Environment

For years – for decades – climate scientists have been telling us that global warming was going to have some seriously bad, seriously expensive effects on the environment. Slowly, the population at large has gone from considering this a "unproved theory" to a "concern", but it's never been a real "problem", at least not in the sense that a ten cent increase in the cost of gas is a problem bordering on a crisis.

We know this is human nature. As a species, we evolved to deal with immediate threats, with clear and present dangers. So while climate scientists and environmentalists move from worry, through to desperation, and finally hopelessness, the political will to take action doesn't materialize.

"Theory" is making a rapid transition to "evidence", as the severity of weather disruption increases around the world. We donate funds for disaster relief amid a growing concern that maybe all that science is right, that maybe we should take action before things get really bad. But then the headlines fade and we go back to bitching about gas prices, demanding rollbacks in electricity rates, and not electing politicians who dare to advance environmental policies because they'll be "too expensive".

Back in reality, well over 300 people have been killed by "unprecedented" tornadoes in Alabama. Damages from this one event are estimated to be between two and five billion dollars¹. Half the North American continent is experiencing "unusual" weather, and the season for this sort of storm has just begun.

So I wonder if this is the year that we have our collective watershed moment. Is this the year that we wake up and realize that we should have been taking dramatic action a decade or more ago? Because this is the new reality. It's going to be expensive, it's going to cost lives, it's going to make food more expensive – if not scarce. Even if we fixed the problem overnight (an absolute impossibility), we're stuck with a least a decade of "what you see is what you get and it's going to get worse before it gets better" weather.

Unfortunately no epiphany seems forthcoming. A quick survey of commentary surrounding the current Canadian election campaign has more people concerned with paying five cents more for a litre of gas today than they are about food shortages or dying in a "freak storm" in a few years. As the New Democratic Party surges in the polls, the most resonant criticism of their policies seems to be that a carbon tax could increase gas prices by four cents a litre, with a corresponding increase in a vast array of goods.

We have transitioned from "people will die" to "people are dying", and we're not scared yet. At least not scared enough to take meaningful action. I really hope we wake the f--- up, and soon.

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[1] Estimate from Eqecat, a catastrophe risk-modeling firm that advises insurance, reinsurance and financial companies, as quoted by upi.com.

It's probably pretty obvious from this blog that my political philosophy most closely aligns with the Liberal Party. What's less obvious is that it's hardly a tight fit. Its more of an alignment of averages. Some probably perceive me as radical left (for example I believe in a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians), some as radical right (along with guaranteed income comes the cancellation of many social assistance programs). I believe in competition, but I don't subscribe to the interpretation that competition requires traditional capitalism.

In last night's English leader's debate, not only was the voice of the Green Party excluded by an irresponsible (in both senses, reckless and unaccountable) "consortium of media companies", but the environment seems to be a non-issue with all "mainstream" party leaders.

This is grossly unacceptable. If it doesn't make you angry, wake yourself up. The environment is the single biggest issue of our generation. It's one of the top issues for a majority of voters. Yet our leaders are silent. Harper could care less, it's all about the present for him. Ignatieff and Layton seem to have been terrified by Stephane Dion's attempts to push too far, too fast. Somehow they believe that the voting populace is so shallow that we can't decouple Dion, who few wanted to see as Prime Minister, from environmentally responsible policies.

So what do we have? Three leaders who care more about votes than about the country they purport to serve. Oh yeah, and Duceppe, who serves the concept of another country.

Well screw them. Screw them all. It's time to flush the lot of these self-serving myopic power seekers out of politics. This time around I'm voting Green in protest, and I urge you to do the same, independent of your usual political inclinations. I realize that if all 50 of my readers go Green, not much will change, so if you buy into my argument, encourage as many people as you can to do the same.

It seems the only way to get environmental issues on the policy agenda is through a measure of popular vote. In the absence of voting reform (another Green party policy), the only way the political establishment will take on the environment before it's a full blown crisis is if the populace put their votes where their concerns are.

I can see some objections to this approach, and I want to address them.

Voting Green will split the left and give Harper a majority. Bull. Take a closer look at the Green Party platform. It's right of the Liberals. To hell with Harper swinging left in a desperate attempt to pick up a majority, it might even be right of the Conservatives in some respects. The Greens should be splitting the vote on the right.

If the Greens win, they won't have the experience to govern. Absolutely true. But the chances of even a Green minority are somewhere between getting hit by lightning twice and winning a lottery. On the other hand, if they score a few seats, they'll actually be able to keep the environment on the agenda. Besides, can you imagine the NDP in a minority situation? It's not much prettier, but people vote for them.

Are there good counter-arguments? Post them in the comments.

The theft of perfectly functional manufactured goods for scrap value has become a serious issue over the past decade. The number of stories of small to medium scale theft, primarily of copper, has gone from rarity to ubiquitous. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared copper theft a critical threat to infrastructure. The size of the problem has grown because the recovered value of many easily recycled raw materials is exceeds the risk of getting caught.

This can be generalized. If raw materials aren't cheap relative to wages, civilization collapses by dismantling itself. This is a grave matter, and I find the implications profound.

I consider myself an environmentalist. I've always believed that one way to build a more environmentally responsible economy was to factor in the "true" cost of extracting resources from the natural environment — despite never having come up with any practical ideas as to how such a cost could be established. Under such a scheme, all raw materials would be significantly more expensive. But the baseline for measuring "expensive" has to be wages. So there's a deeply fundamental flaw in my belief, namely that it leads to the self destruction of civilization. My simplistic prescription is now completely trashed and a new model is required, because the status quo doesn't work either.

