Can McKibben and Nocera both be right?

In a March 15 op-ed in the New York Times, Joe Nocera described a coal gasification plant that the Summit Power Group plans to build in Odessa, Texas, starting this summer. The gasification plant would reduce greenhouse gas emissions perhaps as much as 90% by capturing the resulting CO2 and using it to (1) produce fertilizer and (2) inject into declining oil reservoirs in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.”

Nocera supports this as an important step for addressing climate change. He asked Bill McKibben if he supports the project and quotes McKibben’s response: “the worst possible thing to do with it [CO2] is to get more oil above ground. It’s time to keep oil in the earth, not to mention gas and coal.”

For Nocera, this suggests that McKibben is not thinking clearly, so he ends his article with, “To me, at least, his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem. The enemy is not fossil fuels; it is the damage that is done because of the way we use fossil fuels.”

In my view, they are both right – and both wrong. I don’t know the whole quote Nocera had to work with from McKibben, but it should have said something like the following.

“Yes, humanity should focus on carbon pollution, not on ceasing all use of fossil fuels. We must be driving carbon pollution rapidly toward zero, but if that can occur while still using fossil fuels, that’s fine. Maybe as a first step, some CO2 will be used for enhanced oil recovery. But a rapidly growing share of carbon from fossil fuel use must end up as liquid CO2 in deep saline aquifers or as solid carbon that can never be allowed to reach the atmosphere. If this is not feasible, then the use of fossil fuels must decline rapidly.”

And Nocera should have said something like the following.

“I understand why McKibben is reluctant to allow much use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery because he has done such an excellent job of explaining how close we are to surpassing our carbon budget for preventing harmful levels of global warming. But, while governments dither we should support projects that get the fossil fuel industry working in the right direction.”

And both should have said in unison, “People should read Mark Jaccard’s book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), which explains the likely role of fossil fuel use in a world in which humanity rapidly reduces its greenhouse gas emissions while providing much-needed energy for even the poorest on the planet.”

Climate and Voting – the environmental, social justice and survival issue of our times

British Columbia, where I live, will have a provincial election in May 2013. By a strange set of circumstances, BC voters have a rare opportunity, for the second provincial election in a row, to significantly influence the global climate struggle with their vote. Ironically, this means switching their vote from what it was in 2009 – it can’t get more non-partisan than that!

In 2009, the NDP opposition crassly promised if elected to kill in the cradle North America’s only true carbon tax, even though they had previously argued for its implementation. Many climate-concerned voters, who might have normally voted for the Greens or the NDP, voted for the governing Liberals in order to save the tax. During the campaign, I joined with experts from a diversity of ideological perspectives to try to convince people to vote strategically in our first-past-the-post system, hoping to ensure the NDP would lose swing ridings and not form government. (The NDP often emphasizes its concern for social justice, but sometimes seems to forget that climate change is one of humanity’s greatest social justice issues – just ask someone from Bangladesh, or a similarly vulnerable poor country, who understands the human implications of climate change.)

The Liberals just barely won the election and the carbon tax was saved, a victory that was even more significant than we thought at the time – since the global financial crisis soon blunted climate policy initiatives in most, but not all, jurisdictions. Today, the tax stands symbolically as the only significant carbon tax in North America, representing a model for future policy efforts. Policy advisors study the tax, the New YorkTimes writes about it, even Republican politicians have talked favorably about it. Preventing the NDP from destroying the tax was the most critical outcome of that election. The struggle was stressful, but successful.

In this election, however, the roles are reversed. The reason is the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

Recent papers in Science and Nature on our global carbon emission limits – summarized in Bill McKibben’s article inRolling Stone – explain what many of us have known for at least two decades. Humanity cannot develop our massive unconventional oil resources while at the same time preventing the 2 C temperature increase that scientists believe could destabilize the climate, perhaps leading to runaway global warming. In Canada, this means that we cannot be expanding production levels and transport infrastructure for Alberta’s tar sands. This does not mean shutting down the tar sands tomorrow. With existing production facilities and pipeline infrastructure, its operation would continue for decades. But it cannot be expanding with new major developments and additional pipeline capacity. As McKibben points out, the math is ridiculously simple – and terrifying.

