Debunking more Myths and Fables about the Energy East Pipeline

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Blair

Well my last post summarizing why I support the Energy East pipeline has been out for only a couple days and the response has been quite positive. I can usually tell when a post is doing well: when my social media feed fills up with activists on all sides discussing what I have written. When I first tackled the Energy East Pipeline in March 2015 (The Energy East Pipeline: Dispelling Some Myths) and April 2015 (Where the new Pembina Report misses the mark on Energy East) I thought I had shot down most of the obvious myths about the pipeline. My later post (The Machiavellian battle against climate change using Energy East) dealt mostly with the political games being played with the project. Well Denis Coderre and his crew managed to turn up the volume to 11 and the result has been a brand new batch of myths and fables about the project to be debunked. I swear Aesop and the Brothers Grimm have nothing compared to the activists fighting this project.

To be clear, like any large infrastructure project the Energy East proposal is not perfect and will need to be modified as new scientific information comes to light. That being said the vast majority of the criticisms against it, to my view, are unsupported and unsupportable. That being said, let’s go about addressing the latest batch of misinformation and unadulterated ignorance flowing through the information and social media channels on the subject. Since I have only so much time each night (I write these at night and try to do a last edit during my lunch break as this is my hobby and not my job) I will only address the four most egregious myths in this post.

Myth 1: The refineries in Montreal and Levis don’t need Energy East because they are “full”

Now the most foolish of the fables presented to me this week has to be the “refineries are full” trope. This is the one featured in a video by our friends Environmental Defence that has been making the rounds. The video claims that Energy East is solely an export pipeline because the refineries along its route are “full”. Now let’s think about this for a moment. A refinery is an industrial facility that takes an input (oil), processes the input and produces an output. Certainly a refinery will have storage tanks but those tanks need to be constantly re-filled. A reasonable analogy to highlight the ridiculousness of the Environmental Defence argument would be my own minivan. Suppose I go to the gas station and fill my minivan with gas. My gas tank is “full”. Now if I drive my kids to their sports and activities for a week, the gas tank doesn’t remain miraculously full, it empties. It will need to be re-filled at some time in the future. Currently the Quebec refineries along the Energy East pipeline are being supplied with oil from such sunny, pleasant places as Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. One feature of the Energy East pipeline proposal is that it provides an opportunity to replace that foreign oil with Canadian oil. In doing so we can pump money back into the Canadian economy rather than siphoning it away to pay for Saudi fighter jets and bombs. So no, the refineries are not “full”, they are currently being supplied by other suppliers. These suppliers can just as easily be replaced by Canadian oil once Energy East has been completed.

Myth 2: Energy East does not supply the refineries

One of the most pernicious myths I have had repeated to me day after day has been the claim that was first sent my way by a gent named Jonathan Glover on Twitter. Mr. Glover insisted:

@BlairKing_ca @TransCanada’s records and #NEB indicate this will be primarily exported…care to show where it says otherwise?

Now I am not sure what the deal is but there seems to be a large contingent of activists who keep claiming in-depth knowledge of the National Energy Board (NEB) Energy East filing but are simultaneously clueless about what is actually written in those submissions. The entire file can be viewed at the NEB web site with the actual TransCanada submissions being presented here.

The biggest claim by these activists is that the Energy East pipeline does not include facilities to supply the major Quebec refineries. My response to this is “poppycock”. Volume 1 of the Energy East proposal clearly includes details of the Levis and Montreal laterals. Laterals are pipeline segments that come off the main pipeline for particular suppliers/users. As described in the submission:

  • Montréal Lateral, comprised of approximately 17 km of 1067 mm (NPS 42) pipe from the Québec Segment to a stand-alone delivery meter station at an existing refinery on the Island of Montréal, QC (Montréal delivery meter station)
  • Lévis Lateral, comprised of approximately 10 km of 1067 mm (NPS 42) pipe from the Québec Segment to a stand-alone delivery meter station at an existing refinery approximately 10 km west of Lévis, QC (Lévis delivery meter station)

So when an “expert” assures you that the pipeline does not actually supply the Quebec refineries the quick answer is, as I said before: “poppycock” it is all right there in the filing the project is intended to supply the refineries and includes the infrastructure necessary to do so.

Myth 3: The pipeline represents and unacceptable risk to Montreal’s water supply

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, in his announcement about his opposition to Energy East and his subsequent article in the Montreal Gazette, emphasized the risks that the Energy East pipeline will pose to rivers and water supplies. The funny thing about this is that he apparently is living in an imaginary world where the Montreal refineries are not currently getting oil somehow. To be clear Montreal is currently home to three large refineries with a combined capacity of 386,000 barrels per day (bpd). These refineries receive oil on a regular basis via an existing pipeline: the 74 year old Portland-Montreal pipeline (PMPL) as well as by rail. So when Mr. Coderre acts all anxious about pipelines consider that his city’s refineries are currently being supplied by a 74 year old pipeline from the US and by rail cars that are at risk to explosions or do I have to remind him about  Gogamas, Galenas and Lac Megantic. We all know, by now, that rail has been found to be over 4.5 times more likely to experience an occurrence than pipelines. Looking at this from a safety and security lens you would expect that the city would want to reduce the number of railcars full of oil running through its suburbs. As for pipelines, I think a modern state-of-the-art pipeline might be a bit safer than the 74 year old pipelines that currently supplies Montreal with its crude.

Myth 4: Alberta and Saskatchewan oil is wrong type for Quebec refineries

The final myth I will puncture today has to do with the nature of the material that will be running through Energy East.  Nothing truly expresses the “arrogance of ignorance” of the anti-Energy East activist like this highly entertaining article in the Huffington Post: Energy East Has No Place In The 21st Century by Gerard Monpetit. There is something about the smarmy self-confidence of activists that really gets my goat and this article represents the worst of its kind. It displays utter ignorance about other parts of the country that initially left me speechless. The comparison of Montreal’s sewage dump to the situation in Victoria BC shows an utter lack of understanding that is truly challenging to believe. However for the purpose of this discussion it is his complete misunderstanding of the nature of the oil industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan that really shows. The problem with many of these activists is that they have not bothered to inform themselves about Canada’s oil industry and trust that what their activist leaders tell them is the whole truth.

Certainly oil sands make up over half of Alberta’s oil output, but non-upgraded bitumen does not. Non-upgraded bitumen remains a small proportion of Alberta’s oil exports. Moreover, non-upgraded bitumen makes up only a small percentage of Saskatchewan’s oil output. Outsiders might ask themselves why Brad Wall, the premier of Saskatchewan has got involved in this battle? The answer is because Saskatchewan has a pretty enormous horse in this race. Saskatchewan produces over 500,000 bpd of oil and much of it is the light API fuel being sought by the Montreal refineries.

Virtually everyone has heard of the Bakken Oil fields in the US, but very few Canadians appear to be aware of how much of that Bakken Formation is in Canada.  As this map shows Saskatchewan is sitting on a jackpot of light, sweet crude which explain why the Energy East pipeline includes the Cromer Lateral which will allow Saskatchewan to export this light crude directly to the people who are equipped to handle it, the Montreal refineries. So no the Energy East pipeline will not be used solely for bitumen. As described in the filings, it will supply bitumen and other crudes including replacing the American Bakken crude currently supplied via rail with Canadian Bakken crude supplied by a much safer pipepline.

One additional note, while Mr. Monpetit seems unaware of the fact, the Suncor refinery in Montreal is actively planning to add a coker to its Montreal facility. This would allow it to use bitumen in its supply chain if it wished to do so.

Looking at the information above, the voices of the activists that have flooded my social media feed remind me of that classic line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

 “It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

There are legitimate concerns that can be expressed about the Energy East proposal but the mass of detritus that keeps filling the airwaves and stopping up my social media fed consists primarily of sound and fury that once looked at carefully can be shown to signify nothing.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Energy East, Oil Sands, Pipelines, Uncategorized | 14 Comments

A Chemist in Langley’s take on Energy East

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Blair

I have written a lot about pipelines at this blog and last night while watching Denis Coderre attempt to hijack the Energy East pipeline discussion I said to myself: enough is enough I want to write a blog post to express how I feel about the subject. For people new to my blog a quick background, I am a pragmatic environmentalist, a Professional Chemist and a Professional Biologist and have spent my career cleaning up the messes made by our industrial society including those from oil and gas spills. This blog is chock full of articles on oil, pipelines and renewable energy alternatives. I do not deny climate change and recognize the need to meet our Paris Agreement commitments. I also love my country and its ecological heritage and work hard to protect both.

That being said let’s start with the basis of this discussion: the Energy East pipeline proposal (Energy East). For those of you not familiar with the project, Energy East is a 4,600-kilometre pipeline designed to carry 1.1-million barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada. Its entire length remains within Canadian boundaries (does not cross the US border) and would thus not be affected by US political concerns. Backers of Energy East point out that Quebec and New Brunswick currently import more than 700,000 barrels of oil every day (b/d) – or 86 percent of their refinery needs – from countries such as Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. For a full breakdown of the countries of origin of Canadian oil imports see Table 7.2a of the CAPP Stats Handbook. As indicated in the Handbook, the direction is swinging towards the U.S. but it still represents imports and that U.S. oil will be imported by rail (more on that later). While the supporters of the pipeline are predicting over 700,000 b/d, CAPP reports that refineries in Québec and Atlantic Canada currently import 90 per cent of their requirements. This translates to a potential 640,000 b/d domestic market opportunity for Canadian suppliers.

So why is this important? Well, we live in a society that like it or not, is dependent on oil and the products of oil (petroleum hydrocarbons). Our food is produced on farms that need heavy equipment to operate. That food is shipped around the world by airplane, boat and rail all of which rely on petroleum hydrocarbons to operate. Petroleum hydrocarbons aren’t just refined into fuel to run our vehicles, they also serve as the feedstock of the petrochemical industry. Petrochemicals form the basis of all the things that make our modern world work. They are the building blocks of our plastics, our computers, the tools we need to keep us healthy and the drugs we take when we are sick.

