Category Archives: Climate Change

An Exercise in Futility- Carbon Dioxide Reaches Alarming Levels Amid BC Election Shocker

Exercise in futility: Carbon dioxide reaches alarming levels amid BC election shocker

Climate Change, Climate Science, Politics, Western Canada
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Two surprising, important and connected events took place in British Columbia in May, 2013. On Tuesday, May 14, the province’s citizens elected a majority Liberal government. Five days earlier, on Thursday, May 9, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million — the last time such a high level existed on Earth was about 3 million years ago.

The election of a Liberal majority government was a surprise to almost everyone in the province. Equally surprising was the collapse in support for the New Democrats. Public opinion polls had placed them in the lead — as they had been for months — and all but a few unrealistically optimistic Liberals expected to lose. But the voters surprised both the pundits and the parties.

The explanations for electoral wins and losses are always complicated. But a significant factor was the Liberal’s simple message, repeated endlessly, of a prosperous future promised by the exploitation of BC’s sizeable natural gas deposits. The economic prospects of compressing and exporting this fossil fuel as liquid natural gas (LNG) to an Asia hungry for energy was an irresistible temptation to voters. The further possibility of BC becoming a transit site for the export of millions of tonnes of coal and huge volumes of Alberta bitumen was also a convincing economic temptation. So the majority of the legislature’s 85 seats went to the Liberals, with a smattering of Independents and one Green Party candidate.

The distribution of votes in the province is informative. Almost every seat in the interior went to the Liberals; almost every coastal riding went to the New Democrats. In the heartland of the province, the concern seemed to be jobs and the economic development arising from resource extraction. For coastal BC, the prospect of oil tankers plying BC’s pristine waters was probably a major factor in guiding the vote — the lone Green elected candidate came from a riding most at risk due to an increase in oil tanker traffic from the proposed expansion of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline to Vancouver.

Most of the voters of British Columbia, however, didn’t seem to connect the burning of fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil and coal with rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. They couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that carbon dioxide emissions cause the planet to warm, setting in motion a cascade of complex climate problems which will likely destabilize the foundations of our modern civilization. Indeed, as voters, they essentially supported the conditions that are precipitating a global environmental crisis of a magnitude unprecedented in our existence as human beings.

Climate scientists faithfully monitoring the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide must feel that they are witnessing an impending doom. All international efforts since 1992 to cut CO2 emissions have been abject failures. Levels have risen 27 percent in 55 years, with fossil fuel consumption now increasing three time faster than in the 1960s. As for LNG, the perpetual drilling, fracking, leaking, pumping, compressing and shipping required for this product makes it about as carbon intensive as dirty coal — the use of which, incidentally, is also increasing. Consequently, the international community’s pledge to not exceed a 2°C increase in global temperature seems likely to fail. The 400 ppm is a dark reminder of this inevitability. Dr. Peter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US governmental agency that has been monitoring carbon dioxide levels at the Mauna Loa station, summarizes the significance of this historic measurement. “It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem” (Globe and Mail, May 11/13).

Dr. Ralph Keeling, who is responsible for a similar program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, reiterates Tan’s concern. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds” (Ibid.).

Dr. Maureen Raymo, an earth scientist from Columbia University in the US, echoes the same concern. “It feels,” she says, “like the inevitable march toward disaster” (Ibid.).

But the 2°C is, at best, an educated guess at the temperature limit our sustaining systems can tolerate while still avoiding the feedback loops of uncontrollable warming. The strategy a high-risk gamble fraught with danger. A realistic prognosis by many scientists is that we have already set the conditions to exceed this threshold. Most climatologists expected we would reach 400 ppm — they were only surprised that we reached it so soon.

But surprises are common these days. Climate change by almost every measure is arriving sooner than the models have predicted. Extreme weather events are occurring with unexpected ferocity. Scientists aren’t the only ones surprised. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers (they insure insurance companies), has noted a doubling in the last three decades of claims related to extreme weather. Farmers are regularly challenged by climate anomalies that make crop production uncertain.

One of the biggest surprises, however, was the electorate’s failure to incorporate all the convincing science, evidence and warnings into its thinking and voting. The greatest and most sobering disappointment of BC’s provincial election was not which parties won or lost seats, but the failure of most voters to comprehend the seriousness of the environmental challenges confronting them. If they are unable to comprehend the principles of climate science, if they are unwilling or incapable of recognizing the threats of climate change, if their imagination is not sufficient to motivate strategies of avoidance, then elections will be little more than exercises in futility.

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Rise of the Electric Automobile

Climate Change
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There’s a battle rumbling south of the border. And it’s one Canadians aren’t hearing a lot about unless they plumb the news feeds online.

It started for Tesla Motors during the 2012 U.S. presidential race. As the electric car company paid off its bailout loans earlier this month, American government news watchdog AllGov reminded readers that during the recent U.S. election republicans Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin both referred to the company as “losers.”

Tesla Motors is in the news a lot these days. If it isn’t a controversial New York Times review that caused the venerable newspaper to eat crow, it’s making headlines about selling their automobiles direct to the consumer, whittling away the middle man.

The company ought to get a sincere pat on the back for their efforts to introduce electric cars into the mainstream. Instead, their efforts were derailed in Texas despite a favourable opinion of the company on Wall Street. What this seems to indicate is that despite political backlash and negative press, Tesla Motors continues to move forward — disrupting the current fossil-fuel dominated automobile industry by offering a radical choice for consumers.

So how are you able to take advantage of this choice?

Well, it’s not easy of course. Our roads and geography in British Columbia weren’t made for the electric car in mind. But as proponents will point out, the options are getting better every year. Right now, there are basically four types of electric vehicles. In B.C., the provincial government offers a wide range of interesting incentives for consumers, which includes covering some of the costs to install charging stations at multi-unit residential buildings in the province.

