Category Archives: Climate Change

Ecopathy: The environmental disease

March 30, 2014Climate ChangefeaturedRay Grigg

Besides the many diverse costs resulting from our environmental damage to nature, we are now beginning to suffer a loss of reputation. Under a new category of study called “ecopsychology”, thinkers from a wide range of disciplines have started an honest and penetrating examination of mechanisms guiding our collective behaviour. The resulting image of humanity is not flattering. Words such as “psychopathic” are appearing, along with invented derivatives such as “ecopathic”, “ecopath” and “ecopathy”.

Coining a new term

Ecopathy is derived from two Greek words, oikos for “house” and pathy for “sickness”, “disease” or “suffering”. The word is sobering because it recognizes that the deteriorating ecological condition of our planet is the direct result of an indifference and negligence in our human behaviour that we seem incapable of correcting, even though we have known for decades what to do and how to do it. The medical term for this condition is a pathology.

The origin of the term ecopathy may have emerged about 1979 from the reflections of environmentally conscious Buddhist scholars in the West who would have been comparing the importance of compassion in their tradition to its relative absence in humanity’s treatment of nature.

The psychological and philosophical character of Buddhism would have noted that a cultural insensitivity to the well-being of the plants and animals surrounding us could be construed as a fundamental failure in awareness. As ecologies suffered increasing damage, this absence of empathetic connection would have become increasingly obvious. Although earlier Buddhist thinkers would not have used a term such as ecopathy to identify this condition, the modern use fits uncomfortably well.

Diagnosis of ecopathy

The symptoms of ecopathy match the classic symptoms of psychopathy. Rather than applying to the social pathology of interpersonal relationships, however, the symptoms of ecopathy apply to our treatment of the natural world. The following characteristics that compare the behaviour of the ecopath to the psychopath are derived from the World Health Organization via two environmental writers, Derrick Jensen and Michael Harris:

a callous unconcern for the feeling or well-being of other things in the environment;

a gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for ecological norms, rules and obligations;

an incapacity to maintain enduring ecological relationships, but no difficulty in establishing them;

a very low frustration tolerance and an equally low aggression threshold, with discharges that include violence toward the environment;

an incapacity to feel guilt and to learn from experience, particularly from threats and punishments from nature;

a distinct inclination to blame others or to invent implausible rationalizations for behaviour that has brought the culture into conflict with ecologies.

Such a diagnosis and comparison, of course, is a generalization with obvious inaccuracies. Many people are concerned about environmental issues — some are even alarmed — but, as a society, a culture and a civilization, we have not yet reached the critical mass of awareness that is able to recognize the symptoms, accept them as valid and thereby cure the pathology.

Too many people are still oblivious or indifferent to the evolving environmental crisis, while others remain dismissive or even hostile to the existence of a problem — if they won’t acknowledge the problem, then they certainly won’t recognize the symptoms.

Seeking the treatment

The symptoms of this disorder are many and varied. We have been cultivating them for centuries and millennia. They can be found throughout our mythology, religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics, politics and technologies. Some may be hidden in the biochemical recesses of our genetics and brain functions.

These are the symptoms that are most worrisome because they may be traits entrenched in the cells and structure of our physiology, designed and nourished by the same evolutionary processes that made us. If ecopathy is more an indication of “who we are” than “what we do”, then the possibility of reform will be exponentially more difficult.

How do we become who we are not? How do we remake ourselves to be compatible with the natural world out of which we grew if we have become who we are because of our incompatibility with it? If this incompatibility with nature is our distinctive quality, then how are we to integrate into an ecological system that is governed by immutable laws, that is limited by the finite, and that is brutally unforgiving of mistakes?

The uncomfortable answer to these questions may be that, like incurable psychopaths, we are incurable ecopaths, committed to an endless struggle against nature’s imposed limits because our narrow willfulness knows no other way. And so, while indifferent and oblivious to consequences, we will continue to use our ingenuity and cunning to do what we must to get what we want. The eventual outcome is hidden in the future. And we have no idea what this future will be.

Obama teams up with web companies to illustrate the effects of climate change

March 20, 2014Climate ChangeCanadian Press

Observed changes in sea level relative to land elevation in the United States between 1958 and 2008 (Photo: USGCRP 2009).

by Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration hopes to fight global warming with the geeky power of numbers, maps and even gaming-type simulations.

Officials figure the more you know about climate change the more likely you will do something.

“People need to understand what is happening and what is likely to happen,” White House science adviser John Holdren told reporters.

Web access to public climate data

The White House on Wednesday announced an initiative to provide private companies and local governments better access to already public climate data. The idea is that with that localized data they can help the public understand the risks they face, especially in coastal areas where flooding is a big issue.

