeline.

By their own words:

Liquid pipeline spills along rights of way have decreased over the past decade, in terms of both the number of spills and the amount of product spilled. On average, for every barrel of oil (42 gallons) shipped 1,000 miles, less than one teaspoon is lost from a liquid pipeline.

Converting to metric, that’s 1,609 km. They plan to transport 525,000 barrels of tarsands oil a day to the West coast from Edmonton, along a 1,177 km pipeline.

So let’s say “less than one teaspoon” is 0.9 tsp, or 4.5 mL.  Multiply that by 1,177 / 1,609, and that’s 3.29 mL of oil spilled for each barrel shipped along the Northern Gateway pipeline.  Multiply that by 525,000 barrels a day.  That’s 1,727,250 mL of oil spill per day.  To make that easier to understand, that’s 1,727.25 L of oil spilled every day out of this pipeline. Every day.  That’s 630,446.25 L of oil spill per year, spread out over Northern Alberta and BC.

And that’s on average.  There’s no particular reason to think this pipeline will have more or less spillage, other than the fact that large parts of it will run through mountains. Even if they can engineer their way through the mountains without hurting the integrity of the line, if a spill does occur it could take a long time to get to the affected area to fix it.  Oh, and it’s not like Enbridge has a good track record with these things.  It’s risky.

But even without adjusting for any of that, it’s a lot of petroleum all over our landscape.  This is why I oppose the pipeline.

(Edit July 30, 2012 – corrected a grammar error and added link to Kalamazoo spill coverage).

On environmental action

There are so many little day-to-day things that differ between Canada and Australia when it comes to the environment.  If only we could combine what we do, we might actually be one step closer to solving some of our environmental problems.  I’ll itemise the ones I can think of – there are probably more that have become second nature to me already that I won’t think of! [edit: those that are finding this through the links that have spread, note that this is one entry in a series I’ve been writing on my experiences as a Canadian who spent a year in Australia – after re-reading I realised some context would be appropriate. Thanks for visiting!]

On Public Transit / Public Transport

We all know that public transit is a pet obsession of mine.  I even have an entire Flickr photo set dedicated to it.  I’m going to share what little knowledge I have of transit in the places I’ve been in the last year or so, and what’s really worked and what really hasn’t… This entry is massive so I’ll attempt to bookmark it to let you click to whatever you want to see.  A note on terminology: I use “public transit” and “public transport” interchangeably as the terms have the same meaning (the former being Canadian, the latter Australian).  I also use these terms loosely to include “mass transit” that is not actually owned/operated by the public sector.

If you just want the executive summary, click through to the “summary” at the very end.

Canadian cities:

• Toronto

• Ottawa

• Montreal

• Vancouver

Australian cities:

• Sydney

• Canberra

• Adelaide

• Perth

• Melbourne

• Queensland

Summary

Why Earth Hour matters

The short answer: it doesn’t.

The longer answer: it sort of does, depending on how you look at it.

First, there’s the basic principle: as a species, we need to stop burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases, in order to avoid the worst case climate change scenarios.  There’s very little doubt about that anymore, and if you leave a comment disputing this, it will be ignored.

So, on a very basic level, if lights that would otherwise have been turned on for an hour are turned off, I think we’ve done something.  Even if that something is very little.  That something is smaller in places like Ontario where much more of the electricity (especially at night) comes from hydro, and bigger in places like here in New South Wales where most of the electricity comes from coal.

But the lesson that needs to be taken away from Earth Hour, which is almost always lost, is that we waste so much electricity.  CBD office towers leave their lights on all night – some have developed systems where they auto-shut-off but many have not.  They turn them off for an hour at Earth Hour as a symbolic gesture, but what their owners/operators forget is that they didn’t need to be on in the first place – they should just be off.  I’ve worked in those kinds of building before, and while there are occasionally people in them Saturday nights at 8:30, usually there are not.  So shut off the lights! It’s easy.

More than this, though, is that individuals use electricity wastefully too – I can’t begin to count the amount of times I’ve had to explain to someone why there is no need to leave their computer on all day while they’re at work.  Or leave lights on while they’re asleep.  At the very least, here in Australia the electrical outlets have individual switches so it’s easy to kill phantom load, and many (but certainly not all) do.

The intent, I believe, is for Earth Hour to remind us of these things.  There are so many things, big and little, that we could do in our daily lives to minimize fossil fuel consumption, which is the only way we’ll really be able to deal with climate change.  For all the naysayers – and you’re all very loud about it – just remember this: people are talking about it.  And the fact that people are talking about an issue that has been repeatedly ignored and put to the side is at least a beginning.  It keeps things fresh in our minds, and the minds of those who are less concerned, and that’s important.  Let’s talk about climate change.  Let’s deal with it productively – starting with the little things but not stopping there.

Earth Hour

Just got in from spending a (cold) hour or a little more out around the downtown area to take in Earth Hour.

I missed it last year (due to my own stupid scheduling) but the year before (the inaugural year) I went out to Nathan Phillips Square to take in the Nelly Furtado concert and to celebrate with hundreds of other people. It was definitely really cool to see all the downtown lights go out, but upon closer inspection I was surprised to find a number of other lights on – mostly glowing corporate logos. I was particularly disappointed in the Eaton Centre that claimed to be participating yet failed miserably both inside and out. I took pictures and posted them on Flickr – part way through the night I had given up on photographing the dark and focused on all these wastes of electricity in what was supposed to be our finest hour.

This year, when fewer people and companies are paying attention to Earth Hour (or anything environmental), I decided to set out with a dual purpose in mind: First, get pictures of buildings and signs nicely darkened (there’s something soothing about that).  Second, to document buildings and spaces that are brightly lit needlessly — not to show organizations that were not participating in Earth Hour, but to show things that really have no need to be lit at 9 o’clock on a Saturday night anyway.  I’d love to find out if there are any studies on how much damage our economy takes from unnecessary electricity use – think of the resources we could be using towards more productive things.  Anyways, after switching to iPhone since it actually captures dark scenes better than a regular camera (my camera tries too hard to have a good picture and lets in a lot of light or has a really long exposure, making the photo really blurry), I captured what I saw and have posted it on Flickr again.  As expected, on the surface there were some nice dark spots, but on the whole most of it was cosmetic, and there were tons of lights on that had no business being on at this time anyway.

I have to say, I always get depressed when I start thinking about these things.  Why on Earth would a store that is in a mall, and closed, need (or even want) to have signs on? I can understand keeping a minimum amount of lighting for security, but having signs lit up for no one to see seems, to me, wasteful.  And unnecessary. It’s things like this that remind me of how little I want to buy things from these companies – which leads to the despair of realizing that participating in the economy at all means supporting large companies, in one way or another.  I just purchased a new computer – I bought it from Dell who assembled it in China, shipped it to the US, and then shipped it to me in Canada… but after thinking about what the alternatives were, I realized there weren’t any.  This is a total tangent so I’ll end it here – but I’m searching for ways to deal with the problem of energy waste, and, without some sort of extreme governmental action (cap-and-trade, and even a carbon tax, would only impose financial penalties which would likely be ignored by those involved), I can’t think of any.  

Frustrating.