As I have written numerous times at this blog, I see a need to wean our nation off fossil fuels as an energy source. At some point if we are to avoid the serious consequences of climate change we will need eliminate fossil fuels from our energy mix (the sooner the better). However, contrary to what many say, the process of doing so will take not years but decades and in that time we will still need petroleum hydrocarbons. So the question that must be asked is where do we get those petroleum hydrocarbons from in the meantime?

I know that the concept of “Ethical Oil” has become something of a hot potato because of issues surrounding the origins of the term, but I do believe in the concept behind the term. I want my personal gasoline purchases to go towards subsidizing Medicare and not subsidizing a despot or paying for a tyrant to bomb his neighbour. I want to know that the oil used in my car was not generated using slave labour in a country without a free press and where environmental regulations are noted by their absence rather than their application. I want my oil being produced by well-paid Canadians, in a country with a demonstrably free press, strong government oversight and a strong tradition of NGOs to watch over the regulator’s shoulder.

In Canada the majority of our raw petroleum supplies are located in the interior of the continent and so must be moved somehow. The safest way known to move petroleum products (on a per barrel basis) is via double-hulled tankers but double-hulled tankers do not work on land so we are left with the options of pipelines or oil-by-rail. Some suggest that rail can’t handle the volumes produced in Canada, and they are wrong. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) report: “Crude Oil Forecasts, Markets & Transportation” indicates that current oil-by-rail capacity is around 1 million bpd and is readily expandable to 1.4 million bpd. This 1.4 million bpd greatly exceeds the Energy East capacity of 1.1 million bpd. The CAPP document only describes the Canadian situation and does not include US oil-by-rail capacity which, believe it or not, is comparable to, and will soon be greater than, our own.

Transporting oil and gas by pipeline or rail is in general quite safe, but when comparing the two methods, rail has been found to be over 4.5 times more likely to experience an occurrence than pipelines, and when it does, we get more Gogamas, Galenas and Lac Megantics. Moreover, since our railways tend to follow our river valleys any major spill will more than likely also result in serious ecological consequences. From a pragmatic perspective, pipelines represent the safest, most environmentally responsible way to transport oil over land. Even from a greenhouse gas perspective, pipelines use less energy to transport oil than rail.

Now not all pipeline projects are equal. I have written that I am against shipping bitumen from the North Coast, but would be a fan if David Black’s Kitimat refinery were brought online to refine the crude oil/dilbit prior to shipping. I agreed with Keystone because I recognized that the US Gulf Coast refineries are dependent on low API feedstock which meant either Canadian crude or oil imported from Venezuela or some other unstable country and as I noted above I believe conflict-free oil should be the preferred energy source for North American refineries. I am up and down on the Trans-Mountain expansion. I would really love to see the pipeline updated as the current pipeline is over 60 years old and is literally the lifeline for our west coast economy providing virtually all of the petroleum products we rely on. However, I am becoming less and less enamoured with the project as the proponents have worked their way through the process. Their secrecy and unwillingness to share necessary information on spill response etc…concern me deeply. The one pipeline I see as a no-brainer is Energy East as I have written numerous times on this blog.

As I discussed in my previous posts, I am strongly of the opinion that the absence of pipeline capacity is not going to be the tool needed to “strangle the oil sands”. In my opinion the only way to slow, or arrest, the growth of oil sands capacity is through some combination of government action (placing a sufficiently high price on carbon) and the market (reducing demand so that prices remain low enough to make new investment unprofitable). As I have written before, and will apparently need to repeat here, blocking Energy East does neither of these two things. All blocking the development of Energy East will do is to increase the amount of oil shipped by rail. Given this reality, the output from the Alberta and Saskatchewan oil fields is going to be transported to market by one means or another and in the absence of pipelines that load will be carried by rail.

As I have pointed out more times than I care to mention on this blog, oil-by-rail is one of the riskiest, least environmentally sound, ways of getting crude to market in a Canadian context. So as a pragmatic environmentalist I really have no choice, I have to push to ensure that the petroleum products we need are transported in the safest, most environmentally respectful method possible even as we look for ways to reduce our reliance on these products, that means Energy East.

As a Canadian I also have to point out again that Canadian oil helps support Canadian jobs, Canadian institutions and provides the funds to pay for our education and medical systems while subsidizing transfer payments. Any rent-seeker who thinks that blocking the pipeline will somehow help them is barking up the wrong tree because the Saudis, Nigerians and Americans, who are currently supplying the east coast refineries, are not paying into our Federation, they are siphoning money out of it. If you want your bridges, roads and sewage plants built/repaired then you are going to need money and blocking Energy East is exactly the wrong way to obtain those funds.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Energy East, Oil Sands, Pipelines, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

On poor science communication in the media: a case study on the flu vaccine

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Blair

This morning I was directed to a blog post by Bill Tieleman in The Tyee. The post dealt with the flu vaccine and was titled Time to End Expensive, Ineffective Forced Flu Shots. This is the latest of his, now yearly, tirades on the topic in the Tyee. His previous efforts being in December 2014 (Are Flu Shots as Effective as Billed?) and December 2013 (More Evidence Against Forced Flu Shots). These are in addition to his similarly themed articles in Vancouver 24 Hrs (2013 and 2014 ) and his blog (Oct 2013,  Dec 2013 and 2014). One could almost suggest that he is a one-man content provider for the anti-flu shot brigade. Mr. Tieleman’s yearly pieces are similar in form and content and provide excellent fodder for any class studying the communication of science.  As I have written numerous times, one of the roles of this blog is to point out examples of problematic science communication and for those not able to take a science communication class, I will now examine parts of Mr. Tieleman’s latest article for you.

Let’s start with a simple explanation of one of the critical terms used in these articles: “vaccine effectiveness”. Vaccine effectiveness is the “ability of a vaccine to prevent outcomes of interest in the real world”. To further clarify, if a vaccine has 50% effectiveness that means it reduces the likelihood of getting the flu by 50%. This does not represent a one-time deal, it is a seasonal effect. During the flu season you can be exposed to the influenza virus numerous times a day, numerous days a week, numerous weeks in the year and 50% effectiveness means that over that entire time the vaccine has reduced your likelihood of getting the flu by 50%. This is not like turning the key on your car and having a 50% chance it will start, which essentially represents the analogy Mr. Tieleman implies in his article.

Talking analogies, anyone who has read my writing knows one of the ways to make science more reader-friendly is to use analogies and personal anecdotes. Of course the risk with analogies is that a bad analogy can distract from your narrative. In his articles Mr. Tieleman uses inapt analogies (typically comparing vaccines to consumer goods) to address vaccine effectiveness and in doing so he miscommunicates the actual effectiveness of the influenza vaccine. In his most recent article he asked: “Would you buy a car or a television that had a 50 per cent chance of working at best and at worst only seven per cent”? As I point out above, vaccine effectiveness is not some one-time event like turning the key in your ignition. Individuals are exposed to the influenza virus repeatedly over the course of the flu season. Instead a more apt analogy would involve some medical device or public safety innovation that had a comparable effectiveness in reducing a negative outcome. Happily for our discussion such an innovation exists, it is called “the seatbelt”. A properly used seatbelt reduces your likelihood to be injured in the event of an automobile accident. Seatbelts aren’t perfect, however; and they won’t prevent all injuries. No seatbelt in the world will save your life if you get t-boned by a semi but seatbelts reduce serious crash-related injuries and deaths by, yes you guessed it: about 50%. Thus using the same descriptive criteria as is used for vaccines the effectiveness of seatbelts would be defined as 50%. As presented by the CDC, the flu vaccine since 2004 has varied in effectiveness between 10% and 60% (not the 50% as indicated in his article). Funny, I don’t see Mr. Tieleman suggesting that we should be giving up on seatbelts in automobiles because they only have an effectiveness of 50%.

Now sticking with our seatbelt analogy, as I pointed out above the best seatbelt in the world will not save your life if you get T-boned by a semi. Similarly, the best vaccine in the world won’t work if it is designed for the wrong strain of influenza. The problem is that there is not one single human influenza virus, rather there are dozens of strain/subtype variations and experts must pick which viruses to include in the vaccine many months in advance in order for vaccine to be produced and delivered on time. Sometimes they get it wrong and like last year’s vaccine you end up with lower effectiveness. That is not a reason to abandon a good program. Even in a bad year (like last year where we saw 23% effectiveness) the result is a substantial reduction in illness rate. This brings me back to Mr. Tieleman’s article. In it he emphasizes that last year’s effectiveness was seven percent. That number appears to be drawn from interim estimates for vaccine effectiveness published by Dr. Skowronski (et. al. Eurosurveillance Jan 2015). Since that publication was produced prior to the end of the 2014-2015 flu season I would tend want to trust the CDC result.

Returning to Mr. Tieleman’s article, it starts with a quotation from Glasgow Dr. Margaret McCartney taken from an article in the British Medical Journal. Dr. McCartney’s article relies heavily on several “Cochrane Reviews”. I have written about Cochrane Reviews in the past and have pointed out that they represent one of the higher quality meta-analyses out there but are deliberately very limited in scope. In Dr. McCartney’s article she cites three Cochrane Reviews including one restricted to healthy adults and children. Its conclusion, as Dr. McCartney points out in her article, was that for every 7 healthy children vaccinated 1 case of influenza was avoided. From a medical perspective she views this as a wasted effort. I, as a policy type, view it as no such thing. Rather to my mind this is a terrific result that pretty much justifies the childhood flu vaccine program all on its own.

Consider the Cochrane Review number from a policy perspective. Take a class of 21 kindergarten kids. Vaccinating that class would avoid 3 cases of influenza. Now consider that a typical case of the flu can usually last up to 7 to 10 days. That represents missing 5 days of school. Those 5 days are 5 days when the sick child has to be at home under the care of a care-giver; in my family’s case that means me (using sick time from work) or my wife (using her family leave from her school). Each day our child is sick costs either my employer, or our provincial government (my wife’s ultimate employer) money. Consider that an average teacher gets paid about $200 per actual school day. Missing those 5 days to take care of a sick child represents a direct cost to our government of around $1000. Considering the flu shot costs about $20/shot  those 7 shots cost the government around $140. In return they can generate a direct reduction of employment costs by about $1000. That represents $860 in reduced government costs. Don’t even get me started on the cost savings when you also include hospital and emergency room admissions. Can you show me any other health care intervention that saves the government over 7 times the cost of the program?

