Pipeline itself not the only problem we should worry about: Continued development of the oilsands will increase Canada's CO2 emissions

By Mark Jaccard
Originally published in The Vancouver Sun, January 25 2012

As a sustainable energy researcher, I have been inundated with media requests to comment on the proposed new pipelines from Alberta’s tarsands, especially Enbridge’s Northern Gateway here in British Columbia. I have mostly declined, assuming that with such intense public interest the key issues would get a full airing. But I was wrong — for no one is discussing the proverbial “elephant in the room.” This is the connection between tarsands expansion and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2007 promise to Canadians to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 65 per cent by 2050.

Harper’s promise, recently reconfirmed, simply reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that while any increase in average global temperatures from pre-industrial levels is dangerous, increases above 2 degrees Celsius will likely have cataclysmic effects for the ecosystems on which we depend. Yet human combustion of fossil fuels has already driven the temperature 1.2 degrees higher, and we are on a path of 4 degrees or more in this century alone, which will ultimately increase the sea level by tens of metres. This is why leaders of industrialized countries, like the U.S. and European Union, agreed to reduce emissions 80 per cent by 2050 and will work to require global emissions to start declining this decade.

A target 38 years hence might seem safely distant. But this is incorrect. All leading independent climate policy institutes concur that only with immediate action will we achieve a 65-80 per cent reduction in less than four decades. In the case of vehicles, this means the rapid deployment of near-zero-emission technologies which, thankfully, are already commercially available. These include hybrid vehicles using biofuels (ethanol or biodiesel), plug-in hybrid vehicles, and battery-electric vehicles. In contrast, our demand, and soon the global demand, for oil must contract, especially the demand for high-cost, high-emission tarsands.

Thus, for his promise not to be a lie, Harper cannot allow expansion of tarsands and associated pipelines, and he must require a growing market share of near-zero-emission vehicles. He knows this because his analysts are privy to the work of the world’s leading researchers. Canadians on all sides of the issue should read a 20-page report from MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change entitled Canada’s Bitumen Industry Under CO2 Constraints (found at http://globalchange.mit.edu). The report shows how and why the Canadian tarsands must contract as part of a global effort to prevent a 4 degree increase in temperatures and catastrophic climate change.

Why, then, would anyone argue for tarsands expansion and pipelines like Gateway? The reasons are obvious, as writers have known through the ages.

People who stand to get rich from tarsands development will delude themselves and try to delude others that the climate science is faulty or uncertain. As Upton Sinclair wrote, “it is hard to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.” And those who stand to gain from the tarsands indirectly (like politicians) will distract people from the obvious connection between tarsands expansion and climate catastrophe. “Tarsands are a small part of the problem.” “What about the Chinese?” “The tarsands will inevitably be developed.” “Low-emission vehicles and fuels are not ready yet.” And so on – all of it bogus. As H. L. Mencken wrote, “the truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.”

The oft-heard argument that B.C. needs the jobs and tax revenue is particularly galling. This is like arguing we need jobs making a toxin or nuclear weapons. We are not helping ourselves and our children by creating jobs that spew CO2 into the atmosphere. We are already creating jobs that propel our vehicles without CO2 emissions, and we can do so much more.

And where is the logic in the almost-complete focus on pipeline or oil tanker spills by environmentalists and first nations? If Enbridge is able to convince the hearing panel that these local threats are acceptable, then the project goes ahead. But since climate change will devastate all of the ecosystems potentially affected by the project, efforts to prevent local damage from spills are fruitless if they are not part of a concerted effort to stop CO2 emissions. Otherwise, it’s like trying to prevent a fuel leak on the Titanic as it steams toward the iceberg. We need to turn the ship.

The facts are simple. Our political leaders are lying to us if they aid and abet the expansion of tarsands while promising to take action to prevent the imminent climate catastrophe. If you love this planet and your children, and are humble and objective in considering the findings of science, you have no choice but to battle hard to stop Gateway and other tarsands pipelines. It is time to face up to this challenge with honesty and courage.