The government also is working with several high-tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Intel, to come up with tools to make communities more resilient in dealing with weather extremes, such as flooding, heat waves and drought. They include computer simulations for people to use and see what would happen with rising seas and other warming scenarios. Also, companies will hold brainstorming sessions with computer programmers aimed at designing new apps on disaster risk.

For example Esri, a company that does geographic information systems, used federal data to show what would happen to New York neighbourhoods if sea level rises by 3 feet — which scientists say is likely by the end of the century. It would displace 780,000 people, Esri CEO Jack Dangermond said.

NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration will try get people to create simulations to understand flooding risks in an upcoming coastal flooding challenge. One effort would include putting sensors on Philadelphia city buses to collect data to track the effect of climate change.

How global warming effects people

In its second term, the administration has made more of an effort to connect global warming to its effect on people, especially extreme weather and disasters.

“The more people that have information, the harder it is for a few to block action” on climate change, Holdren said in reference to a 2012 North Carolina proposal that would ignore sea level rise from global warming in flood maps.

Social science literature shows that the more people think a problem, like global warming, is closer to home and immediate, the more likely they are to act, said Cornell University professor Jonathan Schuldt, an expert in environmental communications. But, he added, if people look online and see that their city is not at higher risk from climate change, that could backfire on the Obama administration and make those people less likely to do something.

David Suzuki: We can’t geoengineer our way out of climate change

March 19, 2014Climate Change, GeoengineeringfeaturedDr. David Suzuki

Seawater is sprayed into clouds to make them reflect more sunlight (Illustration: Nasa)

Because nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube or computer program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come up with ideas that didn’t turn out as expected.

DDT was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from controlling disease to helping farmers. But we didn’t understand bioaccumulation back then – toxins concentrating up the food chain, risking the health and survival of animals from birds to humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, seemed so terrific we put them in everything from aerosol cans to refrigerators. Then we learned they damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful solar radiation.

Unintended consequences

These unintended consequences come partly from our tendency to view things in isolation, without understanding how all nature is interconnected. We’re now facing the most serious unintended consequence ever: climate change from burning fossil fuels. Some proposed solutions may also result in unforeseen outcomes.

Oil, gas and coal are miraculous substances – energy absorbed from the sun by plants and animals hundreds of millions of years ago, retained after they died and concentrated as the decaying life became buried deeper into the earth. Burning them to harness and release this energy opened up possibilities unimaginable to our ancestors. We could create machines and technologies to reduce our toil, heat and light our homes, build modern cities for growing populations and provide accessible transport for greater mobility and freedom. And because the stuff seemed so plentiful and easy to obtain, we could build vehicles and roads for everyone – big cars that used lots of gas – so that enormous profits would fuel prosperous, consumer-driven societies.

We knew fairly early that pollution affected human health, but that didn’t seem insurmountable. We just needed to improve fuel efficiency and create better pollution-control standards. That reduced rather than eliminated the problem and only partly addressed an issue that appears to have caught us off-guard: the limited availability of these fuels. But the trade-offs seemed worthwhile.

All that carbon catching up with us

Then, for the past few decades, a catastrophic consequence of our profligate use of fossil fuels has loomed. Burning them has released excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a thick, heat-trapping blanket. Along with our destruction of natural carbon-storing environments, such as forests and wetlands, this has steadily increased global average temperatures, causing climate change.

We’re now faced with ever-increasing extreme weather-related events and phenomena such as ocean acidification, which affects myriad marine life, from shellfish to corals to plankton. The latter produce oxygen and are at the very foundation of the food chain.

Had we addressed the problem from the outset, we could have solutions in place. We could have found ways to burn less fossil fuel without massively disrupting our economies and ways of life. But we’ve become addicted to the lavish benefits that fossil fuels have offered, and the wealth and power they’ve provided to industrialists and governments. And so there’s been a concerted effort to stall or avoid corrective action, with industry paying front groups, “experts” and governments to deny or downplay the problem.

Enter the techno-fixes

Now that climate change has become undeniable, with consequences getting worse daily, many experts are eyeing solutions. Some are touting massive technological fixes, such as dumping large amounts of iron filings into the seas to facilitate carbon absorption, pumping nutrient-rich cold waters from the ocean depths to the surface, building giant reflectors to bounce sunlight back into space and irrigating vast deserts.

But we’re still running up against those pesky unintended consequences. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, studied five geoengineering schemes and concluded they’re “either relatively ineffective with limited warming reductions, or they have potentially severe side effects and cannot be stopped without causing rapid climate change.” That’s partly because we don’t fully understand climate and weather systems and their interactions.

That doesn’t mean we should rule out geoengineering. Climate change is so serious that we’ll need to marshal everything we have to confront it, and some methods appear to be more benign than others. But geoengineering isn’t the solution. And it’s no excuse to go on wastefully burning fossil fuels. We must conserve energy and find ways to quickly shift to cleaner sources.

With contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Study: Arctic getting darker, making Earth warmer

February 18, 2014Climate Change, Climate SciencefeaturedCanadian Press

Study: Arctic getting darker, making Earth warmer — Photo by Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren, NOAA Corps, ret., courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Arctic isn’t nearly as bright and white as it used to be because of more ice melting in the ocean, and that’s turning out to be a global problem, a new study says.

With more dark, open water in the summer, less of the sun’s heat is reflected back into space. So the entire Earth is absorbing more heat than expected, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study’s lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

The Arctic grew eight per cent darker between 1979 and 2011, Eisenman found, measuring how much sunlight is reflected back into space.

“Basically, it means more warming,” Eisenman said in an interview.

The North Pole region is an ocean that mostly is crusted at the top with ice that shrinks in the summer and grows back in the fall. At its peak melt in September, the ice has shrunk on average by nearly 35,000 square miles — about the size of Maine — per year since 1979.

Snow-covered ice reflects several times more heat than dark, open ocean, which replaces the ice when it melts, Eisenman said.

As more summer sunlight dumps into the ocean, the water gets warmer, and ittakes longer forice to form again in the fall, Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said in an email. He was not part of the study.

While earlier studies used computer models, Eisenman said his is the first to use satellite measurements to gauge sunlight reflection and to take into account cloud cover. The results show the darkening is as much as two to three times bigger than previous estimates, he said.

Box and University of Colorado ice scientist Waleed Abdalati, who was not part of the research, called the work important in understanding how much heat is getting trapped on Earth.

PNAS journal: http://www.pnas.org

Insurance industry applying its own carbon tax

February 14, 2014Carbon Tax - Cap and Trade, Climate ChangefeaturedRay Grigg

New York City saw billions of dollars in flood-related damages from Hurricane Sandy (Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images) — New York City saw billions in flood damages from Hurricane Sandy (Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images)

The actuarial sciences of the insurance industry have identified an implacable reality and placed a tax on carbon emissions. For anyone who wants insurance, payment is unavoidable. Protesting or complaining won’t change an insurance industry that functions with the cold logic of calculated risk — if risk increases, premiums increase. And this explains their carbon tax. The industry doesn’t need measured rises in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide or higher global average temperatures to understand what is happening to weather. All it needs is the cost of claims.

In the relative microcosm of Vancouver Island, for example, claims related to fire and lightning caused by weather jumped from levels of about $1.2 million per year in 2010 and 2011 to $6.5 million in 2012. Corresponding claims for wind damage rose from about $250,000 per year to $2.9 million. Total claims for 2012 were $15 million, equal to the sum of the previous two years — with almost all the increases related to weather. Consequently, the annual premiums for the usual package of house insurance commonly rose by a hundred dollars or more.

Across Canada, the situation is similar. “There are more and more storms happening,” said Pete Karageorgos of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, “and we’re seeing extreme weather events that happened once every 40 years… that can now be expected to happen once every six years”. Consequently, “the amount of claims that have been presented has been averaging about a billion dollars [more] a year over the last three years or so”.

Extreme weather costs grow six-fold in six years

Extreme weather events that cost Canada less than $200 million in 2006, reached $1.2 billion in 2012. Domestic fires, which were once the principal cause of insurance payouts, have been replaced by flooding, the result of engineered drainage systems being overcome by torrential rainfall. Wind damage from powerful storms has move up to the second highest cause of claims.

“It’s just been five horrendous years in a row,” confessed Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. Just two events in the last year — June’s flooding in Alberta and July’s torrential rainfall in Toronto — brought the insured property damage to $3 billion. The costs to insurance companies of the devastating ice storm that hit Toronto and parts of Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces during the last days of 2013, have yet to be calculated — the uninsured costs may never be known. One of the largest insurers of property in Canada, Intact Financial Corporation, raised premiums by 15 to 20 percent as a result of heavy losses from climate-related claims. Some home owners are simply denied coverage if they live in areas newly identified as prone to flooding.

Hurricane Sandy a wake-up call

In the United States in 2012, the arrival of Hurricane Sandy caused $65 billion in destruction to the US Atlantic coast — happily for the insurance companies, less than half was insured. The storm, however, has forced some property owners in New York and New Jersey to confront the options of moving away from shorelines, elevating their homes, or paying flood insurance premiums of as much as $31,000 a year (Associated Press, January 29/13). The same year’s drought in the US Midwest did $20 billion in crop damage, of which $17 billion was insured.

