Category Archives: Climate change

Opinions on Climate Change

A stealth Enemy: Air Quality

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Pollution

 

In early 2020 the world changed–we experienced Covid-19. This was something new an international pandemic that hit home to everyone except the most obtuse virus deniers, religious fanatics, anti-science cranks, and conservatives and their fellow travelers.

Covid-19 was big. It changed the world. In many respects the world changed including massive economic slow-downs or even lockdowns. For more than a year we were required to wear masks in most social settings. Many of us were not able to work. An international Marshall plan was established to work on vaccines. Millions of people died while millions of people denied the reality of their illness or the efficacy of the vaccines created to stem the tide. Yes, the world was different.

In the midst of this pandemic and the international response it was difficult to see anything else. As a result, we missed some pretty important things. For example, few paid attention to air quality. That was a mistake.

Rebecca Solnit was the first to draw my attention to this disturbing fact. As she reported in The Guardian,

“While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.”

  

I was shocked to read that. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

After all at the time she wrote, 2.8 million people had died as a result of Covid-19 and it captured our entire attention. Whether we believed it or not, clearly covid-19 was the issue. Since then of course, millions more have died, and we are nowhere need done with this pandemic.

What most of us did not know is that during the first 15 months of the pandemic that Solnit was writing about “3 times as many people died from air pollution.”

While Covid ravaged across the world, air pollution killed about three times as many people. We must fight the climate crisis with the same urgency with which we confronted coronavirus.

 

According to a recent scientific study, 8.7 million people per year die of the effects of air pollution. And part of the problem is that most of us are unaware of this disturbing fact. Air pollution is a largely invisible enemy unless you visit some place like Phoenix Arizona as I did for nearly 10 years in a row. You can see it there. Air pollution usually arrives by stealth. As a result, unlike Covid-19 the world has not rallied to defeat it. There have been no lockdowns or mask requirements because of air pollution. Largely this stealth attack has gone unnoticed and unquestioned.  We have normalized the havoc by treating it as what Solnit called “moral background noise.” Instead Covid-19 gets all the attention. Solnit says we should treat air pollution like an emergency, like we have done with Covid-19. She does not say attention to Covid-19 was misplaced.

The first thing we must realize is that there is more than one serious consequence to burning fossil fuels.  We must also recognize that  climate change is not the only serious effect of our determination to burn fossil fuels. Climate change is a serious problem, perhaps the most serious in the world right now, notwithstanding Covid-19, but so is air quality.  The problem is that burning fossils fuels is to deep a part of the status quo that we don’t really see it. We are blind to it and have come to believe there is no reasonable alternative.

As Solnit said,

“We are designed to respond with alarm to something that just happened, that breaches norms, but not to things that have been going on for decades or centuries. The first task of most human rights and environmental movements is to make the invisible visible and to make what has long been accepted unacceptable. This has of course been done to some extent, with coal-burning power plants and with fracking in some places, but not with the overall causes of climate chaos.”

 

We cannot let this stealth bomber slip under the radar.  Climate change creates similar problems as until we experience dramatic effects as when wild fires consume British Columbia and California forests, or ice bergs break off continents, birds disappear, or in my case, beautiful flowers come earlier in spring, we often fail to take note of the serious changes. It is also difficult to notice when some of the richest and most predatory corporations in the world pay huge sums of money to pundits for hire to confuse the science and persuade these problems are not real.

We must be alert to these problems and the consequences they foist on us. We must dissent from the normal. We must resist the fake reality that predatory capitalist firms try to impose upon us.  As Solnit said,

“According to CNBC, at the outset of the pandemic, “New Delhi recorded a 60% fall of PM2.5 from 2019 levels, Seoul registered a 54% drop, while the fall in China’s Wuhan came in at 44%.” Returning to normal means drowning out the birds and blurring out the mountains and accepting 8.7 million air pollution deaths a year. Those deaths have been normalized; they need to be denormalized.”