Full Steam Ahead? In moving toward a clean energy future, unbridled optimism has its pitfalls

By Mark Jaccard

Originally published in the Literary Review of Canada January, 2012

The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy by Chris Turner

Random House

368 pages, hardcover

ISBN 9780307359223

There are individuals, organizations, institutions, corporations and even some governments showing leadership in the quest for cleaner energy, more livable communities and a lighter human footprint on the planet. In The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy, Chris Turner tells their stories. And he tells them in a way that is compelling and accessible—mixing vignettes of colourful personalities with clear descriptions of technological innovations, green corporate strategies, urban rejuvenations and key energy-environment policies.

If the continual failure of major governments to act against the climate risk depresses you, this optimistic book can help. After reading it, you feel good about the inspirational people in different corners of the world who are rolling up their sleeves to make a difference. You feel good about the author, too, for his effort to spread their messages in a way that hopefully attracts many readers. The planet needs more books like this.

For a taste of the book’s many characters and places, Turner’s occasional focus on Denmark provides an illustrative sample. He describes the multi-decade transformation of Copenhagen, since it first banned cars from its main street in 1962, through a series of decisions on town planning, urban renewal, cycling infrastructure, public transit and district heating that show how an enviable quality of life in a modern city can coexist with an incredibly low per capita use of energy. Jan Gehl, one of Denmark’s earliest advocates and practitioners of this approach, has helped spread the “Copenhagenization” process to cities around the world.

Turner also describes Denmark’s leadership in the development of wind power that, while initially a modest effort in the late 1970s to reduce dependence on foreign oil and coal, has morphed into a full-blown crusade to eliminate the use of fossil fuels over the next few decades as a model for the world. This is not easy for a country such as Denmark, whose best renewable source of electricity is wind, which is intermittent and often most plentiful during night when electricity demand is lowest. But the Danes are also converting coal-fired power plants to biomass (wood and crop residues) while strengthening their transmission links to the hydropower reservoirs in neighbouring Norway and Sweden.

Interconnection with these energy storage systems certainly helps manage the electricity system in the face of wind’s intermittency. But this initial effort will be supplanted by the growing adoption of vehicles with batteries—like the hybrid-electric Prius and Volt—that can store wind-generated electricity for when it is needed. 

The concurrent deployment of “smart meters” to all electricity consumers will enable two-way communication between the electricity system operator and vehicles parked anywhere in the country, so that batteries can be charged or discharged depending on the supply-demand balancing needs of the system. Vehicle batteries can thus store excess wind-generated electricity for use when the wind is not blowing but demand is high. Special tariffs that reflect electricity’s value at any given moment will motivate those who can benefit from participating in this experiment in decentralized energy storage. Those with hybrid-electric vehicles can even agree to have their battery drained completely in special cases and they would simply rely on biodiesel or ethanol for their next vehicle trip while their battery recharges.

The book is brimming with informative and interesting stories like these from Denmark, and for this reason I highly recommend it. I have, however, a fairly significant complaint. It stems from Turner’s strategy of presenting his book as more than a travelogue of modern renewable energy, community redesign and inspiring people. He wants to convince the reader that he has an insightful new concept for motivating and guiding action—“the leap” (or “the great leap” or “the great sideways leap” depending on the page). To explain it, Turner detours through metaphors and fields of research that are unrelated to the book’s topic and confuse more than clarify. It all comes across a...........s a thinly veiled effort to endow the book with a sophistication and gravitas that it does not merit.

The problem starts with Turner’s rationale for the leap. Humanity is in the grips of three related crises: failure of the financial system, peak oil and climate change. A rapid shift to renewable energy will solve all three. By creating jobs, rebuilding social capital and providing stable energy prices, the shift to renewable energy will somehow repair our fragile financial system. At the same time, this shift will eliminate the twin threats of peak oil and climate change. The shift must happen quickly, but this is difficult because it requires a significant change in world view, given our fossil fuel dependence and our penchant for creating inhospitable cities that segregate rich from poor and prioritize cars over people. The solution is to leap: quickly take actions and implement policies that others have done elsewhere or that simply seem like the right thing to do, without bothering too much with careful analysis, critical thinking or caution.