Outside Canada and the United States, the indications of extreme weather are repeated — except the numbers are correspondingly larger. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest re-insurance companies, has been using the best meteorologists, hydrologists, geologists and geophysicists available to understand and predict the increasing number of extreme weather events it has been noting since the 1970s, well before climate change became a term of common usage. Their insurance rates are rising as their actuarial studies reveal a clear indication of increasing risk from extreme weather.

Extreme heat making waves too

Material damage, however, is just the surface of the problem for the insurance industry. Because it will insure everything from homes and crops to product delivery and sporting events, anything that creates uncertainty adds to risk and affects insurance rates. So heat waves that are now predicted to occur every two or three years in the US Midwest and central Europe, according to Munich Re’s research, mean that premiums for insuring anything remotely related — from soybean crops to shipping schedules — will have to rise accordingly. Because Southeast Asia is expected to experience the same heat events, except every one or two years, the complicating effects must be anticipated as more expensive insurance.

Droughts are particularly insidious — such as the 2011 one in Somalia — because they are usually persistent, with consequences that can be both devastating and widespread. As Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program noted, victims have three options: they can riot, migrate, or die. Regardless, they throw social, political and economic stability of local, adjoining and distant countries into turmoil — climate refugees, for example, send waves of disturbances around the world. The successive droughts in Russia in 2010 and 2011 caused a global grain shortage that threw international food prices into pandemonium, and have been connected to the Arab uprisings that are still echoing throughout the Middle East. These unanticipated conditions are precisely the unknowns that insurers can only address by increasing the price of premiums.

As weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, the whole system of payment for risk becomes more expensive. Every claim that is paid by the insurance industry is recorded somewhere in a Great Actuarial Ledger to become additional costs forwarded to future policy holders — most of whom do not realize that these increased premiums are actually carbon taxes.

Will thorium save us from climate change?

February 12, 2014Climate Change, Energy and Resources, NuclearfeaturedDr. David Suzuki

As knowledge about climate change increases, so does demand for clean energy. Technologies like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal and biofuels, along with energy-grid designs that will help us take advantage of renewables, are part of the equation, as is conservation.

But many argue that, despite Fukushima and other disasters, nuclear is the best option to reduce carbon emissions fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. Because of problems with radioactive waste, meltdown risks and weapons proliferation, some say we must develop safer nuclear technologies.

Even eminent climate scientists like James Hansen claim we can’t avoid nuclear if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hansen, a former NASA scientist, with Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tom Wigley of Australia’s University of Adelaide, wrote an open letter last year stating, “the time has come for those who take the threat of global warming seriously to embrace the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems.”

“Safe” Nuclear: Is there such a thing

What are “safer nuclear power systems”? And are they the answer?

Proposed technologies include smaller modular reactors, reactors that shut down automatically after an accident and molten salt reactors. Some would use fuels and coolants deemed safer. (Industry proponents argue the low incidence of nuclear accidents means current technology is safe enough. But the costs and consequences of an accident, as well as problems such as containing highly radioactive wastes, provide strong arguments against building new reactors with current technology.)

The Thorium option

One idea is to use thorium instead of uranium for reactor fuel. Thorium is more abundant than uranium. Unlike uranium, it’s not fissile; that is, it can’t be split to create a nuclear chain reaction, so it must be bred through nuclear reactors to produce fissile uranium.

Thorium-fuelled reactors produce less waste, and while some trace elements in spent uranium fuels remain radioactive for many thousands of years, levels in spent thorium fuels drop off much faster. China and Canada are working on a modified Canadian design that includes thorium along with recycled uranium fuel. With the right type of reactor, such as this design or the integral fast reactor, meltdown risks are reduced or eliminated.

Thorium can be employed in a variety of reactor types, some of which currently use uranium – including heavy water reactors like Canada’s CANDU. But some experts say new technologies, such as molten salt reactors, including liquid fluoride thorium reactors, are much safer and more efficient than today’s conventional reactors.

So why aren’t we using them?

Thorium’s downsides

Although they may be better than today’s reactors, LFTRs still produce radioactive and corrosive materials, they can be used to produce weapons and we don’t know enough about the impacts of using fluoride salts. Fluoride will contain a nuclear reaction, but it can be highly toxic, and deadly as fluorine gas. And though the technology’s been around since the 1950s, it hasn’t been proven on a commercial scale. Countries including the U.S., China, France and Russia are pursuing it, but in 2010 the U.K.’s National Nuclear Laboratory reported that thorium claims are “overstated”.

It will also take a lot of time and money to get a large number of reactors on-stream – some say from 30 to 50 years. Given the urgent challenge of global warming, we don’t have that much time. Many argue that if renewables received the same level of government subsidies as the nuclear industry, we’d be ahead at lower costs. Thorium essentially just adds another fuel option to the nuclear mix and isn’t a significant departure from conventional nuclear. All nuclear power remains expensive, unwieldy and difficult to integrate with intermittent renewables – and carries risks for weapons proliferation.