If you already have an electric vehicle requiring a fuelling station, then Richmond is the place to go. The Lower Mainland city boasts 10 such terminals. And for those thinking about buying an electric car, Clean Energy Vehicles for B.C. provides all the information you need to make a decision.

It even lists all the places in B.C. where you are able to plug-in.

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Harper’s War on Science

Canada, Climate Change, Climate Science, Politics
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The story, by Joyce Nelson, is re-published from Watershed Sentinel.

If Canadians knew the full extent of the Harper government’s  war on science, they would be clamouring for the reinstatement and full funding of dozens of federal scientific programs and hundreds of scientists axed over the past year. Since the passage of omnibus budget Bill C-38, the Harper Cabinet has moved at blitzkrieg speed to make these cuts.

Canada’s Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault, agreed at the end of March to launch an investigation into the extensive muzzling of federally-funded scientists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada and other federal agencies (1). Her decision comes after a February 20th complaint formally filed by Democracy Watch in partnership with the Environmental Law Clinic of the University of Victoria, which called for a full investigation and was accompanied by a 128-page report, Muzzling Civil Servants: A Threat to Democracy. That report documents systematic silencing since 2007 of federal scientists involved in research on climate change, the Alberta tar sands, fish farms, and other areas (2).

But the muzzling of scientists is only one aspect of Harper’s war on science. Far more troubling is the actual elimination of scientific programs and the firing of scientists. Jim Turk, director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, puts it well: “The Harper government wants politics to always trump science. It wants its political views to dominate even if science shows that it’s wrong.”

The NDP’s Megan Leslie is even more caustic: “This government has abandoned evidence-based policy-making to pursue its own brand of policy-based evidence-making.”

The New Inquisition

According to information provided to me in March by the Professional Institute of Public Service Canada (PIPSC) – the union which represents federal scientists and other professionals employed by 38 federal government departments – 5,332 of their members have already either lost their jobs or been transferred to other duties. That number includes 139 scientists/professionals at Environment Canada (cut by $53.8 million), and 436 scientists/professionals at Fisheries and Oceans (already cut by $79.3 million, with $100 million more in cuts announced in the latest March 2013 budget). Thousands of unionized support staff have also been cut from these, and other, departments.

Harper claims that his drastic cuts to most federal agencies are necessary in order to eliminate the deficit before the next federal election. But as business writer David Olive recently observed, “Harper’s ultra-low corporate tax [15%] deprives Ottawa of $13.7 billion a year according to Finance’s own estimates. That’s enough to wipe out the deficit in two years without cutting a single program.”

Canada now has the lowest corporate tax rate of G8 member nations. Indeed, according to a 2013 study by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, of 185 countries examined, only seven countries have a lower corporate tax rate than Canada.

The DFO has been especially hard hit by Harper’s  war on science, with three rounds of cuts and another three to come. The entire ocean contaminants research program has been axed, including laboratories and research stations across Canada. World-renowned scientists have been fired, including Dr. Peter Ross, an expert on contaminants’ effects on marine mammals.

Working out of DFO Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BC for the past 13 years, Dr. Ross is known for his path-breaking research on dioxins in pulp mill effluent, the effects of flame retardants on beluga whales, the impacts of pesticides on wild salmon, and the effects of industrial contaminants on orca whales.

Dr. Ross told Desmog Canada, “If someone is saying that we have to cut 5 per cebt from every department, that’s one thing. But when you turn around and cut 100 per cent of a program, to me that indicates something more than fiscal restraint. It argues in favour of a targeted reduction of a program for some other reason.”

More than a dozen scientific programs important to Canada’s environment and oceans health have been targeted and dismantled over the past year, while others have been slashed to the bone (2).

The Terrible Toll

DFO’s Habitat Management Program – which monitored the effects of harmful industrial, agricultural and land-development activities on wild fish – is gone. DFO’s teams of experts on ocean contaminants in marine mammals, on marine oil pollution, and on oil spill countermeasures have all been disbanded. Gone too is the Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research – the only agency with the ability to adequately assess offshore projects. Nine out of 11 DFO marine science libraries will be shut. And the Experimental Lakes Area is closed.

At Environment Canada, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Nunavut, involved in monitoring the Arctic ozone hole discovered in 2011, has been closed. Similarly, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, Canada’s main research foundation on climate change, has been axed. The Canadian Centre for Inland Waters – the most important science monitoring agency for the imperilled Great Lakes – has lost key staff members. Cuts to the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation, makes communities more vulnerable to toxics.

Harper’s war on science has also eliminated the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission, the independent agency that ensured fracking companies complied with regulations. And by dismantling the Smokestacks Emissions Monitoring Team at Environment Canada, the government has eliminated “the only Canadian group capable of writing and supervising credible testing methods for new and existing rules to impose limits on pollution from smokestacks”.

In other cuts that are environment-related, the Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg – which developed popular spring wheat varieties for Western Canada – is set to close in April 2014. Even the National Research Council’s world-renowned Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Information (CISTI) has been cut drastically. These are the people who solve issues such as responding to pandemics, and maintaining food and product safety. Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology, has consistently defended the Harper government from accusations of a  war on science by emphasizing the $5.5 billion that the Feds have provided to the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), including another $225 million to the CFI in Economic Action Plan 2013 released on March 21.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation

The CFI – the key decision-maker for all science funding in Canada – has a governing body of 13 members, seven of whom are appointed by the Minister of Industry (Christian Paradis). These members then select the other six members.

This governing body then appoints seven of the 13 CFI Board of Directors, receives reports from the Board, appoints auditors, approves the Annual Report, sets strategic objectives and makes final decisions about what science projects will be funded, including at universities. According to the CFI website, the Members are “similar to a company’s shareholders, but representing the Canadian public.”