On the other hand I have always been at odds with much of the environmental movement, in that I grudgingly advocate nuclear power. Not because I think it's clean and wonderful and cheap, but because it looks like the only way we can bridge from fossil fuels to something sustainable without the catastrophic collapse of civilization.¹

I mention energy here because it is a big factor in the cost of production and distribution of raw materials. As time passes, we need to go farther, dig deeper, and expend more energy to extract them, so energy is not only a significant cost factor but rising faster relative to other costs. Mining is one of those places where nuclear seems problematic. Having some mining company build a reactor in a remote part of a third world country just to operate a mine seems foolish at best, and a formula for either future environmental disasters or the proliferation of nuclear weapons at worst.

Even in politically stable populated areas, building a couple of hundred nuclear reactors is a much less adequate "bridge solution" than I had hoped. To put it bluntly, there's no point in having a few terawatt hours of nuclear energy available if someone keeps tearing down the transmission lines for scrap. For that matter it won't matter if that power is generated by the cleanest imaginable source. If infrastructure is constantly under attack, reliable energy could easily mean small scale generation in well defended fiefdoms.

I wish I had a solution for this one, even one that's overly simplistic. 2010 should go down in history as the year dire predictions of the cost of climate change started to swing rapidly from radical wing-nut environmentalist overstatements to brutally underestimated realities. It would be nice if 2011 was marked as the year policy makers started to get a grasp of the magnitude of the threats posed by more costly energy and moved urgently to address the problem. We should now be on the equivalent of a war footing, dedicating the bulk of our fiscal, intellectual, and physical resources to solve these problems. Inexpensive energy is axiomatic to the current structure of our society. If we fail to find a way to generate it, our social structures will undergo major upheaval. Major upheaval is never good.

Instead, we remain complacent. The probability of defeat rises with each day; the cost of victory increases exponentially. It is a time for activism. Call your local politician and remind him or her that there are no elections in feudal societies.

 
1. For the record I don't particularly enjoy doom-saying by sticking "collapse" and "civilization" together. I just happen to think that the problem is that serious.

Almost everyone who looks at the history of North America through the lens of current times is appalled at the brutal decimation of native populations, at slavery, and at the complete absence of any concept of human rights.

It occurs to me that 50 to 100 years on, survivors of the environmental apocalypse will look at us in a similar way. Sadly, we'll be even more culpable. We've known the planet was destined to become overpopulated with humanity for at least 30 years, and our response has been indistinguishable from nothing.

Polar ice caps are disappearing more quickly than even the most alarmist had expected. Climate change wreaks trillions of dollars of damage on our economies. Critical ecosystems collapse and even species we deem to find attractive border on extinction. Meanwhile, we worry about bailing out car manufacturers.

It looks to me like we'll just keep on trying to get by and maintain our "standard of living" until there's a real environmental crisis, until we pass the "tipping point". Then we get to try to put our lives back together in the face of huge population migrations, limited food resources, war, disease, and eventually feudalism. Then we'll "buy locally" — there won't be any other choice!

Our legacy will be that we're the ones who ushered in the Second Dark Ages. Our barbarism will make the early history of the continent look like innocence. The worst, the saddest, part is that it might be too late to change a thing.

This weekend the Toronto Star announced the death of the SUV. One of the reasons this came up has to be the closing of the General Motors truck assembly line in Oshawa. It seems that as the price of gas gets above about $1.25 per litre (or $4/gallon in the U.S.), the number of people who "need" an unsafe gas guzzling SUV drops off pretty quickly. Now these same people "need" to unload their luxury land barges. There's nothing like a flexible definition of needs.

This is a good start. There's going to be a lot fewer road trips in the family road boat this year. Some people will argue that this is a bad thing, that families should be able to get out there with their kids to see all that this vast country has to offer. These people haven't actually seen a family in one of these vehicles. The parents are happily enjoying their time "together" while each kid is in their own isolated space with individual DVD players and noise-reducing headphones. They see as much of the countryside in their basements. Besides, a lot of travel options remain open. Our geography is every bit as dramatic from a train. Better yet, on a train it's a lot easier to get your kids to come out of their multimedia shells and look at something without risking a major accident.

Earth Hour has come and gone. Overall it was pretty successful: the statistic I heard was that electricity consumption in Ontario was down by 8%.

What does that mean? From a pragmatic viewpoint, not a hell of a lot. From a political viewpoint, it's pretty significant. I don't have the numbers that project the percentage of the population that participated, based on an 8% reduction, but I'll guess it's somewhere between 15% and 25%.

That's a lot of people sending a message. At this point it seems the big environmental problem is politicians. Most individuals get it, most corporations get it, but the politicians, who can actually manage the process of real change, just aren't there yet.

Maybe having as many as one in four voters demonstrate their commitment to change through Earth Hour will be enough to wake them up. I'm not holding my breath though.

It's interesting how often the question of online versus traditional shopping comes up. A friend asked me this earlier today and I gave him the same answer I've been providing for a decade now.

These days the response seems reasonable, but back in 1998 it was heresy. It used to be guaranteed to make a room full of start-ups and venture capitalists go dead quiet. Of course back then we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, when somehow geeks who don't like daylight managed to convince everyone that their concept of a good shopping experience was somehow universal.

So here it is:

Last month the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) released a report on dealing with the Gardiner Expressway an ageing elevated highway that cuts through the centre of downtown Toronto and pretty universally regarded as an eyesore.

In general it's a well reasoned report, but it's striking for its continuing embrace of car culture.

Ever hear someone rationalize their purchase of a gas-guzzling SUV as something they did to protect the safety of their kids? I hear that all the time. It's delusional, and here's why...

The "can't quite grasp the concept" set continues to argue that the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming is just too high.