Renewable energy still the best option

If the choice is between keeping nuclear power facilities running or shutting them down and replacing them with coal-fired power plants, the nuclear option is best for the climate. But, for now, investing in renewable energy and smart-grid technologies is a faster, more cost-effective and safer option than building new nuclear facilities, regardless of type.

That doesn’t mean we should curtail research into nuclear and other options, including thorium’s potential to improve the safety and efficiency of nuclear facilities. But we must also build on the momentum of renewable energy development, which has been spurred by its safety, declining costs and proven effectiveness.

With contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Europe leads the way on building a green economy

February 7, 2014Carbon Tax - Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Energy and Resources, RenewablesfeaturedWill Dubitsky

The European Union has fast become the global leader on migrating to a green economy, with its Emissions Trading System (cap and trade scheme) in place since 2005. Canada has much to learn from the current and future EU debates on establishing new targets for 2030 – particularly how to fast-forward its badly lagging green economy following the next federal election in 2015.

The EU: a green economy success story

The foundations for the discussions on 2030 targets are the binding EU 2020 targets. These targets entail:

a 20% reduction in EU greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels;
raising the share of EU energy consumption produced from renewables to 20%
a 20% improvement in the EU’s energy efficiency.

Under this system, each country has its own binding national targets based on its relative capacities to contribute to EU-wide goals.

In the case of Germany, for example, it had already reduced its emissions by 25% in 2012, thereby exceeding its Kyoto 2012 target of 21% – all while being one of the world’s strongest economies. These facts are contrary to what Stephen Harper would have us believe to the effect that economic development and sustainable development are opposing forces for which there can be no reconciliation.

Indeed, measured in terms of economic impacts, the EU’s progress to-date is staggering, especially with respect to job creation. There are presently 3.5M people employed in the EU green sector, with annual job growth for the sector at 180,000 new jobs/year from 1999 to 2008. Even during the worst of the EU’s economic crisis, most of these jobs were retained and many more were created.

Renewable energy-related jobs in the EU were up to 1.2M in 2012 and the projection for 2020 is 2.7M. With the right policies, this could reach 4M jobs by 2030.

The European Commission’s White Paper

Against this backdrop, to initiate EU discussions on 2030 targets and build on the momentum of the 2020 goals, the highly conservative and corporate-friendly European Commission took up the task of producing a White Paper for release on January 22, 2014.

In the months preceding the publication of the White Paper, a major debate arose among EU member nations as to whether: 1) there should be 2030 binding triple targets – EU-wide and nation-specific, and in keeping with the precedent set with the 2020 triple goals; or 2) simply have a stand-alone binding GHG reduction target to be accompanied eventually by state-specific GHG targets. In its White Paper of January 22nd, the European Commission came down in favour of the second option.

The White Paper called for a 40% GHG reduction target with binding requirements for EU member states and an “at least” 27% renewables goal that would be binding on the EU, but not binding on the member states individually.

Under the European Commission’s formula, not only would an EU-wide binding renewable energy target be difficult to enforce in the absence of a binding renewables target for each nation, but also the 27% renewables target would reduce by one third the momentum set by the 2020 goals. That is, modeling of the 40% GHG reduction target suggests that the 27% renewables portion of the EU-wide energy supply would be achieved anyway, without the Commission’s renewables target.

UK, Poland resist binding clean energy goals; 8 countries in favour

The aforementioned Commission’s position went against the recommendations submitted in a January, 2014 letter from the energy ministers of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Portugal – written to commissioners Connie Hedegaard, the commissioner for climate action, and Gunther Oettinger, the commissioner for energy. The letter urged binding clean energy goals for every EU nation.

It also stated that such an approach is essential to providing the renewable sector with the certainty it needs for long-term, cost-effective investments. Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister of Economics and Energy, indicated that the extraordinary progress achieved to date would not have been possible without the combination of nation-specific binding GHG and renewable energy targets.

Particularly on the minds of those supporting binding targets for renewables is the fact that the EU is the part of a world which is most dependent on imported fossil fuels. In 2012, EU spent $740B on importing these fuels. Accordingly, the International Energy Agency has described the path to reducing this dependency as being that of greater reliance on domestically-produced, clean energy and greater energy efficiency.

Fracking among UK motives for non-binding targets

In this confrontation of positions, it is the UK, in particular, that has been very vocal in opposing a renwables target because it wants to have the flexibility to include nuclear, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and fracking technologies in its energy strategy. Consequently, the UK has been advocating a 50% GHG target without renewables targets.

Fittingly, Oliver Krischer, German MP from the opposition Green Party, said proposals to scrap binding renewable energy and energy efficiency targets for 2030 are intended to initiate a renaissance of nuclear power and push through fracking and CCS activities through the back door.