But a look at the CFI Members indicates that it is a highly politicized body (including a founding trustee of the Fraser Institute) that is making the decisions about what science to support with its $5.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

For example, CFI Co-Chair David Fung is so thoroughly embedded in China-Canada business/trade collaboration that he may as well be seen as a de facto vice-president of CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corp.).

The other Co-Chair, Roland Hosein, is a vice-president of GE Canada, a company that is thoroughly engaged in promoting “energy export corridors” and water-privatization efforts across Canada, including the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI) and (with Goldman Sachs) the Aqueduct Alliance.

Meanwhile, the Board of Directors of the CFI includes the president/CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute (a perennial advocate of bulk water export), and an executive for Husky Energy (whose Hong Kong billionaire owner Li Ka-Shing is buying up water/utilities around the globe).

Otherwise, both the CFI Members List and the CFI Board are packed with corporate biotechnology representatives.

So Harper’s war on science has some obvious goals, including getting rid of all federally-funded science that would impede water export, as well as any science standing in the way of aquaculture, tar sands and natural gas export.

As Maude Barlow and renowned freshwater scientist David Schindler wrote in The Star Phoenix, “The Harper government is systematically dismantling almost every law, regulation, program or research facility aimed at protecting freshwater in Canada and around the world.” Harper even killed the Global Environmental Monitoring System, an inexpensive project that monitored 3,000 freshwater sites around the world for a UN database.

The “One-for-One” Rule

In 2010, the Harper government created the Red Tape Reduction Commission, a little-known advisory body overseen by Treasury Board’s Tony Clement and packed with private-sector members. They came up with a strategy for “reducing the regulatory burden on businesses to better enable them to make needed investments in productivity and job creation.” Called the “one-for-one” rule, the measure “requires regulators to remove a regulation each time they introduce a new regulation that imposes new administrative burden on business.” The Harper government adopted the “one-for-one” rule in January 2013, with Treasury Board bragging that “Canada will be the first country to give such a rule the weight of legislation.”

Of course, the Harper government has already wiped out most federal environmental regulation with omnibus budget bills C-38 and C-45. And now, with the  war on science, a few beancounters left in federal departments will be tasked with choosing which rule to eliminate if a new regulation is added.

That kind of stupidity is what has made the Harper Conservatives (and Canada) look truly medieval to much of the scientific world.

Now the Harper government is scrambling to look “green” and “scientific” in order to get U.S. approval for its Keystone XL dilbit export pipeline and to bolster various trade issues (including the Fuel Quality Directive) pending with Europe. But having axed so much environmental and climate science, including the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, and having fired hundreds of scientists across the land, the Harper Cabinet looks like nothing less than the New Inquisition dressed in a cowboy hat.

Joyce Nelson is an award-winning freelance writer/researcher and the author of five books.

 

(1) Information Commissioner To Investigate Muzzling of Federal Scientists

At the end of March 2013, Canada’s federal Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault, agreed to launch an investigation into the muzzling of federally-funded scientists at the departments of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), Environment Canada (EC), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and other federal agencies.

Sporadic mainstream media reports since 2008 have attempted to highlight the muzzling of Canada’s scientists, who have been prevented from giving interviews with journalists and speaking freely about their taxpayer-funded research. In February 2012 BBC News reported the findings of Canadian journalist Margaret Munro: “The Postmedia News journalist obtained documents relating to interview requests using Canada’s equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. She said the documents show interview requests move up what she describes as an ‘increasingly thick layer of media managers, media strategists, deputy ministers, then go up to the Privy Council Office, which decides yes or no’.”

The Privy Council Office (PCO) supports and takes its orders from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), but it has a certain degree of power in its own right. The Clerk of the Privy Council is Wayne G. Wouters. The President of the Privy Council is Denis Lebel (Minister of Transport, Infrastructure & Communities; Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs; and Minister of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Region of Quebec). There are four other Harper Cabinet Ministers in the PCO: Marjory LeBreton (Leader of the Government in the Senate); Peter Van Loan (Leader of the Government in the House of Commons); Gordon O’Connor (Minister of State and Chief Government Whip); and Tim Uppal (Minister of State for Democratic Reform).

Just how thoroughly Suzanne Legault will investigate this chain of command in terms of the muzzling remains to be seen.

(2) Environmental Science Axed by the Harper government (2012-2013)

Department of Fisheries & Oceans

Programs discontinued:

• Species-at-Risk Program

• Ocean Contaminants & Marine Toxicology Program

• Habitat Management

• Experimental Lakes Area (Northern Ontario) *St. Andrews Biological Station (New Brunswick)

• Centre for Offshore Oil & Gas Energy Research

• Kitsilano Coast Guard Station

Budget slashed:

• Institute of Ocean Sciences (Sidney, B.C.)

• Freshwater Institute – Winnipeg

• Oil Spill Counter-Measures Team

• Canada Coast Guard

• Maurice-Lamontagne Institute (Quebec)

• Marine Science Libraries

Environment Canada

Programs discontinued:

• Environmental Emergency Response Program

• Urban Wastewater Program

• Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (Nunavut)

• Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences

• Smokestacks Emissions Monitoring Team

• Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission

• National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy

Budget slashed:

• Environmental Protection Operations

• Compliance Promotion Program

• Action Plan on Clean Water

• Sustainable Water Management Division

• Environmental Effects Monitoring Program

• Contaminated Sites Action Plan

• Chemicals Management Plan

• Canadian Centre for Inland Waters (Burlington, Ont.)

