Category Archives: climate crisis

Positive First Steps in Toronto

climate crisis, toronto,

Crossposted from Torontoist.

All of the controversy last week over city council’s non-decision regarding new taxes overshadowed another story with equal (if not more) importance. Just as a one-vote margin of defeat for a mayor is rare, so too is a unanimous vote for anything other than ceremonial or housekeeping motions. And yet, that’s exactly how Toronto’s climate change plan came to be adopted last Monday night, without a single dissenting voice. Given the importance of dealing with the climate crisis, the relative media-silence surrounding the city’s plan, and the fact that the wrong climate solutions can actually lead to even bigger problems, Toronto’s approach deserves a closer look.

First of all, it’s hard to find fault with the city’s objectives. The “Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan: Phase 1” [pdf highlights] sets emissions reduction targets from 1990 levels of 6% by 2012 (the Kyoto target), 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Those are very ambitious targets (Toronto calls them the “most ambitious in North America”) and they will not be easy to meet. They’re also the same targets that most climatologists agree are necessary in order to avoid the worst of climate change. To put those numbers in context, in 1990—chosen as a base year because it was the founding year of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—Toronto’s emissions were approximately 22 million tonnes of eCO2 (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year. Since then, Canada’s emissions have risen by 30%, which now puts Toronto’s emissions at around 28.6 million tonnes. In other words, what we’re really talking about is getting our emissions down to 20.7 million tonnes by 2012, 15.4 million tonnes by 2020, and 4.4 million tonnes by 2080.

The report’s many recommendations are broken down into twelve categories. Basically, here’s what the city hopes to accomplish.

The Live Green Toronto strategy is designed to provide incentives for individuals and communities, primarily to reduce their own energy consumption, but also to take other action to reduce their impact on our life support systems (sometimes referred to as “the environment”) such as installing green roofs and retrofitting old buildings. The details are vague and presumably yet to be worked out, but there’s a suggestion that the incentives would be in the form of loans to be repaid by the energy savings of new projects. This is also the section that contains the call to “investigate banning the use of two stroke engines” like the ones in some leaf blowers.

The most encouraging ideas in the Green Business Toronto section are the promotion of local food production and an eco-roofs program which would help businesses save money by reducing their air conditioning use, while also reducing the amount of unfiltered water that ends up in storm sewers (and, ultimately, our watershed). There’s also a call to “develop a business plan for a model green-industry business park,” which seems too ambiguous to get excited about just yet.

The city plans to Become the Renewable Energy Capital of Canada by installing small-scale renewable energy systems (including solar, wind, geothermal, and biogas) on 1500 city buildings and landfill sites. Other ideas include making it a legal right for homeowners to install renewable energy generation on their properties, and expanding deep lake water cooling capacity by 20%.

Given last week’s discouraging TTC news, it’s particularly hard to read the plan’s Sustainable Transportation strategy without rolling your eyes. The ideas are there (implement the bike plan, implement the transit city plan, create a new plan to make all the old plans work with each other), but we’ve heard it before. Some (slightly) newer ideas, on the other hand, include shifting taxis and limos to hybrids by 2015 (though you have to wonder why it would take that long) and investigating “a road pricing regime,” which we’re pretty sure is code for tolls.

At 17%, Toronto has a decent amount of tree canopy, but Doubling the Tree Canopy to 34% is still a neat idea that would pay real dividends. Remarkably, this section of the summary report uses 89 words to explain that this will be accomplished by planting more trees.

By the time we get to the Building Partnerships for Change section, things are starting to sound particularly fluffy. Build partnerships with business…invite stakeholders to participate…discuss forming research partnerships…you get the idea. Needs to be done, boring to read about.

Inspiring Action is the name of the plan’s public awareness strategy. The one idea here is to organize a charette to get Torontonians’ input on how to use the internets to spread the word.

Preparing for Climate Change deals with adaptation, which is where things necessarily get a bit more somber. In short, there is a certain level of climate change that we can no longer avoid, so even while we do everything we can to prevent things from getting even worse, we have to deal with the reality of what we’re already done. The city will plan for “response mechanisms [to] meet identified environmental changes, including health related impacts.”

All these ideas are well and good, but they’re pretty useless without Regular Monitoring and Reporting. The city will set benchmarks for progress and report on if they’re being met or not. (But who will report on the reporters?)

Filed under “lead by example” is the Greening City Operations strategy. Toronto will connect City Hall, Toronto Police Headquarters, and Union Station to the deep lake cooling system, phase out the use of incandescent heat light bulbs and improve on the existing Green Fleet Plan (which seeks to improve fuel efficiency in city vehicles).