Another big obstacle to a renewables binding target at national levels is Poland, for which coal represents 90% of its electrical power generation.

The European Parliament passes triple and binding 2030 targets

Consistent with the aforementioned debates within the EU, on February 4, 2014, Members of the European Parliament, in a plenary non-binding vote, voted 347 to 308 in favour three binding targets on national levels, a 40% reduction in GHGs; a 30% target pertaining for energy from renewables; and a 40% improvement in energy efficiency. This February 2014 MEP vote is consistent with the recommendations of the European Parliament’s Environment and Industry Committees on a three-target, binding approach.

According to the European Wind Energy Association, the 30% binding renewables targets for EU member states could provide 570,000 new jobs and save $818B in imports of fossil fuels, all while lowering costs for energy-intensive industries.

Next Steps

The MEP vote notwithstanding, it is just one step in a lengthy process leading up to final legislation in 2017. Moreover, the vote in the European Parliament does not require member states to approve national binding targets.

On February 19, 2014, there will be a Franco-German summit on energy cooperation. Then, on March 4, 2014, the EU energy ministers will meet. This will be followed by a European Council meeting of heads of state on March 8-9, 2014.

Further down the road, European Commission commissioners will be replaced in 2014 and firm legislative proposals are not expected before 2015, after the European parliamentary elections. Subsequently, it may take about two years before the final policies become EU law.

Adding to the cocktail of views that will contribute to these debates are the positions of clean tech sector stakeholders, adamantly in favour of national, binding renewables targets.

Taken together, the EU discussions on the pros and cons of different 2030 options could prove to be enlightening for Canadians reviewing options to catch up to the Europeans, who are already way ahead of Canada on the migration to a green economy. Moreover, their successes and failures to date in advancing their respective countries offer models for consideration for Canada. Accordingly, as a contributor to The Common Sense Canadian, I will continue to provide articles on new EU green economy developments.

Lastly, it is worth noting that the February meeting of the European Parliament included a vote in favour of extending the EU Fuel Quality Directive beyond 2020, thus banning tar sands imports to the EU indefinitely – likely to the great displeasure of Stephen Harper.

State Dept. report rumoured to bode well for Keystone XL pipeline

January 30, 2014Climate Change, Climate Science, Energy and Resources, Pipelines and SupertankersfeaturedCanadian Press

by Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press

WASHINGTON D.C., United States – Canadian officials say they’re encouraged by what they’re hearing about a long-awaited report on the environmental impact of the Keystone XL pipeline that could be released imminently by the U.S. State Department.

Those sources in Washington and Ottawa say they’ve been told the report could be ready for release within a few days — and that it will bolster the case for the controversial energy project.

“What we’re hearing is that it’s going to be positive for the project — and therefore positive for Canada,” said one diplomat in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he hadn’t seen the report himself, although he had discussed its contents with American contacts.

“The rumours certainly are that it’s very thorough and that the analysis will support the project.”

He said there was optimism amongst Canadian officials but no celebration just yet: “You’re not going to be seeing people high-fiving and toasting with champagne,” he said.

“It’s just another step (in the process).”

Canada ramps up pipeline pressure

Earlier this month, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird was in Washington pleading for a decision soon. He said enough time had been lost on the project and didn’t want to see another construction season wasted.

His U.S. counterpart, John Kerry, responded that there would be no fast-tracking the process.

The actual writing of the report began in August, according to the Canadian source in D.C. With the threat of almost-certain lawsuits looming, regardless of what the final Keystone decision might be, he said he’d heard from U.S. officials that the report authors were under pressure to be especially rigorous.

“What we need is an (environmental impact statement),” he said, “that is so thoroughly done that it will stand up to litigation.”

The report is the latest environmental impact statement on the $7-billion TransCanada project to come from the State Department, which has jurisdiction because the pipeline crosses an international boundary.

Supporters say pipeline won’t significantly affect climate change

The last report, released a year ago, concluded the project would not significantly impact the rate of oilsands development or crude oil demand, nor would it pose any greater risk to the environment than other modes of transportation. President Barack Obama has since declared that he will only approve the pipeline if it can be shown that it will not significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Wednesday that he expected the forthcoming report to draw the same conclusions as the last one. “There are no new facts on the ground,” Oliver said. “So you know, it’s to be expected that they would come out in the same way.”

Once that step is taken, the U.S. administration will conduct a 90-day review to determine if the project is in the national interest.

Not so fast…

Another Canadian diplomat warned against concluding that the report’s release is automatically imminent. Even if it’s slated to come in the next few days, there’s always a chance someone, somewhere, could hold up its release.