Natural Resources Canada (NRC)

Budget slashed:

• Reduced science capacity for oversight and research

National Research Council

Budget slashed:

• Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Information

Transport Canada

Budget slashed:

• Transportation of Dangerous Goods (pipeline and tankers oversight)

• Transport Canada Aircraft Services

Other

Programs discontinued:

• Arctic Institute of North America’s Kluane Research Station

• The Global Environmental Monitoring System

• Cereal Research Centre (Winnipeg)

• Canadian Environmental Network

• Prairies Regional Office: Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency

• The Research Tools and Instruments Grant Program

• Grants Programs administered by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

Budget slashed:

• The Centre for Plant Health (Vancouver Island)

• Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health (Winnipeg)

• Horticulture Research & Development Centre (Quebec)

• Plant Pathology Program (Summerland, B.C.

• The Great Lakes Forestry Centre (Toronto)

• The National Water Research Institute (Burlington, Ont.)

• Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration

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All Candidates Dialogue Wednesday Promises “Real Talk on Climate Change”

Climate Change
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An all candidates dialogue this Wednesday evening at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver – featuring five candidates vying for office in the May 14 provincial election – will focus on solutions to climate change. Partcipants include the NDP’s David Eby, Liberal challenger Gabby Kalaw, Green Party leader Jane Sterk, Duane Nickull from the BC Conservatives, and Independent MLA Bob Simpson.

The event, co-hosted by Gen Why Media and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, will also feature musical guests, an audience q&a, plus the CCPA’s Chief Economist Mark Lee and three young voters and emerging leaders: Caleb Behn, from the forthcoming documentary Fractured Land, Transformation Projects’ Andrea Curtis, and Sam Harrison from Kids for Climate Action.

The evening is part of a series of “Bring Your Boomers” events designed to foster inter-generational dialogue on important issues. According to co-organizer Fiona Rayher of Gen Why Media, Wednesday’s event “will bring together young voters with political candidates for a frank conversation about an issue of overriding concern to young people: namely, how to address the challenge of climate change in BC.”

Rayher adds, “Bring Your Boomers events go beyond traditional panels or debates by presenting an engaging mix of intelligent conversation, media, storytelling and music to provide a culturally-driven entry point to discuss social transformation.”

The event takes place Wednesday, April 3 at the Rio Theatre (corner of Commercial Drive and Broadway). Doors open at 6:30, event starts at 7pm. Tickets can be purchased in advance here.

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The Bitumen Cliff

Climate Change, Energy and Resources, Tar Sands
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Bitumen is the current subject of much discussion in Canadian economic and energy policy. Getting Alberta’s version of this carbon-intensive crude from the tar sands to market by pipeline is the cause of considerable concern, study, frustration and tension. The proposed Northern Gateway to BC’s treasured West Coast is laden with controversy, as is the Kinder-Morgan expansion to Vancouver.

The Keystone XL pipeline that would send bitumen south to be refined in the US Gulf Coast has become more complicated than the “no brainer” envisioned by those promoting bitumen exports. Now a report released jointly by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the Polaris Institute (PI) is casting doubt on the wisdom of the federal government’s avid promotion of resource extraction as its primary economic strategy (Shawn McCarthy, Globe and Mail, Feb. 2/13).

Alberta may be the best example of this economic folly. The so-called “bitumen bubble”, the hollowing out of Alberta’s oil prices, has left the seemingly wealthy province with a staggering budget deficit of billions. With an economy now mostly dependent on the value of its bitumen, the province is vulnerable to price fluctuations determined by international market forces.

Now, with new extraction technology flooding the market with oil and gas from shale deposits, Alberta is cornered and in financial crisis. The federal government’s attempts to establish Canada as an “energy superpower” is now in doubt. The report by the CCPA and PI refers to this situation as the “bitumen cliff”.

As Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute explains, “Canada’s current bitumen strategy is not only damaging to the environment, but is leaving our economy highly vulnerable to shrinking markets for bitumen as the world moves to less polluting fuels” (Ibid.).

The problem is the intensive energy required to extract bitumen from the tar sands. As climate change advances and the international community becomes more sensitive to carbon emissions, the preference for cleaner fuels will rise and the demand for bitumen will fall. In an age of growing environmental concerns, bitumen becomes a sunset fuel.

But the “bitumen cliff” is expressed in more serious structural effects. As a primary economic strategy, resource extraction offers a questionable future. One of Canada’s famous economic historians, Professor Harold Innis, succinctly identified the danger of relying on resource extraction as the source of national wealth. In summarizing Innis’s thinking, the CCPA report notes, “As staples are exported in raw form to more industrialized trading partners, Canada is left to buy back processed, value-added products and services at a much higher cost. The combined outcome is a self-reinforcing staples trap (a phrase borrowed from Professor Innis), whereby the faster Canada exports its latest staple, the less diversified and capable the economy becomes and hence all the more dependent on finding more staples to export” (Ibid.).

However well-intentioned, a strategy of resource extraction drifts a country downward in status, sophistication, wealth and stability.

A lack of economic diversity means a lack of economic resilience and greater economic vulnerability. Not only do boom-and-bust cycles become more common but a country’s economic health is wholly dependent on the needs of other economies. Bitumen is a classical example. It seemed like a good idea when the world was facing peak oil — the federal plan, in concurrence with Alberta, was supposed to make Canada an “energy superpower”. Now that other oil and gas is flowing freely from multiple shale deposits around the world, bitumen is in danger of becoming an expensive burden.

As well as the environmental risks and costs associated with the production and distribution of bitumen, such a resource comes with other consequences that are not so obvious. Economies that are dependent on a single resource are compelled to safeguard its production, to cater to its interests and to those who control it. The inevitable result is a deformation and erosion of democracy.

Saudi Arabia is an extreme example. But the economic power of oil almost invariable comes with a politically corrupting influence. Economic diversity invariably creates better government, greater resilience and more social stability — and broadly educated societies that are healthier and happier.