Program Funding for all of this will add up to approximately $85 million, and be targeted towards a number of specific funds and projects.

Finally, Planning for a Sustainable Energy Future tackles community energy planning (as opposed to just renewable energy generation and individual building retrofits as mentioned above).

Ok, so there are a lot of words there. The big question, of course, is will these strategies and tactics accomplish the stated objectives? While we haven’t crunched the numbers, it seems clear that there are enough good ideas here, if properly executed, to meet and probably exceed the initial Kyoto target of 6% reductions by 2012. That’s a good start, and assuming we hold the feet of every single councilor who voted for this (i.e., all of them) to the fire to make sure it gets done, we can feel proud of this plan. In that case, our positive example—proof that emissions can be reduced in smart ways that don’t destroy the economy—will make it harder and harder for the federal government to ignore both the threat of the climate crisis and the great opportunity that its solutions present.

On the other hand, this is only the beginning. There will be many phases to go after “phase 1” is done. And just like any weight-loss program, the last pounds (er, tonnes) are the hardest to lose. We can’t buy into the marketing hype that tries to convince us that getting down to just 4.4 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in the next 43 years will be easy, especially since Toronto’s population is projected to grow dramatically in that time. But it is possible, and it is necessary.

The Globe And Mail Backs Me On Biofuels

climate crisis, energy, food

Well, I mean, they didn’t name me specifically. But just in case anyone thought my post earlier this week about the danger of biofuel from food crops needed some further support, the following story was on the front page of the Globe and Mail today:

Ethanol boom helps fuel global run-up in food prices

Food prices are heating up globally as soaring energy costs, wonky weather and an ethanol boom all combine to push grocery bills higher.

Canadian food prices are 3.1 per cent higher than a year ago, Statistics Canada said yesterday, well ahead of last year’s rate of 2.4 per cent. Higher prices for meat and dairy are the main culprits, but the pickup in prices spills into everything from bread and applies to ice cream, eggs, jam and juice.

The reasons vary with each product, but one factor behind higher prices may be an ethanol boom south of the border, with Canadian chicken and dairy farmers saying they’re seeing higher feed prices.

“Corn and wheat prices are putting upward pressure on food in general,” said Ron Morency, acting chief of Statscan’s consumer price division. “We see that right now in our meat prices.”

…”It’s not going to let up any time soon,” said Adrienne Warren, senior economist at Bank of Nova Scotia. “Short term, it might be weather-related. But longer term, it’s growing demand for food in emerging economies, with growing middle classes and purchasing power, and the global demand for ethanol and biodiesel.”

This month, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said higher demand for biofuels is causing “fundamental changes” to agricultural markets that could drive up prices.

They see “structural changes” under way that could well keep prices for many agricultural products higher over the coming decade.

“We haven’t seen anything on this scale before,” Martin von Lampe, an agricultural economist in Paris at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Bloomberg News.

Net food importing countries, as well as the urban poor, will likely be hardest hit, the OECD predicts.

Government’s Biofuel Policy Dangerous

climate crisis, conservative party, energy, food, green party, social justice

“My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come.” – George Monbiot

Just a few years ago, the biggest threat to our society’s survival was our willing blindness towards the crisis facing us. Now that we’re aware of that crisis, the biggest threat to our survival is our willingness to believe that there are easy answers; that we’re “on the right track;” that our political leaders are starting to “get it.” This is the threat of greenwash, intentional or otherwise, and it can’t be underestimated.

Last week, Canada’s New-ish-like GovernmentTM announced a $1.5 billion subsidy for biofuel production. You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a positive, “step in the right direction.” In reality, it’s extremely dangerous and wrongheaded. In short, while some biofuel policies make sense, biofuels from crops like the ones targeted by Stephen Harper’s plan (corn, wheat, soy) lead to increasingly higher market prices for those crops, setting up a competition between cars and people for who gets to be fed by the Earth. Further, they’re likely to exacerbate, not mitigate, the climate crisis. And it’s happening already.

The fundamental idea behind biofuel is simple, as is its fundamental flaw. Fossil fuels comprise concentrated energy stored up by organic material (plants and animals) exposed to intense heat and pressure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Since our dependence on fossil fuel energy is now becoming problematic and unrealistic for at least two major reasons (climate change and peak oil), the thinking behind biofuel is that we should just cut out the middle man and convert organic matter into hydrocarbons ourselves. It should be obvious, however, that we can never hope to produce biofuel rapidly enough to match our consumption of fossil fuels, since they took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate and we’ve already used up about half of that supply in just the past century.