For starters, the accepted wisdom in Washington has been that the State Department document would not be released until an inspector general’s review of conflict-of-interest allegations against a consultant working on the report.

That review into the activities of contractor Environmental Resources Managament came after news that several of its consultants working on the project had also worked for TransCanada and its subsidiaries, without that previous work having been disclosed.

Gary Doer, Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., refused to speculate on the timing or content.

“We have no certainty on the timing,” Doer said in an interview.

But he expressed faith that the Canadian position would prevail: that the pipeline would be the safest, cleanest way to ship oil that would be transported to the U.S., one way or the other.

Oil-by-rail spills used to promote pipelines

Referring to train accidents, including the tragedy in Lac-Megantic, Que., Doer said events since the last State Department review had only served to reinforce the earlier conclusion.

“We believe that the facts have, regrettably, become only stronger on oil vs. rail,” he said. “We believe that (the earlier conclusion by the State Department) will be maintained: higher cost, higher (greenhouse gases) without a pipeline.”

A State Department spokesperson wouldn’t confirm anything.

“The State Department is working on the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (Final SEIS), addressing issues in more than 1.5 million public comments, as appropriate. There is no time line for the release of the Final SEIS,” the spokeswoman said in an email. “The Department continues to review the Presidential Permit application for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in a rigorous, transparent, and objective manner.”

Canada failing to meet even domestic climate targets; Huge GHG spike expected post-2020

January 13, 2014Carbon Tax - Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Climate ScienceCanadian Press

by Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA – Never mind those international targets, the federal government appears to be having trouble meeting even its own internal operational goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

An internal PowerPoint presentation prepared by Public Works and Government Services Canada asks each federal department to ante up its emissions reductions number for the coming 2014-15 fiscal year.

And it prods departments to “please consider increasing your commitment to help bridge the current five per cent gap.”

“They’re clearly going to miss their targets,” said John McKay, the Liberal environment critic.

[quote]I can’t say I’m overly surprised by that given that they’re not serious about national targets, so why would they be serious about government targets.[/quote]

As part of a “greening government operations” exercise, the Conservatives have committed to reducing GHG emissions from federal buildings and transportation fleets by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2020.

That’s the same target the Harper government agreed to for Canada as a whole as part of the Copenhagen accord in 2009.

Canadian climate targets slipping further away

A fall report from Environment Canada shows the country is slipping further away from meeting its Copenhagen emissions goal, although the government likes to claim Canada is halfway to the target.

Similarly, when Public Works says there’s a five per cent gap in operational emissions cuts, it doesn’t mean the government’s work is 95 per cent complete.

A 2012 report by Environment Canada on the federal sustainable development strategy makes clear “the government is on track to achieve a 12 per cent decrease in emission levels relative to the base year by fiscal year 2020-2021. A projected gap of about five per cent highlights the need for additional efforts in order to achieve the 17 per cent federal target.”

In other words, the government is currently on pace to miss its self-imposed internal 17-per-cent target by five percentage points — or almost 30 per cent. And it would seem no headway has been made on that front since 2012.

Public Works says the current reductions are “more significant … than what was anticipated for the second year of implementation of the federal sustainable development strategy.”

Spokesman Pierre-Alain Bujold said in an email that the current reductions are “subject to change over time as departments analyze their data, adjust their plans and adopt new plans in order to reach the targets by 2020.”

It’s not the only troubling progress report that’s come to light on Canada’s efforts to reduce emissions.

Canada’s carbon footprint to climb sharply after 2020

The government quietly submitted two reports last month to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that show Canada’s emissions will spike sharply upward after 2020, driven largely by expansion of the oil sands.

Emissions between 2020 and 2030 are predicted to climb by 81 million tonnes, taking Canada 11 per cent above 2005 levels — notwithstanding hopes that a new round of international climate negotiations in 2016 are supposed to find further global reductions from the 2005 base year.

“Under all scenarios over the forecast period, emissions are expected to grow the fastest in oil sands extraction and upgrading,” says the Canadian report to the U.N.

McKay, the Liberal critic, says if the government can’t get its own emissions under control, it can’t push other sectors of the economy, noting the federal government accounts for almost 15 per cent of Canada’s GDP. Said the Liberal MP:

[quote]If you don’t get leadership out of the federal government in getting their own house in order, how can you actually reasonably expect the rest of the citizens of Canada to be serious about greenhouse gases?[/quote]

McKay acknowledged not nearly enough was done under the previous Liberal governments to reduce Canadian emissions as per the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

“But after a while the blame exercise gets a little tired, especially since you’ve had six or seven years to get your main emitter under control, which is the oil and gas industry.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a year-end interview that long-delayed regulations on the oil and gas sector will be announced “over the next couple of years.”