The most valuable resource in a modern society is its people. They are nourished and developed by schools, universities, health care, open inquiry and the free-flow of information. Informed people invent their own wealth. A country such as Canada has the raw resources that are best used by Canadians. Professor Innis’s “staple trap” is an economic cliff to be avoided.

Short term political objectives are inclined to exploit the immediate cash of raw resource extraction. But the best and most enduring investments are made in the people themselves. They, after all, are the real substance of nations.

And finally, at the bottom of the “bitumen cliff” is environmental mayhem. In Alberta, it’s open pits of toxic wastes, and an endangered Athabasca River which flows northward to expansive valleys and deltas ecologically rich with fish and wildlife.

In adjacent places, it’s pipelines, tankers and trains with the certain threat of disastrous spills. For the planet, it’s greenhouse gas emissions, a polluting process with unfolding consequences that science describes as being catastrophic to both natural ecologies and to human societies.

So the “bitumen cliff” also comes with a moral dimension. Is it strategically wise to develop a resource that comes with a suicidal component? Shouldn’t our human energy and ingenuity be applied to avoiding weather extremes, rising oceans and the plethora of other environmental disasters awaiting a hotter planet?

The most important discussions today are no longer about the economy and oil but about the fate of future generations. Bitumen belongs in this broader and deeper conversation.

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Harper Government Takes Muzzling Scientists to New Extreme

Canada, Climate Change, Climate Science, Politics
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Machiavelli would approve. So would Stalin, Mao Zedong, the ayatollahs of Iran, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. George Orwell would proudly place the audacity of information control in the Ministry of Truth, the agency in his dystopian 1984 novel in which Big Brother uses the Thought Police as the instrument that determines right from wrong, good from bad, wise from foolish, fact from fiction, reality from illusion.

Reality is shaped by information. Control information and reality is controlled. Eliminate information and the blank slate of public consciousness is vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation. Reality is, in effect, an immensely valuable but incredibly fragile commodity, forever changing as information changes. Little wonder, then, that those with a special interest in power also have a special interest in controlling information.

This would be an academic subject befitting a university class on ethics, philosophy or politics if it were not surfacing in Canada because of the Privy Council’s muzzling of scientists associated with the federal government through employment or grants. The strictures on what scientists can publicly say or publish, put in place by the Prime Minister’s office, have been tightening in recent years. In 2011 scientists protested and collectively complained that they could not speak openly to Canadians about their research and findings without receiving prior approval from the upper echelons of government—a dramatic break from the traditional freedom that is an assumed liberty in an open, modern and democratic society. Now the strictures are tightening further.

“As of February 1st this year,” writes Elizabeth May in Island Tides, (Feb. 28/13), “new rules were put in place requiring that scientists working on projects in conjunction with DFO in the Central and Arctic Region to treat all information as proprietary to DFO and — worse — await departmental approval before submitting research to any scientific journals.” A week later, on February 7th, additional rules were imposed requiring that “now they must obtain prior consent before applying for research grants” (Ibid.).

In Elizabeth May’s assessment of the tightening controls on scientists and their research, the process and its intent is obvious. “The tightening of control over science must be established far earlier in the process. Stop research from being submitted to journals. Stop scientists from collaborating with others. Stop scientists from applying for research grants. Stop science from happening at all” (Ibid.). This tragedy is compounded by strictures that constrain scientists from complaining about the constraints placed on them.

An American scientist, Dr. Andrew Muenchow, who has been doing important collaborative research with DFO in the Eastern Arctic since 2003, has refused to accept the new conditions, politely calling them a “potential muzzle”. The dissemination of crucially important information from Dr. Kristi Miller on viral diseases arriving in Canadian waters from salmon farming has been obstructed by the government authorities. Scientists researching ozone depletion, Arctic ice melt, pollution and species loss have been silenced. These are typical examples of the control of information by the Privy Council, an adjunct of the Prime Minister’s office. And it contrasts dramatically with the earlier protocol in which, “Data and any other project-related information shall be freely available to all Parties to this Agreement and may be disseminated or published at any time” (Ibid.). The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall have appeared in Canada as a blackout on any scientific studies that may conflict with the direction of government’s agenda.

This is not a mere scientific issue. Although science should be the basis upon which governments make many important legislative and policy decisions, open and free scientific research is the most obvious measure of an open and free society, one in which evidence is given precedence over ideology, and decisions are weighted and made as rationally and intelligently as possible from the best available information. Control information and decisions can be shifted toward ideology, the unexamined opinions that drift away from enlightened guidance toward blind bigotry.

Granted, governments make decisions and devise legislation based on their particular ideological bent. But this ideology must be guided by credible information. And a substantial portion of this information now comes from scientific research, collaboration, study and findings. Opinion untempered and unguided by science lacks credibility because it isn’t connected to an empirical measure of circumstances. Ideology that is untested and incompatible with evidence is medieval, for it bears little relationship to reality. Government strategy and legislation founded on uninformed opinion will invariably be flawed and dysfunctional. Even worse, the result is a burden of liabilities, faulty strategies, defective laws and missed opportunities that can be incredibly costly to a country, to its citizens and to the environment that sustains them.

The laws of science don’t change to suit political and economic agendas. Pretending that greenhouse gas emissions are not changing weather, that the Arctic is not warming, that pollutants don’t harm ecologies, and that crucial ecosystems are not under threat is denial bordering on the delusional and pathological. Scientists don’t invent what is happening to our world; they measure, witness and report to us. Muzzling their effort silences evidence and increases our vulnerability to environmental ruin.

As Elizabeth May so eloquently concludes, this suppression of the free exchange of scientific information in Canada “is the 21st Century equivalent of the Dark Ages. This is book burning and superstition run rampant. This is the administration of a steady, slow drip of poison to a weakening democracy” (Ibid.).