Getting back to confusion about numbers, Mr. Tieleman uses interesting arguments regarding some of the numbers used in the reporting of influenza statistics. In his article he writes:

The Public Health Agency of Canada states on its website: “It is estimated that, in a given year, an average of 12,200 hospitalizations related to influenza and approximately 3,500 deaths attributable to influenza occur.”

But PHAC also says elsewhere on the same website that in the past four years the range of flu-related reported fatalities was 100 to 600 annually, while hospitalizations ranged from 2,000 to just under 8,000.

And in the 2015-16 season, the number of deaths with statistics to Jan. 9 is 10 while hospitalizations are 201.

The Public Health Agency puts out a number of documents, a summary document that includes summary information and the research basis for their decisions and then actual statistics on “Influenza Hospitalizations and Deaths”. Unfortunately, you cannot compare the two sets of statistics (as Mr. Tieleman appears to have done) because the qualifiers associated with the data.

The problem with influenza is that it only becomes an official case if a sample was collected; submitted to the lab; and characterized by strain/sub-type. Conducting a laboratory test for influenza is both expensive and time-consuming and typically has no effect on how the illness will be treated. As a result, in the vast majority of emergency room visits, the emergency room doctors do not bother to request this expensive test. Rather they report the patient as having an influenza-like illness (ILI) and leave it at that.

As for the “flu-related fatalities” not matching between the two PHAC sections, that is because the flu is not the sole (or even major) cause of death in most cases, rather it is a contributing cause and thus the numbers do not match up perfectly. Instead they rely on “regression modelling” (note the scare quotes in his article) which allows scientists to peel out the effect of the influenza on increased death rates. In the old days they used to call the influenza the “old man’s friend” because it was the disease that ultimately weakened the severely ill enough to allow them to die of their diseases rather than lingering on with a debilitating ailment in an era prior to the development of effective palliative care. As with the emergency-room visits, in our modern era doctors don’t necessary see the need to actually submit samples for confirmation of flu strain when an elderly patient with a pre-existing condition dies. Thus, only a small percentage of the deaths “attributed to influenza” are actually confirmed as being a caused by influenza. So when we are talking deaths from influenza, we are talking only about cases where a person has died and because there was not an underlying condition a test was undertaken to confirm the diagnosis of influenza.

Finally, by using the numbers presented above it is possible to understand the cost of all these influenza cases to our medical system. Recognize that the first number presented in his quotation is for “hospitalizations” only. That means that the patient was admitted into the hospital ward. It does not consider outpatient and emergency room visits. Consider that in the last two weeks of December 2015, the proportion of visits to BC Children’s Hospital Emergency Room (ER) attributed to ILI represented, 16% and 18%  of all visits. That is a huge number. An even marginally effective vaccine can cut the number of hospital visits dramatically resulting in less crowded emergency rooms and bundles of saved government money. Taking a look at this resource from the CDC shows how incredibly effective the flu vaccine has been at reducing hospital admissions and thus reducing our national medical bill.

In reading Mr. Tieleman’s writing on the flu vaccine it is clear that his major complaint is that he does not believe that health care workers should be forced to be vaccinated. The current research supports him in this respect. The most recent Cochrane Review on the subject: Influenza vaccination for healthcare workers who care for people aged 60 or older living in long-term care institutions supports the idea that forced vaccination does not appear to reduce death rates in long-term care institutions, but notes the absence of good double-blinded research on the subject.

To be clear, I question the professionalism and empathy of any health care provider who chooses to forgo the flu shot. The data is clear that the flu shot reduces incidences of infection. Logically this decreases the likelihood that they will unknowingly transmit the virus to their often immuno-compromised and fragile patients. That being said, at this time conclusive data does not appear to be present to justify coercing health care providers, with threats to their continued employment, into taking the flu shot prior to encountering patients. As for Mr. Tieleman’s articles, it is a pity that in fighting a battle for his perceived constituency (union members who do not want to be coerced into getting vaccinated) he has decided to side-swipe a legitimate program that has a demonstrable effect of protecting the young and the elderly and the added benefit of potentially saving the government a lot of money.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Chemistry and Toxicology, Risk, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

On the glaring intellectual inconsistencies in 100% Wind Water and Sunlight

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Blair

Ralph Waldo Emerson is his famous essay Self-Reliance coined the phrase “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. As readers of my blog know I have spent a lot of time researching and commenting on the 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight series (100% WWS) with the latest article being 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World (called 100% WWS World hereafter). What I can confidently say from that research is that the champions of this approach are not small minds. Frankly the amount of effort that has gone into this project is admirable as is their goal, to achieve a 100% clean energy  future. This is a goal I share, I might add. The problem, to my mind, is that they have failed to convince and apparently do not understand economics. As I point out in my post More on 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight and the Council of Canadians “100% Clean economy” by 2050 goal the costs of this endeavour would be ruinous, especially given the suggestion that 80% of the effort [and thus the costs] would need to be accomplished by 2030. For Canada alone, that represents over 1 trillion dollars of energy infrastructure (according to 100% WWS World spreadsheets), a new power grid and upgraded energy transmission system (neither of which they have costed) all within 14 years. More problematically, from an intellectual perspective, are the glaring intellectual inconsistencies in the 100% WWS program. Now I surely can’t make such a broad statement without any supporting data so the rest of this post will address what I view as the most obvious of the glaring intellectual inconsistencies in the 100% WWS scheme.

My concern with the intellectual incoherence underlying the 100% WWS scheme is their insistence on simultaneously accepting and rejecting technologies and/or the risks associated with those energy technologies. While there are several examples of the 100% WWS team simultaneously accepting and rejecting a technology let’s start with the low-hanging fruit: the role of water in the energy program.

The 100% WWS team have a particularly odd love/hate relationship with water. When it comes to nuclear energy the 100% WWS team is clear; they eschew the technology and do not incorporate it in their calculations. Even in a country like France, that currently gets the majority of its power via nuclear, 100% WWS World requires France to be run entirely from non-nuclear sources. The same cannot be said for hydro. They go in the exact opposite direction with hydro. The 100% WWS plan does not make use of any new hydro, but retains all the existing hydro. The W.A.C Bennett dam in British Columbia is absolutely fine but the planned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is not allowed. Moreover, while they apparently do not like the technology, and apparently see it as a dead-end (since they add no more), they still expect that efficiency of the hydro will improve and thus they assume that capacity factor of the exiting hydro will increase. So the first example of their cognitive dissonance is the fact that under 100% WWS World existing hydro is good, but new hydro is supposed to be so bad that it cannot be used.

Staying with water, as described above, 100% WWS World does not include the creation of new reservoirs behind dams. Apparently for the creators of the scheme there is something inherently wrong about water reservoirs. However, in 100% WWS USA pumped hydro storage represents 5.42% of the US energy storage and pumped storage is mentioned in the other papers as an important energy storage technology. Pumped hydro storage, by its very nature, requires the use of reservoirs at both the top and the bottom of a topographic grade. So under 100% WWS hydro reservoirs are a bad thing when connected to a hydro dam but are okay when the same water is held behind a similar dam so that pumped hydro can be used as an energy storage technology?

Keeping with the inconsistencies with which 100% WWS handles water, as I described above, pumped hydro is a storage technology that makes use of the potential energy in stored water to generate electricity. There exists a similar technology used throughout the world called run-of-the-river hydro. Run-of-the river hydro is an environmentally sensitive and sustainable technology that makes use of the natural flow of a stream to generate power. As of late 2014 there were 56 independent run-of-river projects supplying electricity to BC Hydro and another 25 that are anticipated to reach operation by 2018 in British Columbia. This technology is used around the world to generate power and seems to be an obvious choice in a 100% WWS world. That being said 100% WWS does not incorporate run-of-the-river power generation. Once again I am confused. Water running downhill in a man-made sluice at a pumped hydro facility is considered a good way to generate energy in 100% WWS because the facility has the name “pumped storage”. But a virtually identical system using natural features to generate power (run-of-the-river) is bad and is excluded from use in 100% WWS, how is that for incoherence?

Now the various examples involving water do not represent the only examples of intellectual inconsistency in the 100% WWS scheme. Prior to his blocking me on Twitter, I got to follow Dr. Jacobson’s outgoing missives. One of the technologies Dr. Jacobson regularly decries on his Twitter feed is fracking. Examples include:

“Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies” Oct 9, 2015

“No fracking in NY–>1 step closer to 100% WWS” Oct 17, 2014

Now I have written a bit about fracking, including discussing the misinformation being spouted by opponents with regards to the toxicology of fracking fluids. I have also written a lot about geothermal energy. As anyone who has read my writing knows, I highly approve of the technology. Unfortunately, there are not many geologic formations that will allow for the extraction of geothermal energy at industrial scales without the use of fracking. As described in the literature, fracking of one sort or another is necessary for most large, industrial geothermal facilities. Some activists try to distinguish between “fracking” and “slipping” and claim that “hydro-shearing” is different than fracking, but the earth doesn’t care if it is being blasted by one technology or the other. If you fear that fracking will enhance geologic instability and result in earthquakes, well geology doesn’t really know the difference between these three named technologies. Put simply, enhanced geothermal is geothermal fracking and any risk posed by fracking for natural gas has comparable risks when applied to a geothermal facility.