Ray Grigg’s 2013 review: No platitudes, please

December 31, 2013Climate Change, Climate SciencefeaturedRay Grigg

2013 in review: No platitudes, please — Typhoon Haiyan was a reminder in 2013 of the need for dramatic action on climate change

Platitudes are wholly incompatible with our present environmental situation on planet Earth, so saccharine pleasantries would be quite inappropriate to summarize the events of 2013. The natural world continues to be under ominous assault. The collective awareness of humanity and its political leadership has still not registered the urgency of the problem with enough clarity to effect the required changes in our behaviour. Global remedial action has been halting at best, leaving limited initiatives to be taken by communities, cities and a few countries. However heroic these efforts may be, they are insufficient to address the magnitude of the challenge.

If modern science is correct, the opportunity for avoiding critical ecological instability is rapidly shrinking — if it’s not already too late — and the pressure is building for corrective measures. So 2014 arrives with an anxious dread brought by a sense of impending inevitability, and a sense of frail hope inspired by remote possibility.

Hope and dread

The dread presently exceeds the hope because none of the major ecological problems facing the planet are being successfully addressed. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, so temperatures are increasing in tandem — albeit more slowly for unknown reasons — and ocean acidification worsens. Species extinction is in free-fall due to climate change, habitat loss and biological homogenization. Soil, water and forest resources are either threatened or in decline almost everywhere.

Shortages in oil and gas supplies has been alleviated by extensive fracking but this has exacerbated the carbon dioxide problem, abetted by increases in global coal consumption. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting so ocean levels continue to rise. Industrial ocean fisheries are still ravaging most of the world’s marine stocks while mercury toxicity contaminates the remaining large fish. Coral reefs are dying and oceanic dead zones are proliferating. The threatening health effects of chemical and plastic pollution have become ubiquitous. Climate change refugees are a new and growing challenge to social, economic and political stability. Even our world-wide financial system is showing signs of vulnerability.

The law of limits

Optimism is shrinking as we encounter complexities that seem beyond our character, resolve and ability to address. Yes, we are making notable advances in technology, biology, physics, medicine, communication and general knowledge. But these accomplishments are occurring with the dawning realization that we may have a fundamental defect in the structure of civilization itself, together with our inability to recognize, confront, accept or alter its course. As the momentum of global industrialization leaves nature in tatters, we have so far avoided a predicted collision with the law of limits. But a haunting and collective nervousness is beginning to emerge as our human population soars, as the speed of our technological and consumer enthusiasm spreads, and as the ominous wall of limits seems to loom closer.

Even an assessment of our social ecology is sobering. A economic philosophy continues to widen the gap between rich and poor, threatening the civic adhesives of justice, fairness and opportunity that keep societies contented and peaceful. Serious questions are being asked about the ability of free-market capitalism to function within the bounds of nature’s imperatives.

The folly of 2008’s gross financial irresponsibility in international monetary dealings continues to cause worldwide personal and collective strife. Constraining regulations have been vigorously resisted by financial institutions, underscoring the danger of combining human greed with unfettered financial markets as a viable model for managing humanity’s economic interests. And finally, global demographic changes are unsettling many social ecologies.

Increasing population, complexity

Humanity’s population continues to rise, although a few countries are now dealing with the social and economic problems posed by falling populations — a measure of the degree to which perpetual growth has been equated to our sense of progress. Adjusting to an eventually stable human population is going to be difficult enough; adjusting to unequal demographic changes among countries is going to be even more difficult.

Perhaps the most subtle, powerful and discernible development during 2013 has been the penetrating insights about our human character arising from sophisticated thinkers. They are now articulating their serious doubts about our ability to manage a civilization that is rising exponentially in complexity. Neuroscience has added considerably to our understanding of the individual and collective psychology that motivates and governs our behaviour. The indications are not reassuring. We are not, for example, as rational, pragmatic or foresighted as we like to think we are. Our confidence usually overshadows our competence. Our survival strategies as individuals are more evolved than they are as groups — this is why we have persisted as a species but most human civilizations have not.

Capacity for self-reflection

The high opinion we have of ourselves is constantly being lowered by the honesty of self-examination. Our relative status continues to decline as we learn of the other marvellous living creatures that are indispensable components of the incredible intricacy of life on Earth. If we are any more amazing than ants and elephants or mosses and lichen, if we have any uniquely commendable attributes, it would seem to be the range of our awareness and our capacity to be reflectively conscious.

If this is the case, then our abusive treatment of the miracle of a living Earth would be all the more abject, deprived and inexcusable, our squandering and pillaging of its treasures even worse than wanton. Our present behaviour not only diminishes the planet but it also diminishes us. As our tiny measure of time ticks off another year, we need to weigh our small gains and accomplishments against our great failings and losses.

Maybe 2014 will be a wiser year.