For those harbouring doubts about what this approach actually is, or why it would be wise, Turner provides three specific metaphors. First, he asks us to imagine two trains running parallel toward a chasm. You are on the train that will fall into the chasm, while the other will sail miraculously over it, and for some reason you know this. You should leap to the other train (which I intend to do when I next find myself in a similar situation). This is metaphor number one. If this is unhelpful for real-world decisions, then consider the following. You are one of several transatlantic shipping companies operating out of New York in the early 1800s. The Black Ball shipping company tries for a competitive edge by setting a regular schedule for departures while all the other companies only leave port once their holds are full. This successful business strategy is an example of a leap. This is metaphor number two. Still not clear? Okay, how about you are the governor of New York State in the early 1800s, and you convince your constituents to support the construction of the Erie Canal. The canal proves a great success, fuelling the dramatic growth of New York City. The decision to build the canal was a leap. This is metaphor number three.

Now, what do these metaphors actually tell us? I am not sure. My guess is that Turner is saying we should—in the interests of shifting quickly to renewable energy and liveable cities—be willing to quickly gamble on new approaches and technologies. If these gambles prove successful in hindsight, Turner calls them leaps. But what if they are not successful? Should we have been more careful, perhaps done something else instead of wasting effort and resources? Turner does not provide much guidance here. Yet, while regular scheduling of transatlantic shipping was a successful gamble, the business pages of our newspapers are replete with daily examples of similar-scale entrepreneurial leaps that fail. The hindsight fact that one succeeded hardly provides evidence for the value of leaping.

And the Erie Canal may have been a successful gamble, but economic historians point to most canal projects of the early 1800s in Europe and North America to illustrate the enormous waste of society’s resources from risky projects that should have been considered more carefully in advance. Many of the canals started in this period were never completed, and most of the rest were rendered obsolete within a decade of completion by “the leap” to railways. Indeed, Turner’s selective vision is clearly evident when he mentions but draws no lessons from the financial losses to the followers of George Washington, who pursued his dream of a canal from the Potomac to the Ohio—a project that was never completed.

When Turner shifts from the leap to the great leap, he evokes images of the decisions of China’s Chairman Mao. The Great Helmsman too was a fervent advocate of the leap approach to socioeconomic decision making, but his hastily launched Great Leap Forward of 1958 had disastrous consequences for China’s environment, economy and an estimated 30 million people who died from famine.

If Turner would simply argue that we need to rapidly transform the global energy system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels in order to prevent human-produced climate change, his book would be more coherent and defensible. Instead, he again tries to score populist points by linking the 2008 financial crisis to both coincidentally high oil prices and climate change, declaring the three phenomena to be symptomatic of a fundamental breakdown of our socioeconomic system. Yet the expert book he summarizes to explain the financial crisis, by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, does not argue that high oil prices caused the financial crisis. Indeed, no book by a reputable economist does that. Greed, inadequate regulation and a period during which bankers were willing to close their eyes and leap do just fine on their own as explanations.

Turner’s wholesale acceptance of the peak oil story compels him to overlook the countless independent assessments showing that the earth has a frightening amount of fossil fuels, in a great diversity of forms, all of which can be used to generate electricity and power vehicles. Turner accepts independent assessments, such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when it comes to climate science, but he ignores independent assessments that show the huge magnitude of global fossil fuel supplies at reasonable prices. While he does use one estimate of conventional oil supplies by the International Energy Agency, he ignores that agency’s other studies that explore the ability to substitute between forms of fossil fuels. (For example, South Africa today produces a substantial share of its vehicle fuels from coal and some countries produce vehicle fuels from natural gas.)

Turner should stick with the climate threat. Virtually all climate scientists agree it is huge and already upon us. It is the only rationale we need for acting quickly. But in acting quickly, we need to be cautious and careful. There are many possible wrong steps ahead.

Fortunately, for guidance there are large independent assessments of the global energy system. While the IPCC is known for its volumes that assess the climate science, it produces other volumes that assess the options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy Modeling Forum, based at Stanford University, brings together world-leading analysts for assessing the technologies, energy sources and policies for rapidly transforming the global energy system. Ten years ago, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna directed the production of the World Energy Assessment, an excellent resource for non-experts. It is repeating this process in producing the Global Energy Assessment, to be released in early 2012. Consulting these reports—especially their summaries for policy makers—can help populist writers become a bit more discriminating, a bit less prone to leap in response to the latest discussion with an advocate of one particular technology or policy.