As a final example of intellectual incoherence for this posting I will choose Dr. Jacobson’s favourite hobgoblin: nuclear power. One of the biggest complaints about 100% WWS World is the complete exclusion of nuclear power. As I have described previously, one of the major bases for eschewing this technology in 100% WWS involves the radioactive waste generated in the mining and disposal of nuclear waste. As I have described numerous times, the production of the rare earth metals necessary for 100% WWS produces a lot of radioactive waste. It has been estimate that refining one ton of rare earth elements results in approximately 75 cubic meters of acidic waste water and about one ton of radioactive waste residue. That is a one-to-one ratio for rare earth metals and radioactive waste. As I have previously noted, a single large wind turbine (rated at about 3.5 megawatts) typically contains 600 kilograms of rare earth metals which means about 600 kg of radioactive waste. According to 100% WWS World, Canada will need approximately 60,000 – 5 MW wind turbines to meet our 100% WWS goal. That works out to over 36,000 tons of radioactive waste residue. That total is only for the wind turbines needed for 100% WWS in Canada. Once you add all the rare earths needed to electrify everything, that number will sky-rocket. Could someone please explain to me why radioactive waste is bad when associated with the mining and refining for nuclear power but is not so bad when associated with wind, water and sunlight?

So to summarize, under 100% WWS World existing dams are good but any new dams are bad. Storage of water in reservoirs is bad when used in hydro energy but absolutely necessary and good when used for pumped storage. Collecting the energy of water running downhill is good when used in pumped storage but bad when it is run-of-the-river hydro. Fracking is dangerous and an unacceptable risk when used for natural gas, but the same technology is acceptable when used for geothermal energy. The presence of radioactice waste is an unacceptable by-product of the nuclear industry but is an acceptable by-product of the rare earth industry.

In his renowned book 1984 George Orwell introduced us to a number of fascinating terms/ideas that have become staples of modern intellectual thought. One of the most interesting, from my perspective, is the concept of “doublethink” which RationalWiki defines as “simultaneously accepting and rejecting a given proposition”. Doublethink is comparable to the concept of “cognitive dissonance” without all the negative clinical associations. As they put it in RationalWiki: Doublethink could be “thought of as cognitive dissonance that not only remains unresolved but is also desirable to leave unresolved”. There are few better examples of modern doublethink than the sell job associated with the 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight series.

A lot of people might suggest that I am being a bit harsh by referring to 100% WWS as “doublethink” and for this I am sorry. I attribute no ill intent to Dr. Jacobson and his team. Rather, I see them as true believers. Like evangelical Christians who will cite the Leviticus edict against homosexuality (20:13) while ignoring the edict against seafood (11:12), I see the 100% WWS supporters as simply not recognizing the level of their personal cognitive dissonance.

Posted in Fossil Fuel Free Future, Renewable Energy, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

On the curious anachronism that is the academic journal business model

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Blair

While discussing my post on the benefits and limitations of peer review in the reporting of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary science I came to recognize that I was taking a lot of things for granted. The biggest is that a lot of my readers do not come from a background in academia. As such, while many have heard of the concept of peer review it is likely that many don’t actually know how the system works. The intention of this blog post is to fill a gap in that knowledge base. In doing so I hope I can express how ridiculous the current system we are using really is; this system that thrives by charging people to read work that has already been paid for by those same readers.

To understand this topic you have to recognize that the scientific journal system is a throw-back to a time when publishing was hard and expensive and thus reserved for a privileged few. It started as a system to allow universities and learned bodies (like the American Medical Association) to publish the results of their members. Because of this, much of the work involved was voluntary and unpaid. Over time the role of universities and learned bodies in the journal business has largely been supplanted by a limited number of for-profit publishing houses. Yet somehow in the process the whole “voluntary” and “unpaid” component managed to stick around.

Before we go any further there are some details about the process that the academics in the audience take for granted but the non-academics might find a bit startling. We all know that in our Canadian academic system professors are hired and paid by universities and colleges (i.e. they are paid from the public purse). In their roles they are typically expected to split their activities between teaching and mentoring; academic research; and administrative duties. The relative breakdown of each is dictated by their position. In colleges the professors tend to teach more and research less, in the high-pressure universities some professors might only teach one class a year if their research/administrative duties are sufficiently onerous.

Since individual universities does not have endless piles of cash professors also have to go to outside sources to get additional monies to funds their research. Research funds can come from a variety of sources with the biggest in the social and natural sciences being the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHERC) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), respectively. These are, once again, government funds given to scientists and universities to encourage research.

As described, we have highly trained professionals who were, for the most part, educated on the public dime. They are now employed by publicly-funded universities. These people do years of research, once again paid for by the public, and as a part of their grants are required to share the fruits of their research with the world. Now here comes the bizarre part, instead of making that information freely available they are expected to publish their results through the academic journal system. As I noted above, in the old days journals were put out by universities or learned societies. Nowadays, the vast majority of journals are published by a handful of for-profit companies. These companies make their money by limiting access to the information in their journals through subscriptions. Now the costs for these journal subscriptions are a matter of ongoing interest. As described in this article different universities can pay different prices for the same journals. Alternatively the journals also charge to access to individual articles and those charges can range from the ridiculous to the sublime. Consider that access to an article from “Science” may cost you $30 for a single day’s access to the file.

Let’s get back to the process. Once a professor has written a paper she/he will submit it to a journal. Typically the journal charges a minor submission fee (normally less than $200). The paper is then looked at by an editor, usually a specialist in the field of enquiry covered by the journal. The editor can reject the paper immediately (sometimes called a bench rejection) or can submit it for peer-review. Depending on the journal you may have a blind review, where the editor picks two or three specialists (of the editor’s choosing) to review the paper. Some journals are chummier and allow the author to suggest people who might be good reviewers (often called “a pal review” for obvious reasons). Reviewers typically aren’t compensated for their work as the peer-review process is part of the shared scientific enterprise. What this means is that while the editor may be paid for by the journal, the reviewers, like the author, are instead paid for by the public since they are almost always academics being paid a salary.

As I wrote previously, peer-reviewers serve an important, but often misunderstood role in the scientific endeavour. First they are there to confirm that the science is done in an appropriate manner. In this they are conducting a quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) role within the system. They look at how the work was done to identify errors in methodology and assumptions etc…

Reviewers also serve an editorial role, suggesting changes to make the work more comprehensible, suggesting additional analyses to confirm the validity of results…that sort of thing.

The final role of the peer-reviewer is that of gate-keeper, to identify if the science presented in the paper is novel and interesting enough to warrant space in the journal. A reviewer might say that an article is beautifully written, including all the right tests but that it is not a good fit for the journal in question. This final role is a legitimate one within the system, but as members of the climate science community can tell you, it also risks problems if one part of the community chooses to block the research from a different branch.

Typically the reviewers will suggest changes etc.. and the paper is sent back to the author for revisions. If the revisions are minor then a quick fix and another once-around would be considered sufficient. Sometimes the revisions are major and the paper has to go back for major re-work and another round of peer review thereafter.

Assuming the article makes it through peer review, editing, re-submission etc… it can then be chosen for publication. In that case, the author(s) will be expected to pay fees associated with the typesetting of the manuscript including bonus fees for colour pictures and other extras. If the authors want to make the paper available online for free they can arrange to pay a secondary fee to allow free access to the paper. Having concluded the arduous task of preparing the paper, editing the paper and getting it ready for publication the strangest part of this whole odyssey occurs: the author is expected to give up their copyright for their completed document in order for it to be published in the journal? The author retains certain rights but if they want to share the paper after it has been published then, with the exception of a handful of free copies made available to the author, they will need to pay for the privilege just like everyone else.

Having gone through this entire rigmarole the author then has to wait until the journal decides it is convenient to publish the article. I’ve heard of authors waiting for over a year to have an accepted manuscript published.

Once published these journals are typically pay-walled. That is they are only available for reading by subscribing customers. Typically university libraries have subscriptions. Sometimes individuals will subscribe to a particularly useful journal, but given the prices (often in the thousands of dollars a year) few individuals can afford that cost. If you, as a member of the public, want to read that journal article, you either have to have a subscription, be a member of an organization that has a subscription, or you can pay a fee to get a copy of the article (remember that $30/day?).

So let’s summarize for those whose jaws are currently sitting on the floor. Under the current system academics, who are being paid salaries from the public purse, carry out research, which is typically funded entirely using public monies. The academics write up their research and submit it to a journal. The journal then sends the paper to additional academics. These academics (who are fully paid for by the public) then conduct a detailed peer-review of the paper, for which they receive no compensation from the journal. This research that was bought and paid for by the public is then transferred holus-bolus to a private organization that will charge often exorbitant fees to allow the public access to the details and outcome of that research?

The journals argue that they add value through a screening process, except as we have noted the vast majority of that screening (the peer review) is carried out by other academics. These academics are not being paid to carry out this task by the journals, no; they are doing it free-of-charge as part of their work as publicly financed scientists. I will say this once more because it is so astounding, the public pays for researcher’s salaries, they finance the research and then pay the peer-reviewers to conduct the peer review and in the end they cannot access the information unless they pay an exorbitant subscription fee or an article access fee.

Now to be clear, there is a movement to open up access to scientific information with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) being at the forefront of said movement. That being said the existing journals are working very hard to keep the system as it is because, well because it is extremely profitable. Sadly, many of our public institutions require their staff to publish in “high impact factor” journals. Would anyone like to guess which journals make the list of “high-impact factor” journals? If you said the for-profit ones, then you would be guessing right. This self-perpetuating, anachronistic, money-making machine is truly a glory to behold….

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

On blogging and the irrelevance of academic peer review in multi-disciplinary fields

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Blair

In my short blogging career I have been challenged, on more than one occasion, to submit my writing to peer-reviewed academic journals. My response has been to point out that my work undergoes peer review the second I post it online and that interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary science is not well served by the traditional academic peer review process. The sad reality is that academic peer-reviewed journals are not terribly relevant in the non-academic world. As I will discuss in this blog post, peer-reviewed academic journals serve a useful function in highly-specialized fields but they quickly lose their relevance for broader topics. As a consequence, in some fields peer-reviewed academic journals serve simply as a means by which academics can keep score (for their C.Vs) and to get, or block, promotions. That being said there is a constituency, mostly academic, that remains firmly convinced that peer-reviewed academic journals should form the primary basis for the development of policy in the environmental and climate fields. I hope this post will help correct that misguided impression.