Solnit also reminded us that,

 

“A lot of attention was paid to whatever actions might have caused Covid-19 to cross from animals to humans, but the actions that take fossil fuel out of the ground to produce that pollution that kills 8.7 million annually, along with acidifying oceans and climate chaos, should be considered far more outrageous a transgression against public health and safety.”

 

One of the excuses these corporations have tried to get us to believe is that we can’t afford to change. One thing Covid-19 has showed us is that we can afford to spend the money that it takes to fight off disaster. Hugely impactful changes require huge responses. We can do it. We must. We must not tolerate a “normal” that costs the lives of 8.7 million people every year (in addition to all the other horrific effects of fossil fuel consumption.

Rebecca Solnit left us with some hope in her important essay:

“My hope for a post-pandemic world is that the old excuses for doing nothing about climate – that it is impossible to change the status quo and too expensive to do so – have been stripped away. In response to the pandemic, we in the US have spent trillions of dollars and changed how we live and work. We need the will to do the same for the climate crisis… With a drawdown on carbon emissions and a move toward cleaner power, we could have a world with more birdsong and views of mountains and fewer pollution deaths. But first we have to recognize both the problem and the possibilities.”

 

We need to get serious about climate change and air pollution and stop ignoring the problem or paying lip service to them as we have been doing in Canada. It is time for change. It is time to realize that this is not a future problem—this is happening now. This is apocalypse now.

Welcome to the apocalypse: Doom is Here

Climate change, Environment, Environmental Apocalypse

 

For a number of years now we have been hearing, seeing, and reading predictions of doom. There have been so many such predictions that many people have stopped listening, watching, or examining such claims. People have doom fatigue.

I know a good friend of mine who said to me, quite a few years, “We are fucked.”  Sorry for the bad word. He used it so I feel I must tell you the truth. Frankly, I always thought he was exaggerating. Now I know he was telling the truth.

In fact, now I would go one big step farther than that. Doom is here. It is not something my grandchildren will have to worry about. I will have to worry about it. and I am an old man who will die soon as I was once told.

That has never been clearer than it is in this year 2021. The apocalypse is here.  What convinced me of that was the incredible weather this year. In particular, the off the charts heat wave in British Columbia convinced me of that. British Columbia is of course the last place we expect heat waves. British Columbia is famous for mild weather. Mild winters and mild summers. Perfect climate in other words. Well not this year. In fact, not in the last few years.

It is for that that reason that Sir David King the former U.K chief scientific advisor said, “Nowhere is safe…who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49C in British Columbia?”  The answer is obvious–no one would have predicted that.

In fact, I heard a climate scientist say that those temperatures did not appear on any of the climate models, not even the most extreme. It was not only unexpected, it was basically incomprehensible.

Welcome to apocalypse now. You don’t need to wait for it; it’s here. We are doomed. I want to explore this topic in future posts.

 

Restaurants or Kids

Capitalism, Climate change, Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Scott Galloway said,

“We seem to be obsessed with keeping restaurants open. You know what’s probably the biggest long-term scarring here, outside of the health issues is we’re losing a generation of kids. Pre-pandemic lower income kids largely tracked with higher and middle-income kids with school on math. Since the pandemic hit, they have fallen off the map. Regardless of the moral corruption there, we’re going to lose half our scientists, half our military leaders, half our civic leaders, and half our social leaders when 50% of kids don’t have the skills to enter college. So, we’re losing an entire generation of leaders and scientists because we have decided it’s more important to keep businesses open than keep our schools open. So, if it comes down one theme it’s to protect people not jobs and also capitalism doesn’t work, it’s not an organic state, unless it rests on a groundswell, a tide pool of empathy.”

I want restaurants open as much as anyone. But, I think Galloway is absolutely right. Capitalism needs to be rescued from the capitalists. Again. Just as it was in the 1930s when Roosevelt realized that and saved it.

I would just add that we that we are facing another crisis that has been shoved aside during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that is the environmental crisis. As we ignore it, we keeping digging ourselves deeper into a hole from which it will get increasingly difficult to dig our way out. We have been passing the buck for decades now. We keeping making it more and more expensive to solve that problem. But that problem is not going away. I know things have been made much more difficult and much more expensive by the people of wealth who have been spending fortunes to keep the rest of us in the dark and submissive. They have done that with remarkable success. They have bought political leaders and scared the rest. So, nothing has been done.