To give one example of many throughout the book, Turner raves about Germany’s feed-in tariff, which pays a higher price to producers of renewable electricity. The policy was recently adopted by Ontario. He parrots FIT advocates in claiming that this policy is vastly superior to a system of renewable quotas, which some jurisdictions use instead of FIT. What he fails to acknowledge is that since the introduction of FIT in 2000, Germany has continued to modernize and expand its coal plants, just as Ontario now builds natural gas plants. Yet, the IPCC, EMF modelling studies and the upcoming Global Energy Assessment clearly show that rich countries must not be installing any new fossil fuel generating facilities if humanity is to keep the global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. That is why British Columbia in 2007 implemented a near 100 percent clean electricity quota system, which forced the cancellation of two coal plants and the exclusive development in B.C. of small hydro, wind and biomass electricity facilities. While the FIT has certainly had some good effects, it is hardly the “full-blown leap” Turner calls it, and countries such as Germany need to quickly augment or replace it with a ban on new fossil fuel–burning investments or a 100 percent clean electricity quota system—which amount to the same thing.

Chris Turner has written an interesting book full of inspiring examples of what people are doing around the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy use and to make more liveable cities. Readers will especially enjoy and benefit from the book if they skip through the discussions of his leap concept and zero in on these wonderful examples.  

Let's Get Serious: Focusing on behavioural change is an easy excuse for politicians to avoid implementing greenhouse-gas-cutting laws

By Mark Jaccard
Originally published in Alternatives Journal, 2011

"We must change our behaviour to avert climate change.” Almost every day I hear this – from environmentalists, politicians, business leaders, educators, journalists, almost anyone who cares. The assumption is pervasive: without behavioural change, we cannot avoid climate change. Ironically, however, I hear this everywhere except in my job – which involves collaborating internationally with researchers who design and test models that simulate the impacts of policies meant to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. When we test against past environmental-policy successes, we find that behavioural change did not reduce the emissions that cause acid rain, urban air pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, lead contamination and so on. Technologies changed, not behaviour.

My dictionary defines behaviour as “how one acts or conducts oneself.” For over two decades, governments have begged us to change behaviour in order to reduce GHG emissions: drive less, turn off lights and electronic devices when leaving a room, lower home temperatures when absent or sleeping, dry clothes outside, take shorter showers, fly less and so on. These are behavioural changes because they involve acting differently on a regular basis, usually requiring our conscious attention to do so.

Behavioural change is not, therefore, a one-time decision to purchase a different device: a high-efficiency fridge, a hybrid-electric vehicle, a compact fluorescent light bulb. Such a decision requires no behavioural change, no conscious effort to conduct oneself differently. Similarly, behavioural change is not a one-time decision by energy companies (usually forced by policy) to generate electricity with renewables, increase biofuel content of gasoline and jet fuel, or manufacture and market electric vehicles.

You might not think that this distinction between behavioural change and technological change is critical. Think again. Rigorous research consistently shows that getting people to acquire a different technology is dramatically easier than getting them to sustain the conscious effort needed to act differently on a regular basis. We usually require compulsory policies such as regulations and taxes to induce technological change because the effect is more significant and enduring.

Ask a friend how they changed their behaviour to help reduce acid-gas emissions, lead emissions, urban smog and ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, and you’ll get a confused look. They didn’t change their behaviour. Instead, governments implemented compulsory policies that either banned environmentally unfriendly technologies and fuels or made them increasingly more expensive. 

We must do the same with GHG emissions, but this will happen only after we stop deluding ourselves about the necessity and ease of behavioural change. Figuring out why this delusion has continued for more than two decades is a challenge. My guess is that people don’t readily give up on their favourite myths, regardless of the evidence. Many environmentalists believe that once they get everyone to see the world as they do, then people will change their behaviour as they have. Politicians like to agree with environmentalists on this because it lets them off the hook. They get to fund ads asking people to change their behaviour (Remember the One-Tonne Challenge?), which is a lot easier than implementing regulations and putting a price on GHG emissions. (Remember Stéphane Dion?) Even climate skeptics and those who make money producing our current technologies and fuels enjoy the behavioural-change myth because, as long as it prevails, humanity will do very little to reduce emissions.

Trying to change one’s own behaviour and that of others in order to use less energy or a less-polluting form of energy is certainly a good thing. But it is harmful if it diverts our attention and efforts from the more fundamental change that is very difficult yet absolutely essential: changing our laws and our fiscal system.