In my opening paragraph I make a pretty bold statement: that the academic peer-reviewed press serves a marginal role in real-world policy decisions. To substantiate my claim let’s start with a few self-evident truths of the peer-reviewed academic press.

  • The peer-reviewed academic press is slow to present results. The publication process often stretches on for months and can go for years. This can leave it well behind the decision curve.
  • The peer-reviewed academic press can be subject to institutional and professional gate-keeping that can alienate stakeholders.
  • Accessing peer-reviewed articles is typically so expensive that most non-acdemics only read the freely-accessible abstracts and don’t delve into the actual details of the articles that are hidden behind paywalls.

Now I am pretty certain that no one will challenge my first two points but some might be surprised by my third. Those people are likely academics who have never really had to consider how much it can cost to keep current with academic publications. Most academics are fairly unaware of the cost of subscription or access fees to academic articles. Consider that access to an article from “Science” may cost you $30 FOR A SINGLE DAY. Given those costs most non-academics simply do the inexpensive thing and skip reading the full papers altogether safe in the knowledge that if a paper is sufficiently important someone else will summarize its contents or a pre-print will be made available.

My major complaint about the peer-reviewed academic press is that it only really works well when the journal covers a very distinct body of knowledge. This is because only then will the peer-reviewers be capable of carrying out an effective peer review. The biggest problem with the peer-review system is that the peer reviewers are limited in number, time and experience and as such normally a paper only sees two or three reviewers. These reviewers are picked not only for their expertise but also on their willingness to serve. Typically what this means is that the job is dominated by the very young academics (who have the enthusiasm and want to build up experience) and the very old academics (who have the time). Mid-career academics often lack the time to do much peer-review thanks to their teaching and administrative responsibilities. Most try and make time but they cannot address every manuscript that comes across their desk.

Let’s be clear here, peer reviewers serve an important, but often misunderstood multi-faceted role in the scientific endeavour. Firstly they are there to confirm that the science is done in an appropriate manner. In this they are conducting a quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) role within the system. They look at how the work was done to identify errors in methodology: were appropriate statistical tests applied? Was the sample cooled sufficiently…that sort of thing. Peer reviewers will often suggest additional/different analyses to confirm the validity of results. This task is only possible if the peer reviewer is extremely familiar with the field under study.

Peer reviewers also serve an editorial role. They are responsible for suggesting changes to make the work more comprehensible. That is the sort of task that can be accomplished by any good reviewer whether they understand a topic or not.

The final role of the peer reviewer is that of gate-keeper, to identify if the science presented in the paper is novel and interesting enough to warrant space in the journal. A reviewer might say that an article is beautifully written, including all the right tests, but that it is not a good fit for the journal in question. This final role is a legitimate one within the system, but as members of the climate science community can tell you, it also risks problems if one part of the community chooses to block the publication of research from those with whom they differ.

You are probably wondering when I am going to get to my point? Well here it is: once you leave a peer reviewer’s particular area of expertise they cease to provide a reasonable value for money. At that point they simply become a highly-credentialed copy editor. In a field like climate change or renewable energy policy, that is very broad in content/context, it is simply not possible to find reviewers who can do a reasonable job of effectively peer reviewing papers. You don’t believe me? Well let me give you an example.

One of my recent bugbears at this blog has been Dr. Mark Jacobson’s 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight series with the latest article being 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World (called 100% WWS World hereafter). This paper discusses almost a dozen renewable energy concepts and provides plans that quite literally span the globe. As a consequence no two or three peer reviewers could conceivably do a comprehensive job of reviewing this paper and a lot of things were simply missed by the reviewers. As an example, most North Americans know little about Scandinavia, imagining it is all mountains and fjords. So when Dr. Jacobson suggested that Finland could store huge amounts of energy in the form of pumped hydro storage that probably sounded pretty reasonable to the reviewers (and frankly to me when I read the paper). It took a Finn to point out that Finland, unlike the rest of Scandinavia, is an exceedingly flat country. Pumped hydro needs abrupt changes in topography to be efficient and is not practical in flatlands. So the 100% WWS World plan fails spectacularly in that respect for its analysis of Finland. Similarly, a look at Wikipedia would confirm to Dr. Jacobson’s reviewers that Canada’s coastline is vast (over 200,00 km) but what the reviewers clearly didn’t recognize is that the majority of that coastline is in the north where weather and ice preclude the construction of off-shore wind turbines. Thus, when the paper calculated how much offshore wind potential was available it missed the fact that much of the area described is not practical for offshore wind energy generation. Similarly, it is clear that the peer reviewers didn’t know that the Pacific Continental Shelf pretty much abuts much of the West Coast of Canada. The sea floor drops precipitously very close to the coast and as such over much of the coast it would not be affordable to install an offshore wind platform as the foundation of such installations would need to be 100s of meters deep.

What this all means is that when someone assures me that Dr. Jacobson’s work is correct and relevant “because it underwent peer review” I take that with a heavy dose of salt. I have read almost a dozen critiques of the work (and authored 4 myself) which challenge topics ranging from how it handles transmission lines to how it deals with individual countries. In this case the peer-review process failed because the topic was simply too broad for any small group of peer reviewers to complete effectively. It is an object lesson in the limitations of the peer review process.

Going back to our main topic, in our modern era a blogger doesn’t need to publish in peer-reviewed academic journals to have an effect. Bloggers can build a following and influence policy simply through the act of consistently producing good, well-referenced and well-argued work. A well-respected blogger, like Steve McIntyre (at Climate Audit), can instantly reach and influence a targeted audience of thousands. Meanwhile a typical, peer-reviewed article can take hundreds of hours wending its way through the publishing process, cost thousands of dollars to produce and is likely to be read completely by no more than 10 people.

Once a blog post is presented online it has the ability to be reviewed by the hundreds of readers who encounter it. Moreover, unlike a published article in a journal, corrections and addendums in blogs can be made pretty much right away. I am quick to fix errors in my blog because that allows me to maintain my credibility. A faulty journal article, on the other hand, is exceedingly hard to fix. Sometimes it seems like journals actually discourage corrections as they don’t “constitute original content” so only the most egregious errors get corrected or papers retracted.

In a similar vein, the peer review process is not a magical or proprietary process limited to the academic press. Think tanks and policy foundations can conduct research which they can subsequently submit for peer review from knowledgeable experts before publication. Thus a study on ocean acidification by Patrick Moore can be published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy while rightfully claiming that the study was peer-reviewed. Now to be clear I know nothing about the FCPP but given the prominence of this paper the absence of any legitimate complaints/corrections since this report was published leads me to believe that I can take what I read as factual. Happily, given the scope and breadth of the world-wide net I know that if this statement is wrong I will receive many corrections (which I will share if sufficiently relevant) that may change my view of that report.

Going back to the premise of this post. I don’t plan to submit my writing to a peer-reviewed academic journal anytime soon as I do not see any particular value in doing so.  I know that I will get feed-back once I post my thoughts on my blog and my professional status does not hinge on such publications. Most importantly, my blog stats and link hit statistics re-assure me that my thoughts are being widely read and shared which is really all I am looking for with this blog.

Author’s note: a number of readers have questioned the lack of peer-reviewed output from my graduate work. My graduate work was interdisciplinary in nature and involved developing systems to allow data collected by governmental scientists to be evaluated for its reliability and quality; stored in information systems; and made available for subsequent re-use by other researchers. Upon graduation I went immediately to the private sector and saw no real value in writing up my research. The reason for my reluctance was that the output of my research was already being used on a daily basis as a component of the information systems used by our provincial and federal governments and was being widely shared by those governments (including through workshops that I was asked to moderate).

As for the practical applications of my research, well it was almost immediately applied at my current employer and has become a standard in our industry for the last decade. I cannot imagine a better demonstration of the value of my research than the fact that our clients insist that our competitors conduct data analysis in the manner suggested by my research and in doing so our clients have done more to publicize my research than any academic publication might ever have done.

Posted in Climate Change, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism, Fossil Fuel Free Future, Uncategorized | 17 Comments

More on 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight and the Council of Canadians “100% Clean economy” by 2050 goal

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Blair

This week the Globe and Mail featured an interview with engineer Dr. Mark Z Jacobson on his plan for the world to get all its energy – including transport and heating fuel and electricity – from wind, water and solar resources by 2050. This topic has gained a lot of traction in the environmental community with 34 Council of Canadians chapters joining in the chorus demanding that a “100% clean economy is 100% possible by 2050”. The basis for the “100% clean economy is 100% possible by 2050” plan is a paper prepared by Dr. Jacobson 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World (called 100% WWS hereafter).

Now I am going to be a wet blanket and explain, briefly, why Dr. Jacobson’s ideas, while visionary and incredibly appealing, are also simply not possible.

Before I go much further I want to give a hat tip to physicist Dr. Jani-Petri Martikainen at the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti [I copy and pasted that name as I had no chance of spelling it correctly otherwise]. As readers of my blogs know I have already looked at Dr. Jacobson’s work in three previous blog postings:

In those blog posts I looked at big picture features of the Jacobson model but I never dug down into the country-specific numbers. This week I was directed to a brilliant blog post by Dr. Martikainen Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland? that humorously skewered the work by looking at the assumptions for a single country (Finland) to show how many of the conclusions aren’t based on reasonable assumptions. This encouraged me to go to the supplementary information that came with the paper, in particular the spreadsheet used to do the calculations. Dr. Martikainen’s blog thus served as the inspiration for this blog post.

To go back to my “big picture” view for just one paragraph let’s look at one simple example of a global issue with the 100% WWS paper. Looking at Table 2 in 100% WWS you see that the 100% WWS model requires the construction and installation of 1.954 Million – 5 MW wind turbines worldwide by 2050. As I note in my earlier blog post, a single large wind turbine (rated at about 3.5 megawatts) typically contains 600 kilograms of rare earth metals. If we choose to ignore the minor difference between 3.5 and 5 mw turbines (size and weight) we are still talking about around 1.27 million tons of rare earth metals. According to the US Geological Service, the worldwide production of rare earth metals is approximately 110,000 tons. This means that between now and 2050 (34 years) the equivalent of over 10 years of the entire world’s production of rare earth metals would need to be solely dedicated to producing wind turbines. Forget batteries, magnets, MRI machines or computers for the equivalent of 10 years we would only have enough of the stuff to make windmills under 100% WWS. As for construction schedules, in order to meet our January 1, 2050 deadline we would need to install over 57,000 wind turbines a year starting yesterday. To put that into perspective that comes out to a manageable 155+ installations a day…better get started soon.