We need a new green deal together (or some smarter version of it) with a smart response to the Covid-19 pandemic and we have to do that at the same time. This is going to cost a lot of money, but ignoring it some more will once more just make it more costly later. Like it or not, we have to do it.  I don’t know if the Green New Deal is the right one. But at least those who proposed it did not ignore the problem like everyone else. If a better plan is possible, by all means, let’s go for that. Sadly, we now have at least 2 crises to deal with at the same time. It sucks to be us. But it could suck even more if we choose to do nothing.

Should we tackle  2 problems at once. Or ignore 2 problems at once?

 

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Who cares about the next Generation?

Climate change, Environment, Pollution

 

I heard David Schindler speaking on National Public Radio in April 2017 on our way home from Arizona.  I have also heard him speak a couple of times in person. He is one of Canada’s most respected scientists. He is an expert on water and the harm we do to it.  Schindler warned that the damage to the environment that we hav caused would have profound effects on people 50 to 100 years from now. But it seems we are incapable of looking ahead that far. No one cares. That short-sightedness is extremely unfair to future generations. Don’t we have obligations to them too? Instead of worrying about them we continue to spew out pollutants into the atmosphere, the ground, and the waters we use. That damage might become  irreversible.

The classic example of this, according to Schindler, is the Alberta Tar Sands that he had studied for the last decade or so of his scientific career. The pollution in those Tar Sands are a ticking time bombing, he said. We are leaving it behind. We  will have a lot to answer for.

Another long-term problem we are creating for future generations is climate change. Scientists are 90% (or more) certain that our actions are causing irreparable harm to our climate. We can’t afford to wait until they are 100% certain.

Many people—like the editorial writers in the Wyoming newspaper I read early that morning  driving home from Arizona concentrate instead on short-term economic losses of pollution or climate change mitigation.  I don’t want to entirely discount those consequences. They will hurt some people. But these writers fail entirely to take into consideration the immense longer-term damage. The costs of mitigating climate change will dwarf the cost of the damage to our economy, but others (like our grand children for example) will pay them in the future. That makes it easy to ignore those costs now. It will be someone else’s problem. Our actions are extremely selfish, unwise and unfair. The editorial writers consider the cost of current job losses, extra taxes, and things like that. These are nearly insignificant in comparison to the costs of the harm of doing business as usual. We cannot afford to ignore the cost to the planet.

The editorial writers appeal to the same people Republicans and Conservatives appeal. Or my Member of Parliament. He only cares about the economic cost to his current electors. The next generation is not his problem. All these leaders are concerned about is what costs will they have to pay. The next generation can be dammed. That attitude could lead to disaster. In fact, it looks like it is leading to disaster.

The Best Argument to do Something About Climate Change: Your grandchildren. 

Climate change

Here is an amazing fact, related by Mia Rabson, that should give us some pause:

“A baby born in Canada today will never know a time in which their health isn’t at risk from a warming planet, an annual look at climate change and human health reported…The Lancet medical journal’s 2019 countdown on health and climate change has dire warnings about the kind of world we might be leaving to future generations.”

When I actually think about that I think about my 4 grandchildren.  For the rest of their entire lives they will never experience a day in which their health is not at risk from a warming planet. This is what I, with a little help from my friends, am leaving them. What will they think of me? I don’t want to think about that. It makes me too uncomfortable.

That Lancet Report also said this:

“The Life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change.  Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives.’

We have to remember that the Lancet is not some radical environmental rag; it is an internationally respected medical/scientific journal. This is very bold language for such a magazine.