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Cautious Optimism: World Leaders Ready to Tackle Climate Change?

Climate Change, Politics
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The world’s largest and most influential political and economic forces are showing signs that they might be ready to actively combat climate change. Presently the signs are only words. But the words are unequivocal and dramatic enough to be interpreted as a prelude to eventual concrete action at a global level.

Undoubtedly these words have been hastened by the collapse of a successor to the landmark Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This collapse was followed by the abject failure of subsequent negotiations. Extreme global weather events have now become so anomalous and conspicuous that they can no longer be denied as normal.

Such events are clearly sobering to those who are supervising the wellbeing of the global economy. They see trouble proliferating if something isn’t done soon to reduce the climate threat. Even US President Barack Obama, emboldened by a re-election victory and facing a last term in office, is taking an assertive position, uncharacteristically forceful and visionary (Elizabeth May, Feb. 14/13).

In his January 21st inauguration address to his fellow Americans — and to the people of the world because of the global influence of the United States — he sounded heroic. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms…”

Obama is responding appropriately to the growing anxiety in America about a future made uncertain by strange weather. But he also sees opportunity in adversity. “We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries; we must claim its promise” (Ibid.). Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry, also spoke of climate change and the need for remedial action from the international community, a sure sign that the level of awareness and commitment has reached a critical threshold.

More justification for optimism came from Christine Lagarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has been notorious for financing environmentally destructive projects in the interests of economic development — it hasn’t subscribed to the aphorism that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nature. But Lagarde’s speech in Davos, Switzerland, in late January revealed a different awareness. After outlining the major threats to global economic stability, she conceded that climate change was the most worrisome, “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century.” In elaborating, she added that, “Increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption; this is the real wild card in the pack.”

But Lagarde’s most candid comments came during the question period that followed her speech. This is a time when the carefully edited words of a formal presentation are replaced by candid opinion. “Unless we take action on climate change,” she said, “future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled” (Ibid.).

A normal and predictable climate, Lagarde recognized, is the single most important prerequisite for healthy economies — global, national and local. It is foundational and essential. Environmental chaos causes economic chaos, not to mention political, social and cultural chaos. Nothing functions well when communities and their complex infrastructures are buffeted by extremes and unpredictables, exactly what will happen if climate change is not addressed.

A similar expression of concern came from the new president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim. On January 28th he used an article in the Washington Post to address the American people directly. “After the hottest year on record in the United States — a year in which Hurricane Sandy caused billions of dollars in damage, record droughts scorched farmland in the Midwest and our organization reported that the planet could become 7 degrees [Fahrenheit] warmer — what are we waiting for? We need to get serious fast. The planet, our home, can’t wait” (Ibid.).

Good question. What are we waiting for? The physics that determines global climate doesn’t understand excuses: the complications of international negotiations, the politics of domestic economics, the awkwardness of national recessions, the procrastinations of powerful leaders. Neither does it understand the interests of large corporations, the inconvenience of constructing low-carbon technologies, the stubborn reluctance of old ideologues to accept new modes of behaviour more befitting our environmental reality.

The longer we wait to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the more extreme the cuts must be, the more difficult they will be to implement, and the more likely they will have to be made in increasingly adverse economic, social and political conditions. People in powerful places are beginning to realize this. Hopefully, their words will be an impetus to action.

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Keystone XL: Massive Civil Disobedience is Next

Canada, Climate Change, Oil&Gas, Tar Sands
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Last weekend’s rally in Washington, D.C. is being called the largest climate change rally in history. At least 35,000-40,000 people from all over North America came out on what was an unseasonably cold and windy winter day to demand that U.S. President Barack Obama deny approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and make good on his stated intentions to take serious action to address the climate crisis.

The rally included speeches by Bill McKibben of 350.org, who told the assembled crowd, “For 25 years our government has basically ignored the climate crisis: now people in large numbers are finally demanding they get to work…We shouldn’t have to be here – science should have decided our course long ago. But it takes a movement to stand up to all that money.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, who was arrested a week earlier protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House, said, “President Obama holds in his hand a pen and the power to deliver on his promise of hope for our children. Today, we are asking him to use that pen to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and ensure that this dirty, dangerous, export pipeline will never be built.”

Canada was well represented by a number of indigenous leaders, including Chief Jacqueline Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation. “The Yinka Dene Alliance of British Columbia is seeing the harm from climate change to our peoples and our waters,” said Thomas, Yinka Dene Alliance co-founder. “We see the threat of taking tar sands out of the Earth and bringing it through our territories and over our rivers. The harm being done to people in the tar sands region can no longer be Canada’s dirty secret.”

Will any of this make a difference? Even while the demonstration was underway, self-proclaimed environmentalists such as New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin was criticizing the demonstrators, writing that “a tight focus on Obama’s decision over the pipeline could be counterproductive if the hope is to build policies that might someday reduce the need for oil, whether the source is Alberta oil sands, the floor of the Gulf of Mexico or the Niger River delta.”

Many climate activists did not take kindly to Revkin’s comments, with journalist-turned-activist Wen Stephenson tweeting, “50,000 people come out to fight for our kids’ future, and you dump on it. You are what we’re fighting.”

Grist columnist David Roberts noted:

We can sit around and fill our blogs with reasons why this or that solution is the wrong one, inferior to some better one that we’d already have, goldarnit, if those meddling pushers-of-other-solutions weren’t ‘distracting’ from ours. We can fall in love with the ineffable intellectual tangle, as Revkin has, and accept that anything specific enough to build an activist campaign around will be meaningless in the context of global energy demand and emissions…But some people want to fight! Some people actually haul themselves out from behind their keyboards, call a bunch of friends, put on warm clothes, and go stomp around in public yelling about it.

Tensions are running high, as is often the case when so much is at stake. But is Revkin right? Is fighting Keystone the best strategic move or should we be directing our energies elsewhere? I was at the protest in D.C. and had the opportunity to speak with a number of climate activists about what lies ahead for the movement. From what I garnered from my discussions, I think Roberts has captured a sentiment that most of us have yet to fully realize, even those of us engaged in this struggle.

Yes, Keystone is a symbolic fight and stopping the pipeline will not fix our climate problem, not by a long shot. But for many people (and the numbers are rising), climate change represents one of humanity’s defining challenges, on par with the abolition of slavery, universal human rights and defeating fascism during the Second World War. It is the sine qua non issue of the 21st Century – no matter what else we might do, if we don’t get this one right, we’re in for an extremely rough ride.

This sentiment is becoming widespread in climate activist circles witnessed by, among other things, the Sierra Club’s recent decision to advocate and engage in civil disobedience for the first time in the organization’s 120-year history. The route of international negotiations and treaties has led us no closer to arresting climate change so many are now rightfully asking: If not now, when? If this is not the issue to get us out of our chairs and into the streets to fight, then what is? New pipelines represent a tangible symbol of our continuing addition to fossil fuels, locking us in to many more years of oil consumption at a time when even the International Energy Agency is telling the world that most of the world’s fossil fuels need to remain just where they are: in the ground.

Canada’s federal government is notorious for its intransigence and lack of interest in the climate change file. In the wake of the ongoing Idle No More movement and massive opposition to the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, one wonders what climate activists in this country might be planning next. After all, Stephen Harper’s government appears hell bent on getting tar sands crude out of Alberta to international markets. If not Keystone, if not Gateway, Harper is determined to find some other way and other plans are surely in the works.

Following the protest, I had some time to visit the National Museum of African American History at the Smithsonian Institute where I came upon a quotation by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Whatever you may think of the campaign to stop Keystone XL, it would appear that climate change activists around the world are beginning to wake up to the cold reality of Douglass’ words. We may well look back upon last weekend’s protest as only the beginning of a long, bitter and increasingly hostile battle.

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Bearing Witness: From Vesuvius to Climate Change

Climate Change
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At approximately 1:00 pm on August 24th, 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing nearly all the people in the nearby Roman seaside resort of Pompeii. Tremors were common in the area so little notice was given to the particularly strong ones that occurred the previous day. The same indifference greeted the strange cloud that appeared over the mountain the following afternoon. The eruption, witnessed by Pliny — known later as “the Younger” to distinguish him from his famous uncle, “the Elder” — described the cloud from where his family was living at Misenum, 32 km to the west. It resembled “a pine tree,” he wrote, “for it shot up into a trunk of great height, and then spread out into several branches. Sometimes it looked white, sometimes spotted, as though it had drawn up earth and cinders.”

Pliny’s uncle, a known naturalist and commander of the local Roman fleet, was fascinated by the cloud. So, on the pretence of conducting a rescue mission, he ordered large boats to carry him from Misenum to Pompeii for closer inspection. In reconstructing the event 27 years later, Pliny the Younger wrote that his uncle “dictated and noted down all the motions and shapes of that terrible portent as he went along.” Soon, however, the eruption and tremors became more intense. “Already,” the nephew wrote from his uncle’s notes, “ashes were falling on the ships, and the nearer they drew the hotter and thicker grew the showers; then came pumice-stones and other stones, blackened and scorched and cracked by fire, while the sea ebbed suddenly and the shore was blocked by landslides.”

By evening, in Pliny the Younger’s recounting, “broad sheets of flame broke out over Mount Vesuvius, rising high in the air and lighting up the sky, their brightness silhouetted against the darkness of the night.” His uncle, now in Pompeii, continued to document the eruption until morning. By then violent earthquakes were shaking the buildings as ashes engulfed them. Sulphurous gases and “thick fumes” eventually suffocated the uncle. Three days later his body and notes were found on the Pompeii waterfront.

Back in Misenum, the 17-year-old Pliny helped his mother and family escape the Vesuvius eruption. He described tottering buildings, heaving roads, smothering ashes, and being nearly trampled by the throngs of frantic people trying to flee the catastrophe.

The writings of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger are now a part of history, a personal and vivid account of a tragedy they both witnessed and recorded with the objectivity of a modern scientist. Pompeii remained entombed in ashes for 1,900 years until archeologists exposed the buildings, bodies, frescoes, food and minutiae of daily life that died that August day.

In a sad and tragic parallel, many scientists and environmentalists feel they are observing and documenting a corresponding disaster today, witnesses to an ecological catastrophe that may not be as immediate and lethal as the one that befell Pompeii but which may be even more significant because it is global rather than local. This parallel invites exploration.

For decades climatologists have been documenting a warming planet, the tremors that are dismissed as nothing unusual. As greenhouse gas emissions ominously rise, so do temperatures. Meanwhile, governments ineptly fiddle with ineffective regulations, earnest promises are regularly broken, reduction targets are routinely lowered, and corrective legal agreements are abandoned as being too onerous to implement. Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are creating a plethora of problems, from extreme weather and ocean acidification to species loss, political instability, food insecurity, property damage and human suffering. All these problems are slated to get worse on a warmer planet.

While we cannot stop a Vesuvius from erupting, we do know how to arrest climate change — and we could if we had the political will to do so. Instead, we note that average global temperatures are rising, Arctic ice is melting, glaciers are destabilizing, ocean levels are creeping higher, and more fires, droughts, floods and storms are ravaging more and more places. Those who know and care are bearing witness.

The struggle for survival of 7 billion people — with 2 or 3 more to come — presents incomparable challenges as so many try to live and flourish in ecosystems that are already stretched beyond their carrying capacity. The political, economic, social, religious and cultural turmoil that keeps erupting in both rich and poor countries is the predictable outcome of too many people crowded on an Earth that is now too small.