Now let’s look at the Canadian story, because even if we don’t think Ethiopia is going to get its act together in time we Canadians live in a rich country and should be doing our part to meet the 2050 target. After all if the Council of Canadians says it “is doable” then surely it must be. In 100% WWS the breakdown of energy sources by 2050 in Canada would include:

  • Onshore wind 37.5%
  • Offshore wind 21%
  • Solar PV plant 17.7%
  • Hydroelectric 16.5%
  • Wave energy 2%
  • Residential rooftop solar 1.5%
  • Commercial/govt rooftop solar 1.7%
  • Geothermal 1.9%
  • Tidal turbine 0.2%

On the outset the numbers look challenging, but not necessarily impossible. Being a practical guy, I thought I should dig a bit deeper to see how these numbers pan out.

The first thing that jumps out to me is that wind makes up the lion’s share of our proposed energy mix, providing 58.5% of our total energy supply. Now I am not an energy wonk, but Dr. Jesse Jenkins is and in his Energy Collective blog he points out the difficulty with relying on variable renewable energy for more than 40% of your energy supplies. If you combine the solar and wind (the variable energy sources) you get 76.2% of our energy supply. This is not good for our power grid and would mean that in addition to everything I will describe below, we would need to massively upgrade our existing energy grid and control systems to make this project work.

Okay, for the time-being we will give 100% WWS a pass on the power grid concerns and look to the actual new infrastructure necessary to get this project started. According to Table 2 of the spreadsheet, Canada has a particular challenge in that to achieve our national goal we need to install over 60,000 wind turbines between today and 2050. That means 1764 a year or 5 units a day between now and Jan 1, 2050. British Columbia will really have to get moving because that national number includes both onshore and offshore facilities. As one of the two coasts British Columbia would be responsible for close to half of the 21,555 offshore units needed to achieve our 100% WWS goal. To put the scale of this challenge into perspective: as of September 2015 British Columbia had 5 onshore wind installations with a total of 217 wind turbines and an installed capacity of 489 MW. As of September 2015 we had zero offshore wind facilities. Getting from zero to 10,000 in 34 years, in our regulatory environment, shouldn’t be much of a problem, heck according to BC Hydro they have up to 300 potential wind energy sites being investigated for project development. Of that group offshore represents 43 project with an installed capacity of 14,688 MW. Sure it is only 4 percent of the 368,000 MW of nameplate capacity called for in 100% WWS but we are assured this is “doable” so let’s continue.

From a cost perspective wind, while not ultra-expensive, is not cheap either. BC Hydro’s Bear Mountain Wind Park in Dawson Creek cost $200 Million dollars for a 102 MW facility. Now this facility needed no major transmission lines upgrades as it is located near an urban area and didn’t need major roadway improvement since it is near a highway so this project would represent a low-cost installation. Unfortunately this low-cost operation put us back about $1 million per MW (for an onshore power facility). Dr. Jacobson acknowledges these costs as the 100% WWS spreadsheet suggests an initial range estimate of $1.35 million to $1.8 million per MW for onshore wind.

It looks like I misread Table 2 in the spreadsheet,  I used the “technical nameplate capacity” instead of the “total nameplate capacity” for my onshore wind calculations. Based on the calculations presented in the paper we only need 39,263 – 5 MW wind installations. Using Dr. Jacobson’s discounted rate for these units the wind installations would only cost $273 billion not $1.8 trillion. So that ONLY represents 2.4% of GDP not 16% over the entire span.

Remember that is for the onshore wind facilities only we haven’t considered the offshore wind, wave devices, solar facilities and geothermal plants. This is what the Council of Canadians says is “doable”.

Now the wind numbers look daunting, but not technically impossible. We have a small, but growing, domestic wind power industry. A somewhat less likely set of assumptions comes from the wave and tidal power spreadsheets. According to the plan in order to meet our goal we will need 27,323 wave devices (covering a physical footprint of about 14 km2) and 1980 tidal turbines. With zero wave devices installed yet in Canada at the end of 2015 we only have to install 804 of these, as yet not yet designed nor tested systems per year to meet our goal. As a bonus, that energy is not going to come cheap. According to BC Hydro the estimated unit energy cost for wave energy ranges from $440 to $772/MWh. For perspective BC Hydro has been paying about $78/MWh from the Independent Power Producers and this has caused some political folks to blow their lids over the costs. As for that footprint of 14 km2 we know that British Columbian environmentalists go out of their way to encourage large industrial users to cover huge swathes of their marine foreshore with industrial power plants, so that won’t be a problem either.

Now that I have covered the power sources, I will address what I view as the biggest Achilles heel in the 100% WWS goal for Canada: power transmission. I’m not sure if Dr. Jacobson and his team had a chance to notice but Canada is what they call a big country. The vast majority of our inhabited land mass is not near a coastline where all that offshore wind, and the tides and waves are going to generate one quarter of all our power. The only way to get that power from where it is generated to where it is needed is via transmission lines and building transmission lines in Canada can be intensely expensive. Consider that the Northwest Transmission Line project in BC is looking to cost over $2 million a kilometer to build.

Consider that to achieve 100% clean energy in 2050 virtually every community in Canada will need to be connected to a national grid since cities like Yellowknife, which is hundreds of miles from the nearest coast and where solar provides negligible power for much of the year, will need to import a lot of power in order to continue to exist. Under 100% WWS the citizens of Inuvik won’t be allowed to use diesel generators during the 6 month winter, when the ice has blocked up the coast and the wind can disappear for days at a time. They will thus have to import electricity from down south. Now I admit to having picked a couple extreme cases to make my point, but recognize that Canada’s vast and challenging geography has limited our ability to create a nationally integrated power grid. Yet in order to work the 100% WWS proposal requires such a grid. It needs us to shift power from areas where it is windy to areas where it is not windy and from our coastlines to places like northeast Saskatchewan. Even the most optimistic view has a new grid costing $25 billion and taking a couple decades to build. A more realistic appraisal puts the cost of a national backbone of 735 kV transmission lines at around $104 billion and taking 20 years to complete. Only once the backbone has been built can we then start work on all the feeder lines that will have to go to every city, town and hamlet. Since we only have 34 years to get this accomplished we had better get started sooner rather than later.

Reading back the last few paragraphs, I realize that I sound a lot less like a wet blanket and a lot more like the voice of doom suggesting we all abandon ship or die. The truth is that while the 100% WWS by 2050 plan is clearly not possible that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard to achieve its underlying goal of low or no carbon energy with a strong renewable component. The problem with the 100% WWS proposal is that it is hobbled by some of the personal views of its creators. It omits some pretty obvious energy solutions like further large-reservoir hydro in Quebec, Labrador, Ontario and BC, run-of-the-river hydro across Canada and, of course, further nuclear power. A country like Canada that is blessed with an abundance of hydropower opportunities should not ignore those opportunities because one engineer from California doesn’t particularly like that technology. A fear of the risk of nuclear proliferation should not hinder nuclear savvy countries like the US, Canada, France and China from making use of nuclear power in their energy mix. It is not as if we have to worry that Iowa may get the bomb if the US builds a nuclear plant in Idaho.

As I have said more times that I would care to admit in this blog: I am a pragmatist. As a pragmatist I tend to live by the credo “moderation in all things”. The 100% WWS model fails because it does not believe in moderation. It places tight, and poorly supported, restrictions on a number of important baseline clean energy technologies and in doing so results in a proposal that is ruinously expensive. Looking at the numbers above, the costs would be prohibitive for Canada consuming over half our national GDP over the 34 year time frame proposed. While ruinously expensive is technically “doable”, the same can’t be said for countries like Zimbabwe or Ethiopia where the anticipated costs exceed GDP by orders of magnitude. Alternatively, Ethiopia could build the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project which would provide it with ample, essentially carbon-free, electricity and raise its citizens out of abject energy poverty.

Let’s be clear here, I believe strongly in renewable energy, but as I have written before I believe in regionally-appropriate renewables. I also believe that we cannot ignore the potential of nuclear and hydro energy in a post-fossil fuel energy mix. To summarize what I have written above: when an apparently innumerate representative from the Council of Canadians assures you that 100% WWS is “doable” the correct response is: “only in your dreams…only in your dreams”.

Author’s note: It was pointed out to me that my numbers may be off, and not surprisingly some of them were. The Jacobson spreadsheet is quite the maze of interconnected macros and I missed one. I have thus made a correction to the calculation for onshore wind power.

The error changes the cost of onshore wind by quite a bit, but since the original number I had was insanely high, the new number is now only disastrously high. Looking at the numbers in the spreadsheet, which low-balls offshore wind costs and provides numbers for technologies that have yet to be developed, it looks like the entire cost for new power infrastructure only would run closer to 15% of our GDP per year between now and 2050. Remember this is before we consider the necessary transmission system upgrade; before we undertake the massive electrical grid conversion; does not include any costs for all that storage needed to make these technologies work; and assumes that costs for the infrastructure will be substantially reduced for these technologies even though we know that raw material costs will go through the roof because of a shortage of the rare earth metals and Lithium necessary to make the technologies work.

Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, Fossil Fuel Free Future, Renewable Energy | 29 Comments

A look at British Columbia’s energy picture in light of the Paris Agreement

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Blair

In the last month or so, I have seen an upsurge of comments on my Twitter feed, and at the #bcpoli hashtag, from individuals who I can best describe as “politically active” and “partisans”. These tweets have centered on the topics of energy use, cost and policies with emphasis on our provincial government and our publicly-owned energy utility (BC Hydro). The bloggers and Tweeters are mostly complaining about two topics: the Site C Dam project and the price BC Hydro pays Independent Power Producers (IPPs) for the power they contribute to our provincial power grid. The intention of this blog post is to address these complaints in as non-partisan a manner as possible. Before I do so I suppose I should supply some background.