Some of the ill health effects the report warns against include malnutrition, especially in the poorer and hotter countries. Why do poorer countries always get hit first and hardest? In Canada the worst health effects will be on things like air pollution, heat-related illnesses, and exposure to toxic smoke from forest fires. These are expected to impact children’s health for the long-term. Don’t we care about this? Or is it all about the economy?  And not just the economy, because it is clear that in the long term the effects on the economy will also be horrific, but do we care only about the short-term impact on the economy?  What will our grand children think about the economic ruin we leave behind for them to deal with only because we don’t want to interfere with our God-given right to make money no matter what the cost?

Of course there are other unpleasant health effects we are bequeathing to the next generation. Things like more widespread spreading of diseases as well as the inevitable result of political strife that will surely follow.

As Rabson reported,

“Hotter climates are also conducive for the transmission of disease. Nine out of the ten most suitable years for the transmission of dengue fever have occurred since 2000. The number of suitable days for the spread of the pathogen that causes diarrhea has doubled since 1980. In Canada, Lyme-infested ticks are marching their way north.”

Don’t we love our grandchildren? Isn’t that what they will ask?

Talk About wasting money

Climate change

 

Our governments have given hundreds of billions to the fossil fuel industry in subsidies. If we used that money to fight climate change, instead of using it to make things worse, we would have a substantial down payment on the funds required.

Subsidies include a myriad of payments, indirect and direct, made by governments to oil, gas, and coal companies. They include tax credits, and government underwriting of corporate risk. The OECD has identified a surprising 250 mechanisms currently in place to support and subsidize the oil, gas, and coal industries.

At the same time, renewable energies get much less. They are not allowed to compete on a level playing field.  So we have to get serious about tackling these issues. We can’t wait for better times. As Damian an Carrington from the Guardian said,

“If you thought that tackling the red-hot issue of cleaning up energy now was tantamount to burning money, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Without urgent and transformative action, today’s conflagrations will seem like stray sparks compared to the wildfires to come.”

As Fatih Birol has pointed out,

“One of the most surprising and alarming issues in the climate change arena is the fact that fossil fuels causing global warming continue to receive substantial government support, making them artificially cheap and encouraging more of them to be consumed. It’s a form of madness. What’s particularly baffling is that while government support given to environmentally beneficial renewable power is subject to seemingly endless media and political scrutiny, the 500% larger subsidies given to oil, gas, and (to a much larger extent) coal rarely get much attention…So what would happen if all these subsidies were phased out?  According to the IEA’s models, we’d see a massive reduction in global fossil fuel.”

This in turn would lead to a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  Isn’t that exactly what we are trying to accomplish?  Yet isn’t that exactly what our government keeps telling us we can’t afford?  Perhaps we could afford to do what so desperately needs to be done if we stopped giving away so much cash to so many enormously profitable multi-national oil and gas corporations. The IEA has estimated that with cuts to oil and gas subsidies we would have sufficient funds to provide about half the funds required to hold global warming to 2°C.

Think how powerful the oil and gas companies are to secure such lavish subsidies when the governments cut “fat” (as they called it) everywhere. So when energy prices at the time hit a record high, in 2008 government subsidies of more than half a trillion dollars were paid to some of the richest companies in the history of the planet! That money was equivalent to the combined gross domestic product of Sweden and Saudi Arabia!

I admit that it would be very expensive to pay for the various solutions to climate change. Yet half the necessary funds could be obtained by doing what we should be doing anyway!

Yet it will be  difficult to persuade our political leaders that they should do what needs to be done to eliminate these harmful subsidies. After all the richest companies in the world won’t go down without a fight. They will spend lavishly to protect their interests and  obtain the influence to get what they want and resist actions they find unpalatable. It is a fact that environmental groups are pipsqueak opponents of the energy sector. As Birol said,

“I don’t know of any global data about the relative size of fossil and renewable lobbies, but where figures are available, the hydrocarbon brigade massively outspends those pushing for clean energy—by a factor of 12 in the U.S. according to one estimate.”

Even Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard and energy advisor to Mitt Romney who was one of the Republican Presidential candidates all of whom refused to even consider any tax hikes under any circumstances, has admitted that the current pricing of fossil fuels does not make economic sense. According to him, the price of gas should be higher, as “Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” So the rest of us are paying for expenses that the oil companies should be paying, to the tune of $2 for every gallon they sell. If that is not insane, what is?

Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels, we should be taxing them more so that their price more accurately reflects the “real cost” to all of us. That is why more and more of us are advocating a carbon tax.

When Stephen Harper was running against Stephane Dion he unfairly, but successfully,  characterized the carbon tax as “a tax grab.” In fact, in Dion’s case it was clearly revenue neutral. He wanted to “shift” tax to bad things from good things. The total tax would not have changed. Yet that was considered too radical for Canada. Now some—not many granted—Americans are advocating the same thing.

Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favourite writers for the New Yorker,  got it right when she said,

“What the country needs—and has always needed—is an energy policy that, instead of pandering to American’s sense of entitlement, would compel us to finally change our ways. In addition to a phased-in increase in the gas tax, it would include a comprehensive, economy wide tax on carbon, or alternatively a cap-and-trade- system.”

No matter how much we want to find a different solution, we just have to raise the price of carbon so high that we will find alternatives and fund research for new alternatives. Until we do that, we will find no solutions to our declining fossil fuels nor to the ever rising global warming. We can pay now, or we can pay later.  And paying later will be much more painful than paying now.

Subsidizing Pollution

Climate change, Environment

 

Did you notice how the federal government in Canada characterized their carbon tax as a tax on pollution when it introduced the tax. I thought that was smart actually. After all it was true.

Then did you notice how last year (2018) the government quietly, without much fanfare, delivered a $1.6 billion bailout to oil firms in Canada! Some people keep telling me how Indigenous people are always standing with their hands out waiting for money from the government. Well, if that’s true they are not the only ones. You could buy a lot of water treatment plants on Canada’s Indian Reserves for that amount of money.

Here is how Mia Rabson reported on this in the Winnipeg Free Press reported quietly on it in the business pages of the paper:

“Canada’s $1.6 billion bailout package for Alberta’s battered oil industry is well underway, but with little transparency about who is getting the money and for what.

Almost $1billion of the package of loans, guarantees and government grants is in the hands of companies, but details are available for a small fraction of the spending.’

So just as Canada has been falling behind its international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as international agencies recently announced, we are paying the oil and gas industry $1.6 billion to pollute more! Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? Paying to pollute.

A subsidy is a financial benefit that the government gives, to businesses or industries or even consumers. Oil and gas subsidies support oil and gas production (and even coal production). Subsidies can be paid directly in cash or indirectly in tax breaks. Either way its 6 of one or half a dozen of the other. Either way the tax-paying public pays. The fossil fuel companies take. You could call it socialism for the rich.

It is not well known that Canada already subsidizes its oil and gas industry by about $3.3 billion. Canada is the largest subsidizer of financial support to its oil and gas industry in the G7 per unit of GDP.  Countries around the world have criticize us for it too. That money could instead be used to pay for 44,000 hospital beds, or put 260,000 high school students through high school or pay for a lot of transition to cleaner energy. So instead of using that money to pay things like that, we pay industries to pollute and we do it at the cost of our international reputation.

Such subsidies also help to lock in our dependence on fossil fuel in the country and continue to supporter the competitor to clean energy provides by making oil and gas seem cheaper.

European countries are already protesting Canada’s position. As Rabson reported,

“Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, said Wednesday it had sold its Alberta-government issued bonds because it will no longer invest in assets held by governments or companies with large climate footprints.

A day later, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the non-profit lending institution of the European Union, announced it will no longer invest in any fossil fuel projects after 2021.”

I know that the Canadian oil and gas sector is already hard hit by the withdrawal of $30 billion in capital in the last 3 years and it is still an important industry in Canada, but isn’t it time that we stop paying people to pollute? Can’t we find better ways to invest our money?

The Madness of Subsidizing Oil and Gas

Climate change, Environment

 

The Oil and Gas sector is heavily subsidized in both Canada and the United States. It has been for years. But many people don’t know how much. This is the case even though their profits are enormous.