What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that more than simply inadequate, this strategy is actually destructive. The $1.5 billion proposed by the Conservatives is an attempt to meet their own requirement for 5% ethanol content in gasoline by 2010. Europe has a similar target of 5.75% of transport power by 2010 and 10% by 2020. The United States is looking to use 35 billion gallons of biofuel a year. Problem is, according to the International Herald Tribute these targets “far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70 percent of its farmland with fuel crops. The entire corn and soy harvest of the United States would need to be processed as ethanol and biodiesel.” Of course, no American president or European leader is going to allow that to happen. Therefore, if these targets were actually met, they would likely have to be met by destroying the food systems of the South. The poor would go hungry while the wealthy pumped diverted human food into their SUVs.

Think this sounds implausible? It’s happening now:

CBC News, May 22 2007 – The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, and Canada is not immune, say industry experts.

Food prices rose 10 per cent in 2006, “driven mainly by surging prices of corn, wheat and soybean oil in the second part of the year,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report.

“Looking ahead, rising demand for biofuels will likely cause the prices of corn and soybean oil to rise further,” the authors wrote in the report released last month.

What’s more, the degree to which biofuels can contribute to solving the climate crisis has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the wrong kind of biofuel policy could even make the climate crisis worse. According to the BBC, a recent United Nations report found that “demand for biofuels has accelerated the clearing of primary forest for palm plantations, particularly in southeast Asia. This destruction of ecosystems which remove carbon from the atmosphere can lead to a net increase in emissions.”

Even once the initial conversion of wilderness to farmland is complete, biofuels grown by current agribusiness methods require large inputs of fossil fuel energy, which defeats the purpose. As a result, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is very weak. According to a U.S. government report, the EROEI for ethanol grown from corn is 1.34. In other words, it takes approximately three barrels of ethanol to produce four. And that’s the optimistic outlook. A study out of Cornell University found that the production of biofuels actually results in a net energy loss.

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:

  • corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
  • wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

  • soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
  • sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Normally, you would expect the market to sort at least some of that out, since biofuels that actually lose energy would not be economically viable, right? Unless of course, the government subsidizes them to keep the price artificially low. (Oh wait…crap.)

Despite all this, I tend to think that most people pushing for biofuels are well-intentioned. George Monbiot, on the other hand, begins a column published recently in the Guardian titled A Lethal Solution by saying:

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

He goes on to point out that “a report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that…biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES [caps his] as much climate change as ordinary diesel.”

Now here’s where this gets really hard to follow: not all biofuels are bad. The same UN report cited above also concluded that “using biomass for combined heat and power (CHP), rather than for transport fuels or other uses, is the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade – and also one of the cheapest.” The Green Party of Canada also supports investments in cellulosic ethanol, since it doesn’t set up the same competition between people and cars for food (a competition which, as Monbiot points out, “people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation”). A good shorthand then, perhaps, is that we shouldn’t be making car-food out of people-food, and that we should focus our biomass efforts on CHP instead of as replacements for transport fuels like gasoline and diesel.

It may seem like asking a lot for us laypeople to be able to tell the difference. Even so, in a democracy it’s our responsibility to figure it out. We can’t get the right solutions out of government unless we know which governments (in waiting) are offering them up.

Elizabeth’s Writing

climate crisis, green party

Elizabeth May has written two things recently that might interest you, and that you probably wouldn’t stumble upon otherwise.

First, her article in the May issue of Policy Options Magazine titled The Saga of Bill C-30: From Clean Air to Climate Change, Or Not is a very interesting explanation of how our laws get made, or, well, not. “It is a saga,” writes Elizabeth, “a story of love and betrayal; of heroics and scandal; of a fight to the death for the future of the planet. It is at least the story of an overwrought and oversold piece of legislation called Bill C-30, The Clean Air Act.”

Second, in all of Sun Media’s papers today (Toronto Sun, Calgary Sun, London Free Press, etc.) Elizabeth squares-off on carbon taxes in a piece called Carbon conundrum. Her case is very compelling and well-argued.

Economists and experts agree that a carbon tax is the single most effective way to deliver a consistent signal to the economy. Among those who support a carbon tax are Don Drummond, chief economist at TD Bank, who explained, “Pollution must have a price tag. Currently it is too cheap to pollute, and too expensive not to.”

Her opponent, Tom Harris, spends his time denying the severity (or existence?) of climate change while making all sorts of claims he never backs up. Site commenters fail to distinguish between the Green Party, the government of Canada, and “think tanks,” while succeeding in missing the point entirely. Good for a laugh, bad for blood pressure.

Hopefully that will tide you over while you wait for her next (and sixth) book, Global Warming For Dummies, due out later this year or early next. Yes, seriously.