As readers of my blog know, I have written a lot about renewable energy and British Columbia’s role in our shared national energy future. If you are interested I have written about geothermal energy (Part 1 and Part 2), wind energy and explained the importance of regionally appropriate renewables. I have explained why some renewable energy technologies are better than others (energy density and power density); on Energiewende (Germany’s experiment with renewable energy); on the issues with biofuels; and on some of the limiting features of various renewable technologies including shortages of critical rare earth metals needed in renewable energy technologies, issues with avian mortality associated with wind energy and the role of “trust” in the renewable energy debate. Most importantly, I have actually crunched the energy numbers in order to establish what it will actually take to get British Columbia to a 100% fossil fuel-free status.

An examination of my writing will demonstrate that I have remained strictly non-partisan. I am an unpaid blogger and the only cause I shill for is evidence-based decision-making. Anyone uncertain about the facts I present at my blog can check other non-partisan sources, the best of the lot (for my British Columbian readers) being the EnergyBC website. It is a great resource for professionals and lay readers alike and represents the investment of thousands of hours of work by some very bright minds out of the University of Victoria. It is a credit to its founder (Dr. Whiticar) and the UVic community and should be on every high-school science teacher’s list of resources for their students.

Any discussion of British Columbia’s energy future should also recognize the current geopolitical situation. In December world leaders passed the Paris Agreement at the end of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP21). Under Canada’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Canada agreed to drop our greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. Moreover, Canada’s NDC was written when the international climate change goal was to hold global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. In Paris, we agreed to a much more aggressive target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This means essentially cutting fossil fuels out of our transportation and home heating energy budgets by the middle of this century. Let’s look at what this means from an energy budget standpoint.

As I describe in my Huffington Post article Dispelling Some Myths About British Columbia’s Energy Picture:

In order to achieve a “fossil fuel-free B.C.” we would need to somehow replace the almost 60 per cent of our energy needs currently being met with fossil fuels through alternative sources. To even make a small dent in that demand means we are going to need to develop a LOT of new electricity. Unfortunately, we have already exploited almost all of the easily accessible hydro.

To put the numbers into perspective I looked at our energy future using a new unit of power a “Site C Dam equivalent”. As I wrote at my personal blog:

Consider that the Site C dam, once completed, is expected to generate 5,100 GWh of electricity. To replace the energy currently provided by gasoline and diesel fuels only, we would need to find the energy equivalent to almost 15 Site C dams! [I later estimated that efficiency gains associated with electrifying transportation could bring that number down to 9].

Remember we have only been talking liquid fuels here. For a 100 per cent fossil fuel-free B.C., we would also need to replace the natural gas used mostly for industrial purposes and for home and water heating. That would represent another 16 Site C dam equivalents.

Any knowledgeable observer looking at these numbers would recognize that British Columbia is nowhere near ready to help Canada meet our Paris Agreement commitments. Given our current electrical supply we are approximately 25 Site C Dam equivalents away from our goal. Considering the lead time associated with major power projects some might argue that we are already almost out of time. What is abundantly clear, however, is that we will need a lot of fossil fuel-free electricity in the very near future if we are to do our part to arrest global climate change. As the numbers clearly show, the Site C Dam project barely gets us started on the road to our fossil fuel-free future but at least it will help move us in the right direction.

Let’s make something else perfectly clear, there may be some legitimate complaints about how First Nations have been consulted in the Site C Dam decision. I am not fully informed about the complexities of that discussion and that is not the topic of this blog post. I am only dealing with energy needs in this post. What is clear from the discussion to this point is that any observer who claims that British Columbia does not need the power to be generated by the Site C Dam is either being disingenuous or simply does not understand either British Columbia’s or Canada’s energy picture/needs.

Having established that we need a lot of power, the question that must be asked is how do we go about generating that power? Happily BC Hydro has done a great job of evaluating various energy generation and storage technologies including establishing approximate costs for the various options. BC Hydro’s November 2013 Integrated Resource Plan is a useful resource but one that has likely only been read by a handful of energy-policy wonks. Similarly, the 2014-2015 power generation options update, which updates the 2013 data, helps further clarify our needs. A serious read of these documents makes it abundantly clear that BC Hydro cannot do all the work on its own. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure (including transmission lines) that need to be planned for and constructed if we are to meet our Paris Agreement commitments. This is where the IPPs come into the story.

British Columbia, like many constituencies, has recognized that the public sector cannot pay for all the power projects we need right away. We need to find private sector partners. That is why BC has championed the public private partnership (P3) approach. For non-British Columbians a P3 is a method of paying for infrastructure where a private partner takes on the risk of building infrastructure in exchange for guarantees that they can recoup their costs through sales or tariffs over a set period of time. BC Hydro has an entire section of their web site explaining how the IPP process works. As BC Hydro puts it:

BC Hydro acquires power from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to help meet electricity needs. IPPs develop and operate projects such as wind, water and biomass. IPPs include power production companies, municipalities, First Nations and customers. IPPs provide approximately 18,902 GWh electricity each year.

To avoid any confusion, BC Hydro has a detailed document explaining their procurement practices with respect to IPPs. In order to ensure the cost-certainty necessary to finance investments of this size, IPPs are generally provided with long-term contracts. Long-term contracts don’t just provide cost certainty for the producer; however, they also provide BC Hydro with an understanding of their expenses for years to come. Because the contracts are written for the long-term, they do not follow the ebb and flow of the day-to-day energy market. This means that some days BC Hydro gets a better deal and others the IPPs get the benefit. This is where the partisans really love to play their games. They love to report how BC Hydro is supposedly overpaying for power. Oddly enough many of these people are the same ones who demand that we work to achieve our Paris Agreement commitments and fight global warming. Their cognitive dissonance is almost painful to watch from an outsider’s perspective.

I can fully understand that political animals are going to act like political animals, but even the most politically partisan observers should be able to recognize facts when they are presented in a clear manner so let’s summarize the situation:

BC is doing well, at the moment, with respect to energy demand. While we meet most of our electrical energy needs using large-reservoir hydro, the majority of our energy needs are being met by using fossil fuels. As a nation Canada has pledged to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. This can only be accomplished by substantially increasing our supply of electricity. To do so we will need to develop alternative energy supplies as most of our readily-available, large-reservoir hydro has been tapped. Given our future energy needs we also cannot ignore readily available large energy sources like the Site C project.

Given the extent of our future energy needs we need to start planning and funding future energy projects as soon as possible. Our national and provincial governments do not have the financial or professional resources to manage this transition alone. This means that they need to access the vast financial and intellectual resources of the private sector. The only way to involve the private sector is to provide the private sector with guarantees that we will buy the energy they produce at a fair price and we need to provide those guarantees in the form of enforceable contracts.

Let’s get real here, either the partisans out there are interested in meeting our international commitments or they are not. We need to have a serious discussion about energy in BC and that discussion needs to incorporate all the data. This topic is too important to be left for the partisans.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism, Fossil Fuel Free Future, General Politics | 11 Comments

A pragmatic environmentalist blue-skies a renewable energy project

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Blair

I have written a lot in this blog about renewable energy. Most of my blogging on the topic has involved looking with a pragmatic eye at various potential renewable energy technologies including geothermal (Part I and Part II), biofuels  and wind. Because I have written a lot of critical prose about renewable energy technologies some have suggested that I must be some sort of “shill” for conventional energy interests. As a scientist I don’t view reviewing a technology from a technical/pragmatic perspective as being an attack but it takes all kinds. I will simply point out that I am strongly in favour of regionally-appropriate renewable energy and have pushed for BC to move even more deeply into renewable energy especially geothermal. As for being a shill, as I have written before, I accept no compensation for my blogging and thus think of myself as an unpaid shill for good science and intelligent evidence-based environmental decision making.

Now, I will admit that sometimes being a pragmatist can be a bit tiring. Sometimes it is fun to be the dreamer, suggesting ideas unencumbered by considerations of the political consequences or financial viability of a plan. Well today it is my turn to be the dreamer as I am going to suggest an idea that has been bouncing around in my mind for quite a while. The plan makes use of the physical geography and characteristics of Vancouver Island to generate and store energy by combining wind energy and pumped-hydro projects. My blue-sky plan, as imagined, would work equally well along much of the North Coast of BC. The reason I am emphasizing Vancouver Island in this post, however; is because that is where I lived for much of my life and Vancouver Island has a problem. Vancouver Island is energy poor. It does not generate enough local power to supply its needs. Instead, Vancouver Island is supplied with the majority of its power via transmission lines from the mainland. Even though BC Hydro is working to reinforce the system the island is subject to outages in storms or when the lines go down.  Having a reliable local power supply would be welcomed by citizens and industries alike.

Now anyone who is taking time to read this blog must already be aware of the potential of wind energy. As I have discussed elsewhere, wind is a diffuse energy source (with low energy density). As such, there are large parts of the globe where wind would not be a regionally appropriate way to generate power. That being said, there are parts of the world where harnessing the wind makes a lot of sense, with the West Coast of British Columbia being one such place. Nothing I have written so far should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the energy sector. The Cape Scott wind farm , located 35 km west of Port Hardy, is only one of the projects either on the books or in construction designed to take advantage of the windy nature of our west coast. This document from the BC government presents a map showing more than 300 potential wind energy sites being investigated for project development.

The downside of wind is that it is an intermittent energy source. When the wind is blowing a wind farm can generate a lot of power but when the winds are still so are the generators. What many may not realize is that the wind’s intermittency actually hurts it from an economic perspective. In some places, like Germany and Denmark with high amounts of renewable in their mix, when the wind blows it actually drives the price of the energy it produces down. In extreme cases this can actually result in over-supply and negative energy prices. The problem is that, due to intermittency, power producers have to keep a certain amount of base capacity online. If the wind supplies too much energy the utilities have to dump the power. In BC we have rapidly-dispatchable power in the form of large reservoir hydro, but addressing intermittency is still a big issue in power circles.