I started paying attention to this issue during the Obama administration. At that time, Exxon was the world’s biggest oil company and perhaps the world’s biggest company, and also had the world’s largest profits ever in one year. President Obama, pointed out at the time that Exxon earned $4.7 million profit every hour! He said that the 3 largest oil companies made combined profits in 2011 of $80 billion or $200 million every day.

What was even more astounding was that such large companies, with such huge profits, were subsidized by taxpayers. They were on the public dole! That meant average taxpayers contributed extra subsidies to those  corporate giants. Many of those subsidies were paid through tax breaks. These were tax breaks that ordinary citizens and ordinary small businesses did  not enjoy. According to President Obama, those subsidies amounted to 4 billion annually in the United States. A staggering amount considering who the recipients were, namely huge and already profitable corporations.

In 2012 US President Obama tried to eliminate those subsidies. Shockingly, to me at least, the Senate Republicans blocked the measures to eliminate those tax breaks.  President Obama in arguing for the bill made a simple comment that is hard to deny. “With record profits and rising production, I’m not worried about the big oil companies,” Obama said,  “… I think it’s time they got by without more help from taxpayers, who are having a tough enough time paying their bills and filling up their tanks.”  Yet such simple logic was beyond the ken and understanding of conservative politicians.

When oil companies argue against reducing the subsidies that they have come to cherish their “best” argument is that these subsidies are less than that enjoyed by other huge corporations.  Wow. Some get even more!  This is nuts!

What is really strange—hallucinogenically strange—is that those subsidies continued right through the recession when both the American and Canadian governments claimed to be so lacking in money, they had to make all kinds of cuts. Meanwhile these subsidies seriously exacerbated the most serious environmental problem of our time—climate change. Ordinary people were paying to make things worse!

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 we have been in and out of recession. Some  think we never really got out of it. A lack of cash made it difficult to consider expensive projects.  Projects like doing something about climate change. Yet we can afford even less to do nothing. Inaction is much more expensive than action.

Carbon emissions have continued to rise during the recession,  though admittedly not as high as they would have risen had economic conditions been better. As Damian Carrington said on his environmental blog,

“The house is ablaze and we are throwing bucket after bucket at it—buckets of petrol. Worse if that is possible, the world’s politicians are not stepping in to stop us stoking the flames: instead they are helping us to pay for the petrol.”

In other words carbon emissions have risen during tough economic times because governments have dragged their feet on the necessary actions and then have made matters worse—much worse—by subsidizing fossil fuels the primary culprit behind climate change. These are truly weird times.

Despite clear warnings from the scientific community for a number of years, our political leaders have done nothing to halt the emission of greenhouse gases so those emissions have been rising by record amounts. This is beginning to look more and more like the people of Easter Island who kept cutting their trees down on their island until they were all gone. I always wondered who was the person on Easter Island who cut down the last tree and how did he think that made sense?  Sometimes we are just plain stupid. And as I have said often about myself, making it a fundamental principle of mine, ‘life is hard when you’re stupid.’

Scientists have for a long time pointed out that any average temperature rise beyond 2° C would not be safe.  “Safe” perhaps is not the best word.  Average temperature rises of 2° C would be serious.  Some say disastrous. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted a temperature rise of 3.5 °C based on current policies. Some agencies have predicted even greater rises. That means we will soon enter a world of mass migrations and severe water shortages. In such a world, England would have the temperature of Morocco today. Manitoba would be about like Kansas.

Another possibility though is that average temperatures will rise even more to 6 °C.  According to Carrington, “That’s Armageddon: large parts of the planet uninhabitable and the risk of runaway warming threatening the rest.”

I am not minimizing what all of us individuals have to do. We too have to get serious about climate change. We have to change the way we live. But the role of governments is also of critical importance. The current inaction by our political leaders is a disgrace.

The IEA has said the role of government is “critical.”  Yet governments like our own stand still. During the Harper regime in Canada he said, he would not inflict the costs of action on our country.  Yet according to the IEA “delaying action is a false economy.” According to the IEA if we save $1 now by doing nothing we will pay $4.30 later to make up for it.”  That certainly would be a misleading “saving.”