This means that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the US and the Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the BC coast should not be built. They would allow tar sands production to double from its current level of 2 million barrels per day.

The past three decades have shown that the vast majority of politicians have proven adept at expressing great concern for the threat of global warming, while not actually committing to policies that would stop or reduce emissions growth. The governing Liberals in BC, for example, have said they still believe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet promote rapid expansion of shale gas production and new coal mines. They express “concerns” about Northern Gateway, yet refuse to promise to stop it if re-elected in May. We all know what this means.

In contrast, the opposition NDP has promised to kill the project. And believe me, a provincial government that wanted to kill a project like this would be able to do it – even if the federal government had the jurisdiction to approve its construction and had already done so.

The NDP is leading in the polls, but that does not mean they will win the election. The Conservatives have all but collapsed, which will mostly help the Liberals. And the Greens are still capturing a large share of voter interest, which will mostly hurt the NDP. Meanwhile Liberal supporters pound away with personal attack ads – a strategy that has worked well for Stephen Harper in election after election – and one wonders if some desperate oil patch money is behind this. The election outcome is definitely not a foregone conclusion.

All of this sets the stage for well-meaning people concerned about climate to make a tragic mistake this May – by voting Green in ridings where it could have ensured the election of an NDP member instead of a Liberal. (We must never forget how Ralph Nader’s Green candidacy helped George Bush just barely defeat Al Gore.)

In my view, this election is, and should be presented by people concerned about climate, as a referendum on Northern Gateway, and we should be encouraging individuals to vote NDP in any riding where the NDP has a chance of defeating the Liberal candidate, even if that individual would prefer to vote Green in an electoral system with proportional representation. The only riding where I am suggesting climate-focused people might vote Green is in the Victoria riding where climate scientist Andrew Weaver has an excellent chance of winning (hence not a wasted vote) and would be supporting an NDP or Liberal government where it did the right thing and hounding it where it did not. (For example, both the Liberals AND the NDP are too bullish on shale gas and LNG exports – a subject for a future blog.)

At this point, the prevention of Northern Gateway would be a (second) unique occasion in which British Columbian voters would be able to influence the broader struggle to stop global warming with one X on a ballot. Its cancellation would embolden activists and average citizens to realize that the tar sands and other carbon polluters can be stopped and would contribute to a rethinking of climate policies and emission reduction efforts in the two biggest carbon polluting countries in the world: the US and China.

Why we need to stop oil sands expansion

On February 25th I and three climate scientists, along with activist-writers Tzeporah Berman and Bill McKibben, held a press conference to present our recent report on the huge contradiction between the Harper government's promise to reduce carbon pollution 17% by 2020 and its promotion of expanded tar sands production through new projects and new pipelines like Keystone and Northern Gateway. The report can be found at canadianclimatepolicy.org.

An article in the February 25th Globe and Mail refers to this report as well. I am misquoted in the original online version as being negative about the prospects for cap-and-trade. I actually said that I am agnostic about carbon tax versus cap-and-trade versus regulations. If the Harper government wants to do regulations, that's fine by me. California is using regulations to achieve about 90% of emission reductions and it is on course to meet its aggressive reduction target.

But the Harper government has not implemented the regulations it promised to meet its target and as the Environment Commissioner in our Office of the Auditor General noted last year, it is now too late to hit the 2020 target. This is why we need to not allow any investments that expand the production and transportation of fossil fuels to produce more carbon pollution. This does not mean shutting down the oil sands. It means stopping its expansion. It does not mean shutting down existing pipelines. It means stopping the construction of new capacity. Existing facilities will still operate for decades. But we must stop the insanity of new major carbon polluting infrastructure.