We do co-exist remarkably well considering our circumstances. But stress is the normal product of overpopulation and overconsumption of resources. Conflicts develop over shortages of energy, food, territory and wealth. Ideologies collide and weapons proliferate. The homogenizing process that allows people to live together in harmony also generates differences which then lead to separation, factions, rebellion and violence. Those who know and care are bearing witness to this, too.

Helplessness is debilitating. Some wither under the weight of it. Some refuse to acknowledge the warning tremors. Some become cynics and misanthropes. But some heroic others harken to an inner calling, muster their energies, rush to the rescue and struggle toward solutions, ever hopeful that their dedicated effort will avert an ominous outcome. As the metaphorical ashes and stones rain from the sky, many others merely note the unfolding circumstances and bear witness, profoundly saddened by the realization that perhaps nothing can stop the impending loss of something treasured and beautiful.

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Of Frogs and Fishes: Farms Spawn Lethal Diseases

Climate Change, Fisheries, Oceans, Species At Risk, WATER
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A lethal fungus has spread around the world, killing frogs at a rate 40,000 times faster than at any time since these amphibian species formed some 360 million years ago. Habitat loss is a factor, too, as wetlands are drained and forests are cut. But the most lethal and uncontainable enemy of frogs — and salamanders, too — is a single-celled fungus called Batrachochytrium dentrobatidis (Bd), a very strange killer since it belongs to a family of fungi that has long co-existed with frogs and has been relatively harmless. What happened to make it lethal is a mystery biologists set out to explain (NewScientist, July 7/12).

At first they suspected that climate change might be creating the ideal conditions for the fungus to flourish. Another candidate was pollutants. But the definitive answer came when researchers sequenced the genome and discovered that samples of the lethal Bd collected from everywhere in the world were essentially identical.

Dr. Matthew Fisher, an epidemiologist from Imperial College London, calls this variant “the global panzootic lineage”. Since it doesn’t survive in salt water and it has no airborne stage, it had to be getting from continent to continent with the help of people.

Two species of frogs have been traded internationally for decades. One is the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), used for research purposes, and the other is the North America bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), used for meat. Both species are relatively resistant to Bd so they could carry it undetected to wild frogs — this vector was confirmed when the first two outbreaks of Bd in wild frogs were detected in a site downstream from a bullfrog farm in the Philippines and in a newly established bullfrog population in a lake in the United Kingdom.

The other factor contributing to Bd’s virulence is the crowded conditions in which captive frogs are bred. In a wild environment, “natural selection tends to make diseases less virulent, because pathogens that rapidly kill their hosts have less chance of spreading. In crowded conditions, however, evolution favours the nasty” (Ibid.).

Somewhere in a frog farm, two related species of Bd combined to form a new and lethal variant. It was then distributed around the world with the farmed frogs. In other words, the Bd that is killing hapless wild frogs everywhere on Earth is “our own Frankenstein monster” (Ibid.).

This scenario should be familiar because it corresponds exactly to net-pen salmon farming in BC’s West Coast where viruses have been brewing for years in crowded “feedlot” conditions. The prospect that these farms could import and then breed a lethal variant virus which could subsequently escape to wild salmon has been haunting independent salmon biologist Alexandra Morton since her studies first found the same viral diseases in both farmed Atlantic salmon and native salmon stocks.

Morton worries that all the conditions are in place for a wild salmon catastrophe. Eggs that salmon farms import from around the world arrive with exotic diseases. Viruses flourish amid the hundreds of thousands of fish that are confined in individual net-pens, a threat accentuated by the fact that viral diseases are known to exchange genetic material to create new strains.

Pesticides, parasites, feces and diseases pass unobstructed through the net-pens into the surrounding marine ecosystem. And the industry has further increased the risk by choosing to locate many of their salmon farms along the migration routes of the wild fish.

Morton’s concerns are credible. Although motivated by a passion to protect wild salmon and the entire West Coast ecology they support, she nonetheless thinks like a scientist. Her arguments are rational, her studies are empirical, her gathering of data is rigorous, and her fears are justified. They are also shared by almost everyone who is free from the economic leverage purveyed by the salmon farming industry.

As Morton points out in her electronic newsletter, when the salmon farming industry first wanted to import Atlantic salmon eggs to the West Coast in the 1980s, the proposal was widely opposed by “the Steelhead Society of British Columbia, United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, BC Ministry of Environment, even members of the federal fisheries salmon transplant committee, and the Director General of Fisheries and Oceans, Pacific Region… They all cited concern that exotic diseases would accompany these shipments.”

For this reason, in 1986, Dr. Dave Narver, Director of the BC Ministry of Environment, warned that the “introduction of exotic races of salmonids into British Columbia is probably the most critical issue ever to face the maintenance of wild salmon stocks.” In 1990, Pat Chamut, Director General of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, warned that the “continued large-scale introductions [of salmon eggs] from areas of the world including Washington State, Scotland, Norway and even eastern Canada would eventually result in the introduction of exotic disease agents of which the potential impact on both cultured and wild salmonids in B.C. could be both biologically damaging to the resources and economically devastating to its user groups.”

Morton believes that the salmon farming industry, in conjunction with sympathetic government agencies, have set in place the conditions that could unleash a viral catastrophe in BC’s wild salmon populations. For her, the ingredients for crisis are in place and the waiting is agonizing.

The crisis of frogs and fishes is analogous. History repeatedly reminds us that our ignorance has a propensity to combine with our venality to create disasters. Frogs all over the planet are dying in massive numbers because we were instrumental in concocting a Bd “monster”. The possibility exists that we are about to inflict the same fate on our beloved wild salmon.

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