While wind energy represents a potential future energy source for BC, British Columbia’s primary energy bounty is in hydroelectricity. While virtually every British Columbian knows about large reservoir hydroelectric power and most have heard of run-of-the-river hydro there is a third type of hydro we seldom hear discussed: pumped-hydro storage. In pumped hydro storage (image) a reservoir at a lower elevation is linked with a similar reservoir at a higher elevation via a tunnel with turbines. When power supplies are low, the water from the upper reservoir is used to run the turbines producing power. When excess power is available the process is reversed and water is pumped back up from the lower to the upper reservoir to be used another day. There are a number of different ways to operate a pumped-hydro system, there are reservoir-to-reservoir (fresh and seawater), open versus closed loops and even pumped hydro to underground storage. A pretty decent overview can be gleaned from this presentation.

So in this post we have discussed an intermittent energy source and a useful way to store intermittent energy for future use. Combining the two seems like an obvious fit. This is where British Columbia’s geography comes into play. As I mentioned previously, BC Hydro has a map of potential wind energy projects. BC Hydro has also produced an Evaluation of Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Potential which includes a map of potential pumped-hydro locations. Overlapping the two maps shows an amazing confluence. On Vancouver Island alone BC Hydro identifies sites with many thousands of megawatt/hours of pumped-hydro potential proximate to some of the windiest portions of our coast. Stepping away from Vancouver Island for a moment we see that the northern coast shows a similar confluence.

Okay, I can’t do it, every man has his limit and I have reached mine.  While my proposed plan is elegant it has a serious downside in that it would not be cheap. If one did the numbers the energy price, by the kilowatt hour, would be more expensive than what we can buy on the spot market. Unfortunately, as I describe in my post Starting a Dialogue – Can we really get to a “fossil fuel-free BC”?, we are likely to need that power to replace fossil fuels used in our automobiles and trucks. Canada’s INDC under the Paris Agreement calls for Canada to decarbonize our transportation sector. The numbers to carry out that task are frightening. In British Columbia alone we need on the order of 46,000 GWh of power to run our automobiles and trucks even when accounting for the efficiency gains associated with converting to electric power. In a relative sense, this represents thepower generated by the equivalent of 9 Site C dams. As for achieving a fossil fuel-free BC that number does not even consider replacing the natural gas we use to keep our homes warm and our water hot.

If we are to meet our obligations under the Paris Agreement, we are going to need to decarbonize our transportation sector and that, sad to say, is going to cost money. Money is needed in the form of capital investment in infrastructure and money in the form of higher power bills to pay for that new infrastructure. I keep reading that the Public Utilities Commission projects reduced future electricity needs in BC. This is used as an excuse by activists to fight the Site C project. My question to the BCUC is how does that plan square with our commitments under the Paris Agreement? I really wish someone would had the power to force them to answer would ask that question as I am baffled by how in a world fighting climate change they could ignore our future needs for electricity as we look to replace fossil fuels in the transportation and housing sectors?  Going back to my blue-sky project. In a fossil fuel-free BC the costs of combined wind energy/pumped-hydro projects look pretty reasonable, not that I expect to see any of them anytime soon.

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

On Pragmatic Environmentalism, the Paris Agreement and where do we go from here?

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Blair

This weekend they passed the Paris Agreement at the end of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP21). As I have discussed in previous posts, it is my opinion that the Agreement involved serious overreach. I have written about why I think the empty symbolism of the deal will hurt it from an implementation perspective. That being said I am a pragmatic environmentalist and as a pragmatist I work in the world we have and not the one I wish we had. Since we now live in a world where the Paris Agreement has been signed, we must decide how we move forward. The intention of this blog post is to discuss one possible approach. My approach is underscored by the understanding that we need to abandon the outmoded left/right rubric of the old environmental movement; we need to bring in the private sector to invest heavily in alternative energy and the transportation sectors; and most importantly we need to establish how we can get as much clean electricity as possible to make up for the void as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

A lot has been written about the Agreement so I won’t dwell on it, except to point out that we have not agreed to any enforceable emissions reductions. Apparently this was done for the practical reason that any enforceable reductions would need to be passed by the US Congress and nothing is getting through that quagmire. Instead we have agreed to a process of open and transparent reporting and continual improvement. For a practical perspective all we have done is agree to do what we promised we would do. You see, prior to COP21 each country was expected to provide Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). An INDC represents a “climate action plan” explaining how we can “cost effectively meet their stated objective of keeping a global temperature rise to under 2 degree C”. Canada’s INDC calls on us to drop our greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. Admittedly this was what we planned to do under the 2 degrees Celsius target; presumably we will need to do more under a 1.5 degrees Celsius target, however; in keeping with the idea of working with what we have, under our INDC we agreed to

  • reduce transportation sector emissions
  • phase out coal in power
  • phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and
  • reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

The Canadian INDC includes two major provisos:

Canada’s regulatory approach is aligned with that of the United States, where appropriate, recognizing the importance of cooperative action in an integrated North American marketplace. Canada will continue take cooperative action with its continental trading partners, particularly the United States, and will work towards further action in integrated sectors of the economy, including energy and transportation.

Canadian provinces and territories have significant authorities over the fields of natural resources, energy, and the environment. Each has its own legal framework and each has its own policies and measures that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mechanisms exist for the federal government to engage with Canadian provinces and territories, as well as other key partners and stakeholders, on climate change. In particular, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, a minister-led intergovernmental forum, will be addressing climate change on an ongoing basis

The critical features of the Canadian INDC involve the link between Canadian and American efforts and underscore the limitations on our federal government due to the nature of our constitutional democracy.

Under our constitutional structure the federal government has the ability to unilaterally work on the HFCs and methane emissions issues. The phasing out of coal power and the transportation sector changes, however; need heavy help from the private sector and the provinces. This leaves us with the question of how do we do it?

The first thing we, as an environmental movement, need to do is discard the old left/right rubric in the environmental field. As I have written previously, the right is not the enemy of the environment and the left is not always its friend. The greenest Prime Minister in our history was Brian Mulroney. Internationally, the Montreal Protocol would never have been passed without the strong support of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher was the first major politician to develop policies to address climate change. Put simply, the way the modern environmental movement has aligned itself with progressives and anarchists has done nothing to build popular support for the movement and in some cases have hurt those efforts.

My warning to the environmental movement is to go the non-partisan route, because, frankly, the progressives and anarchists have their own agenda. When push comes to shove they will abandon the environmental movement the minute it ceases to remain useful in advancing their cause. The funny thing is that the progressives and anarchists aren’t even hiding what they want to do. I would suggest listening to them and taking them at their words. When a progressive socialist says the Paris deal:

“provides an important hook on which people can hang their demands”

environmentalists should be very worried. Heck it has only been a day and I have already seen it starting with my favourite transit campaigner Eric Doherty out there stating:

OK @JustinTrudeau, I’m ready to help enact #ParisAgreement! #Nopipelines! No #MasseyBridge! Yes to #Transit

Upgrading old transportation infrastructure (like the Massey Tunnel in the Vancouver region) is a straightforward requirement of local government and the suggestion that we should refrain from updating infrastructure because of the Paris Agreement is simply ridiculous. As for the environment, it should not be a “hook” used to push a socialist agenda.

As I have written previously, the main reason we need to abandon this silly left/right idea is because history has shown us that every surge in environmental awareness has occurred during times of strong economic performance. Look at the historical record and check out how environmental issues fall off the table during economic downturns. Look at how fast and how far the environment fell off the public conscience following the crash of 1998. The lesson of history is that if you want to improve our environmental awareness and environmental performance you need a thriving economy. The current aim of the socialists and progressives to stagnate our economy in the name of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, is thus guaranteed to backfire. In good times governments have the money to invest in research and the environment, in bad times those priorities can become sidelined. So if the environmental movement wants to help us work our way out of this dilemma, it needs to ensure that the average voter is not worrying about his/her next paycheck. In a global sense, the environmental movement has to understand that hungry families care more about feeding their children than protecting the environment and that 800 million Indians living in energy poverty will choose coal power over nothing.

Another reason for abandoning the antiquated left/right rubric is that the public sector does not have the resources to make the fundamental changes necessary to fundamentally re-organize our transportation/energy systems. We need resources from people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to change the way we run our vehicles. We need companies like Ballard Power Systems and Westport Innovations Inc. to lead the way away from fossil fuel and/or diesel engine technologies to cleaner, lower carbon alternatives. We need to encourage innovation and private sector involvement in this task and that is exactly what the socialists don’t want to see happen. Instead they look towards the command economies that gave us the Lada and the Yugo.

As environmentalists, we also need to acknowledge that we need to compromise to get to the next phase of energy. We need to develop Geothermal, allow the construction of transmission lines and we need to find additional sources for the necessary rare earth metals needed for our low-carbon future. One area that I have previously discussed, in depth, is the reality that if we are going to make major cuts in our carbon emissions in the transportation sector we need to make up that energy from other sources. As I wrote in my blog post Starting a Dialogue – Can we really get to a “fossil fuel-free BC”? if we were to completely decarbonize our transportation sector we would need to replace it with about 46,000 GWh of power. That is the equivalent of about 9 Site C dams. So when activists say that we don’t need clean energy from projects like Site C, then you know they either aren’t serious about addressing climate change or simply lack the depth of understanding of what it will take to achieve the goals they profess to desire.

The environmental issue is big enough that it cannot be faced by governments alone. We need to unleash the innovative power of our whole economy. We need to encourage investment and provide rewards for those willing to use their financial resources and intellect to advance the cause. The last thing we need is for government to go about trying to pick winners and losers since history has shown that government is very bad at picking winners and losers and exceedingly bad at fostering innovation.

For those who like the visuals:

Naomi

Eric

Addendum: For an interesting alternative to the left/right rubric consider this post on upwingers vs. downwingers in the environmental field.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments