A case against the empty symbolism of the 1.5C climate change goal

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Blair

In my last post on Pragmatic Environmentalism I brought up the topic of Canada endorsing a call to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. I bemoaned the idea as being the equivalent of promising “a unicorn in every pot and a hoverboard in every garage”. In retrospect that line might sound a wee bit snarky but what I was trying get across is that the scientific community is in general agreement that holding climate change to 2 degrees Celsius is pretty much an impossible goal so going for 1.5 C isn’t exactly in the cards. That being said, since I wrote my post I have read a number of opinions supporting Canada’s call to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In this post I will expand on the points from my last post to make a case against the empty symbolism of Canada calling for limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Let’s start with the obvious first question: is restraining global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius even possible? The short answer to that is: No. The long answer requires that we explain a number of assumptions. As regular readers of this blog know, I am a Lukewarmer who believes that climate sensitivity will end up on the lower end of the IPCC’s range. The reason climate sensitivity is important is that it ultimately defines how much carbon dioxide is necessary to achieve a set amount of heating. [Readers please note: today’s post is for the policy types so I won’t discuss technical details such as TCR, ECS or any of those topic here] However, for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to stick to the absolute mainstream of consensus science. For that I will refer back to my previous post where I discussed the IPCC carbon budget necessary to achieve a high likelihood (over 75%) of not overshooting 2 degrees Celsius: 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (Gt CO2). As discussed in this paper in Nature Geoscience

Two thirds of the CO2 emission quota consistent with a 2 °C temperature limit has already been used, and the total quota will likely be exhausted in a further 30 years at the 2014 emissions rates.

What this all means is that we are already on a very tight timeline to meet a 2 degrees Celsius goal.

According to the IPCC at the 2014 rate of carbon emissions we will exceed the carbon budget necessary to achieve a 50% likelihood of not overshooting 1.5 degrees Celsius in approximately 10 years. Now many pundits have marveled that in 2015 it appears that the global carbon emissions may have peaked but absolutely no one believes that they can go to net zero carbon emissions 10 years from now. Admittedly some researchers and think tanks have some pretty complicated plans to achieve a goal of zero carbon emissions, but not one can get us to where we need to be in 10 years. The best that some of the more ambitious plans can do involves implementing negative emissions. To explain, negative emissions are the panacea of the climate change debate, one might say its cold fusion. The theory goes because there is no practical way to avoid overshooting our goal and then we will use use negative emissions to get us back to where we need to be. Deus ex machine, Bob’s your uncle and everything is better in the end. Unfortunately be it carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), ocean fertilization or any of the other suggested technologies the negative emission technologies are all still in the research phase and for the most part more than a decade away from practical implementation. So to finish this point, there is simply no way, using anything less than magical thinking, to achieve a global goal of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Having established that 1.5 degrees Celsius is not feasible, why would Canada be endorsing a call to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius? The answer in a nutshell is symbolism. For a compelling read on the positive symbolism of such a pledge I direct you to read Simon Donner’s blog post on the subject. In that blog Dr. Donner suggests that signing on to the pledge

is about respect. In pushing to include reference to a 1.5 °C limit, Canada is saying that the people of small island developing states and vulnerable countries like Bangladesh matter.

Now I am all about showing respect but I am also a self-declared pragmatist and what Dr. Donner and his fellow-thinkers appear to have forgotten is that sometimes symbolic gestures can set back a cause. We live in a world of Realpolitik and in that world you can’t afford to make commitments you are not willing to keep.

As a student of history I am reminded of the George Santayana quote: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Looking into the recent past we can all find a relevant parallel in the field of climate change: Jean Chretien and Canada’s Kyoto pledge. For those of you not versed in political history, during the negotiation for the Kyoto Protocol Jean Chretien informed his negotiators to meet or beat the American commitment. For him it was about the symbolism. Unfortunately the US negotiators had a similar mandate and as a matter of symbolism they ended up agreeing to numbers that were overly-ambitious. The numbers were so ambitious that PM Chretien essentially decided to write them off. It is as well to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb as they say. For the better part of a decade Canada did absolutely nothing to address its carbon emissions and when it came time to pay the piper Canada instead withdrew from Kyoto. It is generally agreed in policy circles that had Canada agreed to set reasonable goals, the Chretien government could have sold them to the public and got buy-in for the pain necessary to make them happen, but by promising the moon and the stars he failed to achieve any political traction.

Continuing our historical theme let’s look at a case where positive change was achieved: The Montreal Protocol. In the negotiations for the Montreal Protocol the Canadian government looked at what could be achieved and then agreed to that in negotiations. Because the goal was doable the implementation went quite smoothly. The Canadian government got onside and got agreement from its Provincial and Territorial partners. More importantly from an implementation perspective, because the goals were reasonable there was general buy-in nationally, this resulted in unexpected improvements in performance and strengthening of the Protocol over the years. There is a reason that it is considered good business to undersell and over deliver and not oversell and under deliver.

In discussing the Montreal Protocol I mentioned some very important players who need to be involved in any attempt to achieve real carbon emission reductions in Canada: the Provinces and Territories. Contrary to what many have claimed for the last decade, Canada is not a dictatorship. In order for the federal government to make changes it needs buy-in from the provinces. Unfortunately for PM Trudeau, provincial premiers have their own issues and are wont to spend their personal political capital to make him look better. Ask Premier Notley how proposing a carbon tax is working for her popularity. Now consider that Premier Notley did virtually everything right in the lead-up to her carbon tax. She picked a strong non-partisan Panel that did a tremendous job of public consultation and they came up with a very reasonable Climate Leadership Plan. Now imagine PM Trudeau going back to Premier Notley to say, “that was great but we need much deeper cuts much sooner?” The speed with which she would show him the door would be interesting to behold. Ontario, Quebec (and now Manitoba) meanwhile are all implementing their combined carbon market. Imagine PM Trudeau’s reception when he drops the bomb on them? As for BC, Premier Clark has an election in May 2017 and does not have any political capital to spare.

To summarize the above, in the real world, the world of realpolitik, you only make promises and commitments you are willing to keep. If you want to be treated as a player in the game you can’t say one thing on the world stage and then do another on the home front. That might have been possible in a time without the world-wide web and streaming video but is not the case anymore. If you want to be a serious government and to be treated like a serious government then when you make a commitment on the global stage you have to keep it. If the Canadian government wants to make real, palpable change then it needs to figure out the most we can achieve and then commit to doing so. Empty symbolic gestures will certainly garner praise from activists and make for good headlines, but once the drinks are all drunk and the partiers have all gone home our government will have some hard work to do. Let’s not let these heady days get to our heads. We need to be practical and pragmatic and set achievable goals and then work hard to achieve them. If we are lucky (with lower climate sensitivity or some marvelous technological breakthrough) then like with the Montreal Protocols we can set loftier goals or tighten our timelines in the future. But for now let’s stop with the empty symbolism and start with doing the ground work and building the foundation for real change.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Climate Change, Climate Change Politics | 7 Comments

On Pragmatic Environmentalism: Being the Responsible Adult in the Room

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Blair

I wasn’t sure what I wanted write about this weekend only to open up the paper (okay figuratively since I read the paper online) to discover that my next topic had pretty much dropped itself into my lap. There in The Globe and Mail I read that Canada’s Environment Minister had:

endorsed a call from small island nations to hold global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, putting Ottawa out of step with the United States, which has maintained a 2 C target.

As a pragmatic environmentalist, my first response was to sigh deeply in recognition that my fears about our new Liberal Government were coming true. I had such high hopes that the new Liberal Government would turn Canada into a serious voice on the world stage on the topic of the environment. After suffering a decade of the “Harper Government” shirking on our environmental commitments even as it quietly throttled our federal government’s ability to protect the environment or do good science I knew we could do better. Anyone familiar with the field of climate change knows, the scientific community is in general agreement that holding climate change to 2 degrees Celsius may be an impossible goal. For our new Environment Minister to suggest that we endorse a call to achieve 1.5 degrees Celsius shows her (and our new Liberal Government) to be just as unserious about the environment as the Harper Government was, only in the opposite direction. They are looking to make big headlines but cannot have any reasonable plan or means to accomplish the goals they broadcast to the world. If they had promised “a unicorn in every pot and a hoverboard in every garage” they would not have been any less credible.

The story reminded me that not too long ago I was asked to write a bit about Pragmatic Environmentalism. I have written a couple posts broadly on the topic at this blog. One post addressed the fact that “Environmentalism and Pragmatism are not mutually exclusive” and one detailed my personal position as a modern PELE: a Pragmatic Environmentalist, Lukewarmer, Ecomodernist. What I came to recognize was that while my personal version of pragmatic environmentalism suffuses this blog; I have never really explained what being a “pragmatic environmentalist” really means.

In a personal sense I see pragmatic environmentalism as about being the responsible adult in the room when dealing with environmental issues. I am the parent of three small children and as a parent I am often called on to be the arbiter. When conflict arises I am called to listen to all the stories; to look at the situation from a practical standpoint; and using the benefits of my personal experience and knowledge to make a decision that is as fair as possible to all sides while always acknowledging our shared reality and limitations. Sometimes it means giving one child priority over another. Other times it means explaining that we don’t have the resources to get all the things we want right away and that we have to make do with less or even make do without.

In looking as my role as a father you can now see how I came upon my position on pipelines in Canada. As I have written previously, we live in a society that is, like it or not, 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.

In North America 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. 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. So a pragmatic environmentalist really has no choice, he or she has to push to ensure that the petroleum products are transported in the safest, most environmentally respectful method possible even as we look for ways to reduce our reliance on these products.

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. I am all for Energy East as I have written numerous times on this blog and support the Trans-Mountain expansion as well.

Some have suggested that we can simply import our oil from abroad but I am pragmatic on that topic as well. While I recognize that the term “Ethical Oil” has become something of a hot potato, because of issues surrounding its origins, I believe strongly in the concept behind the term. As a pragmatist I want my personal gasoline purchases to go towards subsidizing Medicare and not subsidizing a despot or paying for a tyrant to build barrel bombs to drop on innocent civilians. 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.

Some might suggest that by calling pragmatic environmentalists the “adults” I am casting stones towards my less moderate peers. My response is that if the shoes fits wear it. To my eye, many modern environmental activists are like well-meaning teenagers. They are typically relatively intelligent but lack the wider experience (and scientific education) necessary to make informed decisions. Often, like teenagers, they let their hearts, rather than their heads make their decisions for them. As an example, consider the protestors who chained themselves to the gate of the Chevron refinery in Burnaby. Sure it looked good and made them heroes to their friends, except the Chevron refinery supplies much of the fuel necessary to keep Vancouver running. Shut its gates for any length of time and the food trucks will stop running, the ambulances will stop picking up patients and the fire trucks won’t be responding to fire calls. There was no thought to long-term consequences in those activist’s actions, it was just about feeling good in the moment and making a splash in the media.

Moreover, many of these “teenagers” view their calling as being so important that in their minds nothing they do is ever wrong. In the adult world this is called “noble cause corruption”. As an example, this weekend one of my regular foils decided it was time to do some blogging on fracking fluids. Instead of finding links and supplying them to his readers he decided to scan a reference book and post critical chunks of it on his website. When I questioned him on the possible copyright violation his reply was:

People have a right to know what is being pumped into the ground @BlairKing_ca. Companies have a problem they can sue me. #fracking #cdnpoli (ref)

Let’s look at this activist’s “logic”. Because some corporation somewhere does something this person doesn’t like (fracking) he feels fully justified taking the work from an innocent third party (probably an academic author). That innocent author spent time and effort collecting and compiling the information that activist wanted. Without that reference the activist would not be in a position to make his case. So how is the activist going to pay back that innocent author for her/her hard work and devotion? By reducing the author’s ability to get paid compensation for all that hard work and devotion. I’m sure the activist will be happy when the publisher decides to red-light the update to the book due to poor sales. But in this case the activist couldn’t care less. He has a “cause” and his “cause” is the most important thing in the world to him. When I challenged him on it I got the reply above with many of his followers on Twitter expressing similar sentiments. The most humorous was hearing that I had an “eau de shill”. Actually maybe I was being too generous. Teenagers at least understand a bit about personal responsibility. You have to go back to the toddler stage of development to reach an age-level where ego-driven personal narcissism is comparable to that of many of the environmental activists I encounter on a daily basis.

To return to our topic, being a pragmatic environmentalist is about making the personal choices to do our best even if it only represents a drop in a bucket. Sometimes countries like Canada have to take a lead. There is an old expression that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We as Canadians have done very well in the global lottery and maybe it is time that we took that first step to show other countries that it can be done. British Columbia showed the rest of Canada that a carbon tax did not necessarily mean the death of our economy and so moving towards a fossil fuel-free future may be something we can do as well. Pragmatic environmentalism also means being a environmentalist in its own right and working as individuals to reduce our own personal emissions. As I have written previously, I have been living a low-carbon lifestyle since long before we even had a term to describe what I was doing. In doing so I hope to show that we can accomplish our own small bit on a personal level as well.

Posted in Environmentalism and Ecomodernism, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Deconstructing the 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight scenarios – Part III Issues with energy storage

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Blair

Last night I got drawn into a very long Twitter discussion with an acolyte of Dr. Marc Z. Jacobson and his colleagues in the Wind, Water and Sunlight (WWS) series. The discussion revolved around the most recent in Dr. Jacobson (et al.’s) stream of road maps for a 100% Clean and Renewable (WWS) future. The newest is a roadmap for 139 Countries of the World. As regular readers of my blog know, I have banged my head against the 100% WWS drum a couple times, but since Dr. Jacobson continues on his journey, I feel I should probably continue to accompany him. The topic of last night’s discussion revolved around energy storage technologies in the 100% WWS series. As I have mentioned in my previous blogs (discussed below) Dr. Jacobson (et al.) tend to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what combination of WWS will meet each scenario in each region/state/country but in doing so they gloss over important topics like raw material limitations and energy storage. Having looked at the former previously, today I intend to look at the latter.

For those of you new to the cycle of papers Dr. Jacobson has produced in the series, it all began (in my estimation) with an article titled “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security” (hereafter Jacobson 2009). Jacobson 2009 created the underlying energy framework for his subsequent work. All his subsequent papers rely heavily of the analyses in Jacobson 2009. As I describe in my post Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part I Why no nuclear power? the foundation for this series is definitely not built on bedrock. In Jacobson 2009, Dr. Jacobson creates what can best be described as a “unique” ranking system to establish that wind, water and sunlight are the best energy sources to power our future society. Most people in the renewable field agree that these are definitely critical energy sources for a fossil fuel-free future. Curiously one other energy source, considered critical by other researchers, is discounted by Dr. Jacobson: nuclear energy. As I describe in my post, in Jacobson 2009, Dr. Jacobson eliminates nuclear as a useful option through what can best described as an inventive approach. The approach includes calculating mortality associated with nuclear energy based on a future nuclear exchange scenario and discounting the use nuclear power internationally out of fear of nuclear proliferation. Yes, you read that correctly, he apparently feared that nuclear power plants in the United States, China and a Russia might encourage these three nuclear powers to develop nuclear weapons? As if the only thing keeping Canada, Sweden and Germany from producing nuclear weapons was access to nuclear power plants? Finally, in a coup de gras, he uses what can nicely be described as an outlier from the academic literature, to assign an incredibly high carbon footprint for nuclear power. For details on this discussion, feel free to look at my earlier blog post.

Building on Jacobson 2009, Dr. Jacobson and Dr. Delucchi prepared a pair of papers titled “Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power”, Part I and Part II (called 100% WWS World Part I and 100% WWS World Part II hereafter). These built on the intellectual framework of Jacobson 2009 by crunching the numbers on how 100% WWS could be used to power the world in a very general sense. The papers look at the various energy scenarios and argue that if scaled up they would provide adequate power given a lot of interesting assumptions. One of the biggest assumptions, which I discuss in my blog post Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part II What about those pesky rare earth metals? is that the critical raw materials for use in these technologies can be obtained both easily and at a reasonable cost. As I point out in my blog post, the assumptions of the paper are belied by actual planetary material limitations. As I discuss, even supplies of the simplest elements like Lithium are under strain by current usage rates. Expansion for global use would simply bust the market.  Certainly we can mine the sea for Lithium, as suggested by Dr. Jacobson, but only at a huge cost in energy and money. As a recent study points out to simply replicate our current lithium mineral production by filtering ocean water we would need 10% of the present world production of energy power! At that energy cost for production Lithium would be more valuable than platinum is today. Somehow I cannot see any scenario where we could make batteries affordable at that price for Lithium. People would be stealing cars just for the batteries. As for the suggestion that we could enhance our supplies through recycling? Well the battery needs of those scenarios would require 100% usage of Lithium, leaving no Lithium to exploit via recycling.

Having addressed the initial shortcomings of the 100% WWS papers, I will now consider another topic not previously covered in my writing: energy storage and loss. Throughout the series of 100% WWS papers the various authors have glossed over the issue of energy storage as a means of buffering for intermittency of the energy supply/power needs equations. In Jacobson 2009, Dr. Jacobson provides a very brief paragraph (124 words in a 23 page paper):

A fourth method of dealing with intermittency is to store excess intermittent energy in batteries (e.g., for use in BEVs), hydrogen gas (e.g., for use in HFCVs), pumped hydroelectric power, compressed air (e.g., in underground caverns or turbine nacelles), flywheels, or a thermal storage medium (as done with CSP). One calculation shows that the storage of electricity in car batteries, not only to power cars but also to provide a source of electricity back to the grid (vehicle-to-grid, or V2G), could stabilize wind power if 50% of US electricity were powered by wind and 3% of vehicles were used to provide storage.113 The only disadvantage of storage for grid use rather than direct use is conversion losses in both directions rather than in one.

I note that he correctly identifies that vehicle-to-grid storage results in conversion losses in both directions but does not quantify those losses.

In 100% WWS Part II, Jacobson and Delucchi repeat the mantra of storage in “batteries, hydrogen gas, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air (e.g in underground caverns or turbine nacelles), flywheels, or thermal storage units”. As with the previous work, an examination of the 100% WWS papers finds a dearth of information about energy loss in the conversion and storage of energy. This is interesting because one of the big points in the 100% WWS premise is that by electrifying everything we can generate major savings in energy use. As described in the papers, Dr Jacobson sees savings of up to 30% in energy requirements by converting from fossil fuels to electric vehicles. Yet with the exception of transmission losses and battery decay, the papers don’t address the losses associated with any of the alternative technologies suggested. So let’s look at some of these.

Author’s Note:  Coincidental to the production of this blog post a new paper by Dr. Jacobson and his team was published in PNAS titled: Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes. It addresses a number of the storage issues identified in this post. Dr. Jacobson was kind enough to supply a pre-print with all the supplementary information included. Specifically it addresses some of the questions I raise about storage technologies and also points out that the paper only addresses the 48 contiguous states. As such some of the text below has been struck-through and some additional comments added in italics.

One of the solutions suggested in the 100% WWS series to address both the lack of raw materials (like Lithium) and the need for dispersed storage is the idea of “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) storage. Realistically V2G will form an important way of managing energy supply in a fossil fuel-free future, but Jacobson (et al.) fail to include energy losses associated with this storage medium in their calculations. Looking at the literature, the generally accepted figure appears to be that that the charging of electric vehicles through the use of an on-board inverter has about a 5% -10 % energy loss per cycle. A study of V2G storage in Poland showed a charge/discharge efficiency loss of 22%. This number matches the rest of the literature pretty effectively. In my reading of the 100% WWS series I cannot see anywhere where this loss is reflected in the necessity to add additional generating capacity. The series includes a consideration of transmission losses but says nothing of charging/discharging efficiency? One would think if you are counting on energy demand to go down by around 30% from conversion efficiency and around 7% from end-use efficiency you should also consider how the 22% loss via charge/discharge efficiency will affect your calculations? An examination of the follow-up paper indicates that they have left V2G storage out of their follow-up analyses.

Another suggested energy storage solution in the 100% WWS series is the use of underground thermal energy storage (UTES), borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) or aquifer thermal energy storage where excess heat is stored underground in summer to produce heat in winter and cold is stored underground in winter to provide cooling in summer. This was the topic of the Twitter discussion that served as the impetus for this blog post. A great example of a BTES system is Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, Alberta. Currently Drake Landing is providing over 90% of its residential space heating needs through use of solar thermal energy. This is an excellent thing and worth pursuing; but there are drawbacks. The most obvious is the loss of energy in the system. In the best BTES systems you can still expect to lose 33% of the solar energy collected via heat loss to the surroundings. Incorporating a heat pump will improve this number at a loss of some additional energy to the heat pump. Looking at Dr Jacobson’s numbers the results don’t look nearly as good when you realize that up to one third of the energy collected by the 100% WWS system could be lost in the storage phase of the cycle. In an extreme locale like Fairbanks Alaska, in winter, there is not a lot of WWS to work with so losing one third of the minimal energy you generated during the “day” might leave you suffering through a very long and cold “night”. In the follow-up paper Dr. Jacobson uses a UTES efficiency of 56% which seems a reasonable number for this analysis.

Storage losses aren’t the only drawback to these underground storage systems. The creation and operation of the systems can have serious environmental consequences as well. From an environmental perspective we have to consider the thermal, chemical and biological impacts of these systems. Dr Jacobson and his team are primarily engineers and do not appear to have taken into account the fact that aquifers are not simply closed boxes where you can store energy. Aquifers flow; are in chemical balance with their surrounding rock; and can represent biological communities in their own right. Depending who you believe the injection of all that heat/cold into aquifers can have either few serious effects or serious deleterious effects with the serious effects ranging from the growth of undesirable biological communities to the release of metals like arsenic into the groundwater. In communities dependent on groundwater as a potable water supply, these systems may not even be possible/advisable. Moreover, in many locations geological formations are not naturally conducive to such systems and fracking may be necessary to make the groundwater accessible. I’d like to see anyone trying to sell fracking for underground thermal storage to the folks in New York State anytime soon.

As this post is getting long (which seems to happen in these posts) I will stop here. Before I leave though, I want to make something perfectly clear. I am not against the ideas put forth by Dr. Jacobson and his team. I believe that we, as a society, need to move beyond fossil fuels. Like many others I see WWS as part of the solution. Where I differ with Dr. Jacobson is that my research makes it clear that WWS can only be part of the solution. Without baseline power from sources like nuclear energy I cannot foresee us achieving a fossil fuel-free future. What I find annoying (and the reason for these posts) is that many activists lack a sufficient grounding in science to recognize the flaws in this proposed system. These activists continue to fight against both fossil fuels and nuclear power. By demonstrating the real, and likely insurmountable, issues associated with the 100% WWS scenarios I hope to help work towards a future where renewable and nuclear energy can work together to power a growing and prosperous society.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Fossil Fuel Free Future, Renewable Energy | 10 Comments

The good politics and bad policy implications of a revenue neutral carbon tax

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Blair

Premier Notley and The Alberta Climate Change Advisory Panel released their Climate Leadership Plan this week to widespread approval in both the political and climate communities. One of the features of the recommendations from the Panel is a price on carbon, better known as a carbon tax. I have written a lot at this blog about the need for a carbon tax as a means to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. As a British Columbian I would like to relate our experience with the tax as a demonstration that making a carbon tax revenue-neutral is a bad idea from a policy perspective, even though it might look good in a political (and possibly economics) sense.

The impetus for this blog post was a Maclean’s online article by Trevor Tombe Here’s what we know—and don’t know—about Alberta’s carbon tax. Dr. Tombe is an economist from the University of Calgary and while Dr. Tombe praises the carbon tax he argues, persuasively, that from an economist’s point of view making the carbon tax revenue neutral is a good thing. He argues that there is an opportunity for a “double-dividend” consisting of an improved environment and an improved tax system. While he is likely right (I’m not an economist so I will trust him on this) from an economist’s point of view, I would like to argue that from a policy/climate change perspective a revenue neutral carbon tax is actually a very bad thing.

To understand where I am coming from you first need to understand what is meant by “revenue neutral”. In her presentation on the Alberta Carbon Tax Premiere Notley was very circumspect. In her speech she said:

The Alberta carbon price will therefore be revenue-neutral, fully recycled back into the Alberta economy. To that end, revenue will be reinvested directly into measures to reduce pollution — including clean research and technology; green infrastructure like public transit; to help finance the transition to renewable energy; and efficiency programs to help people reduce their energy use. Revenue from Alberta’s new carbon price will also be invested into an adjustment fund. This fund will help individuals and families make ends meet as this new policy is implemented. This adjustment fund will also provide transition help to small business, to First Nations, and to people working in the coal industry. As our emissions go down, so will the funds collected. We do not want the government to become dependent on these revenues.

Strictly speaking this description of revenue neutral doesn’t meet the actual definition of the term. The Province of British Columbia (my home province) has a true revenue neutral carbon tax. Being “revenue neutral” means:

every dollar generated by the tax is returned to British Columbians through reductions in other taxes.

In order to remain revenue neutral the BC government has to spend a reasonable amount of time (and money) keeping track of the effects of the tax on the economy and adjusting accordingly. In BC this means that:

The Minister of Finance is required by law to annually prepare a three-year plan for recycling carbon tax revenues through tax reductions. This plan is presented to the Legislative Assembly at the same time as the provincial Budget (ref).

In BC, in order to make the implementation of the carbon tax more palatable the government issued each of us a one-time “$100 Climate Action Dividend” and quarterly issues a Low Income Climate Action Tax Credit payment. This is where the whole revenue neutral nature of the carbon tax starts to go awry.

From an environmental/climate change perspective, the point of a carbon tax is to put a price on carbon in order to encourage the market to move away from carbon-intensive energy sources. In implementing a carbon tax to address climate change, governments will want to implement corresponding policies to help cushion the blow and help industries adapt. As described above, in BC that includes the tax credit. In Alberta the Panel has recommended:

  • A consumer rebate to mitigate the impacts of carbon pricing on low and middle-income Albertans,
  • fund complementary emissions-abatement programs and, where applicable,
  • support a sound and just transition for labour and communities and strategies to protect small-and medium-sized businesses.

The common feature of that list is that each item is going to cost the government money. Under a revenue neutral carbon tax regime that money still has to come out of the government’s pocket. If the overall budget is held steady, increasing payments in one section of the budget means cutting somewhere else. This is exactly what occurred in BC. The government vacated a tax space which it then replaced with a revenue neutral carbon tax. In doing so the BC government ended up short-changing the taxpayer. In order to fund the one-time $100 cheque and the quarterly tax credit payment the government has had to forego other opportunities.

Whenever policy experts get together to talk about reducing our carbon emissions the same topics come up. We talk about the need to increase funding for mass transit and bike lanes; for funding alternative energy technologies; and support for renewable energy. Notice something about that list? Once again each item requires an outlay of government cash. The problem is that the government is perpetually short on cash. Unfortunately, our governments also live in a world where raising taxes is an anathema to a goodly percentage of the voting public.

More problematically, the companies who have been delegated with the primary job of collecting the carbon tax, the retail fuel outlets and the natural gas companies, have made advertising the effects of the carbon tax a part of their business plan. They, rightly, do not want to be held solely responsible for higher gasoline and natural gas prices and so at our gas stations, right on the pumps, you will see a chart showing how much of our gas purchases are made up of tax. This serves as a reminder to drivers, every time they fill their tanks, that they are paying the bulk of this tax. This leaves the driving public with a (possibly misguided) belief that they deserve something for it. For drivers this comes in the form of a desire for increased infrastructure spending on roads, bridges etc… Unfortunately, since our carbon tax is revenue neutral the revenues from the gas tax are not spent improving infrastructure, those revenues are dumped directly into general revenues where they disappear from sight.

The result of all this is a general upset with the operation of government. This was best observed in a virtual tax revolt in the form of a landslide vote against further funding of transit in Vancouver. Moreover, since the carbon tax is being used to run hospitals and pay for wildlife officers it is not available to built new bridges or help support our fledgling renewable energy industry in BC. It is my personal opinion that the revenue neutral feature of the carbon tax is also why it has been frozen for the last several years. Any further increase would require the government to protect industries/individuals from shocks associated with the increase and in the absence of tax room they do not see a way to pay for those supports.

Based on the BC experience, I beg Premier Notley to stand fast on her plan not to make her carbon tax strictly revenue neutral. Leave yourself the tax space to make intelligent policy decisions and don’t allow yourself to be handcuffed to a white elephant like we have been in BC. Our class-leading carbon tax has been sabotaged by the promise to keep it revenue neutral; yours doesn’t need to be.

Author’s Note: Somewhat ironically, I started composing this post on the Vancouver rapid transit system. Using a combination of an express bus and the Skytrain, I was able to get from my home in Langley to a meeting in Vancouver faster than I could have done had I actually had a car to make the trip. The downside of the commute was that I did not see David Robert’s similar post on the topic on Vox until I had written much of the text. Mr. Roberts presents a very similar premise and his article is an excellent companion piece to this one. If I had the energy, I would have re-written the post to better reflect his excellent analysis, but instead I will simply recommend that after reading this you head over to Vox and read his take as well.

Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, Renewable Energy | 10 Comments

On “Shilling” for evidence-based decision making

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Blair

In the last couple weeks I have had a very interesting time on my social media platforms. As many of you might know I have a regular blog at the Huffington Post. I use that blog to present shorter versions of topics presented on this blog. While the topics of this blog are diverse, for my HuffPost blog I stick to topics where science is either misunderstood or used badly in decision-making. Since I prefer that my HuffPost blog is read, I try to stick to topical subjects in a shortened, more approachable style.

In the last couple months at the HuffPost I have written blog posts on the overblown risks of synthetic soccer fields, so-called “toxic” molds, the Nocebo Effect and Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, Wi-Fi in schools, and local is not always better in agriculture. As you can probably guess by reading that list, I appear to have made a habit of poking some angry bears and most weeks have seen me on the receiving end of a good deal of vitriol. By this point I am pretty much used to waking up the morning after one of my blogs has been posted to find some pretty impressive/insulting comments in my inbox.

By far the most common suggestion is that I am a paid “shill” for whichever cause I am writing about on any given day. As I wrote in one of my most popular blog posts: On “Bullies”, “shills” and using labels to shut down legitimate debate the word “shill” is usually used in an attempt to diminish the ideas and information provided by someone who holds an opposing point of view. The Oxford Dictionary defines a “shill” as “someone who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest”. In my experience, however; the term “shill” is pretty much reserved as an attack against people who tend to agree with the status quo. As I wrote before, the common thread in the use of these terms is that the activists yell “shill” when they have no case to present, nor data to support their point of view. Ad hominems and name-calling are used by the desperate to distract and to interfere with or stop all debate. They are not used by people who can marshal facts in defense of their opinions.

So am I a “shill”? Well, I have never been paid to write a blog post and receive no compensation for any of my blogging. I have been asked to appear on the radio a number of times, but for that I do not get paid either. I earn my living working for a great private sector employer, but none of my blogging is done on behalf of that employer. My direct supervisors and managers are aware of my blog and I have assured them that I will avoid any potential conflicts between my work and my blog. Sometimes this means I won’t blog on a topic where my personal intellectual interests and my company’s corporate interests intersect. I do that willingly as I enjoy and appreciate my job too much to risk it by blogging on such topics. The contents of this blog are my thoughts and opinions only and do not reflect those of my employer. Arguably my blogging actually costs me money since any blog post I write detracts from the amount of time I have to work on my real work from home.

So I don’t get paid to blog and receive no compensation for my blog posts. By definition I cannot, therefore, be considered a “shill”. That being said, maybe there is a loophole. You see I do have one important interest in my blogging. As I noted in an earlier post Environmentalism and Pragmatism, the two aren’t mutually exclusive – A blast from my past back in 1995 the earliest part of my thesis research included looking at a number of areas of scientific discourse and research to identify the basis for policy decisions. I realized at the time that a lot of important decisions were being made in spite of the quality of the information available to the decision-makers. From that experience, I realized that it was up to scientifically literate individuals, like me, to stand up and inject some science and defensible data into debates that often seemed mostly about politics and emotions and seldom considered the critical component of what we knew or what we could prove. I came to recognize that if we continued to waste all our built-up moral and intellectual capital on emotionally-charged and scientifically-indefensible projects (a modern example being the Leap Manifesto) then we wouldn’t have any to spend when it came to making real changes that could make tangible improvements locally, regionally and nationally.

In a modern perspective, look at the recent decision by the Notley government in Alberta. Unlike other decisions made by governments (like President Obama with Keystone) Premiere Notley went about finding the best science advisors she could. The panel, headed by one of my favourite economists Dr. Andrew Leach from the University of Alberta, asked the right questions, did the hard analyses and came up with a report that provides the information needed to make a sound evidence-based decision. Was Premiere Notley’s resulting policy perfect? Probably not, because like all policies it had to accept some political compromises, but it is better than they had before and it is better than a policy built on a foundation of bad science.

Going back to the premise of this blog posting, am I a shill? Well maybe I am, but I am not a paid shill in the thrall of some corporate interest. Rather, I will think of myself, hereafter, as an unpaid shill for good science and intelligent evidence-based environmental decision making. Because as a citizen I have an interest in how good science can allow us to move towards good answers and how a misuse of science can have real, negative repercussions. Consider some of the topic I have addressed in the last months.

The existence of all-weather soccer fields at our local park mean that our soccer organization can use our fields up to 18 hours a day virtually year-round. As a child I remember soccer regularly being rained out and portions of our fields being mud-holes by early November. My children, meanwhile, can play almost every weekend on safe fields that give true bounces and result in fewer injuries. If we allow unsubstantiated fear to force us off these fields, field availability on the natural fields will decrease substantially. Fewer kids will get a chance to play and the smaller number of kids will get to play fewer games. If there are fewer spots to play, soccer will become more exclusive and given the nature of our society the hardest hurt will be those with the fewest resources. My kids will do fine, but others will not be as lucky and our society will be worse off as a consequence.

The presence of Wi-Fi in school means that my kids can have access to teaching resources that were unheard of in my days. These resources are regularly threatened by individuals who don’t even appear to know what band of the radio spectrum Wi-Fi is broadcast on. Eliminating Wi-Fi in the classroom to assuage unalloyed fears will eliminate those teaching resources. Once again, because our school has the resources, my kids will probably be fine. Once again the schools with the fewest resources will be hit the hardest. Schools that are told they cannot use Wi-Fi and cannot afford to hard-wire Ethernet connections will be left in the dark.

Finally to go to my personal bugbear (the topic that finally drove me to speak out), I have watched local and international activists fighting oil and gas pipelines while doing nothing to address our society’s use of fossil fuels. We know that the safest, most environmentally responsible way to get fossil fuels to market is via pipelines and the least environmentally responsible ways are via rail and/or truck. These misguided activists, meanwhile, work hard to block our pipelines while doing little to curb even their own personal consumption of fossil fuels. So while we transition away from fossil fuels I will continue to work to ensure that we use the safest modes of transport in order to protect our joint ecological heritage.

So to conclude, my intention in my blogs is not to court conflict. Rather, I want to highlight the misuse of science in environmental decision-making. The reason for this is simple. We live in a world of limited resources and when we make bad decisions we foreclose on opportunities. The best way to get to good decisions is by looking at all the data and all the alternatives. I see my role, as a shill for good science and intelligent evidence-based environmental decision making, as helping make good decisions possible.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism | 8 Comments

Don’t fear the soccer pitch – on synthetic turf fields and risk communication

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Blair

So my twitter feed exploded again. This time it was about the risks of synthetic turf fields to the kids in our soccer organization. The basis for this furor was a series of reports in The Province, CBC etc…. apparently all derived from an ESPN short documentary “The Turf War” by Julie Foudy. The documentary details an investigation into the risks of turf fields (and more specifically the little rubber tire crumbs used on the fields) to young athletes. The documentary was presented from the perspective of Amy Griffin a woman’s soccer coach at the University of Washington who believes that she has identified a particular risk to soccer goalies from the fields. In the last three days friends at the park and colleagues at work have approached me to help them understand the risk associated with playing on these fields.

Now I am going to break one of my cardinal rules of blogging and give you a fast and dirty answer to the question rather than forcing you to read to the end. To summarize, the toxicological research says that rubber tire crumbs do not pose a significant risk to players. That being said, the epidemiological evidence for Ms. Griffin’s hypothesis has not been compiled so we can’t tell whether the cancers she has seen are isolated cases or some form of cancer cluster. If the latter is true, then more research will be required to try and figure out the cause. As I described in my post Risk Assessment Epilogue: Have a bad case of Anecdotes? Better call an Epidemiologist that is not a trivial exercise and the result might be something we have not even thought of yet. However, as a chemist, my assessment is that the material will be shown to be safe. I base this conclusion solely on its chemical composition (which I will talk about below). I hope my simple assertion helps to assuage a bunch of you, but for the rest, I will provide more details below.

This is not the first time this topic has risen on my radar. You see I am not only a chemist with experience assessing the risks of chemical exposure to human health; I am also the father of young children who play soccer on artificial turf fields and I have been coaching soccer on such fields since my kids joined soccer. Like every other parent in our soccer organization, my house and garage are dusted with those little black crumbs and the pile in my garage is almost big enough to make a spare tire for my minivan.

The last couple times this topic came on my radar I dismissed it by citing the US EPA. The EPA carried out a scoping exercise in 2009. In that exercise they looked at the data and then conducted air and metals leachate sampling from a number of fields using synthetic turf. Their conclusion was that air samples were not generally worse than background samples and that “concentrations of components monitored in this study were below levels of concern”. This time I need to do a bit more work because an action group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) challenged the EPA and successfully got the EPA to modify their reporting on the topic. The report was changed to indicate that the results only reflected the samples studied and curiously included a long list of compounds often identified in recycled tire materials. The report suggested that more work needed to be done on the topic and that role was taken on by the research community and public health authorities. These results have been pretty much unanimous. The crumbs have been shown to be relatively benign and not a likely threat.

In a previous post (Risk Assessment Methodologies Part 1: Understanding de minimis risk) I introduced readers to the concept of de minimis risk. De minimis risk is a risk that is essentially negligible and too small to be of societal concern. The post explained that while all things have risk some risks are sufficiently small that risk assessors and toxicologists agree to essentially ignore them. The reason I point out this term is that you will see it again and again when reading the literature on the topic of shredded tire rubber.

Here is a brief overview of what the toxicological and occupation and public health literature has to say on the risk of the tire crumbs used in soccer fields:

As for the air sampling, the results were the same:

  • A limited number of studies have shown that the concentrations of volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds in the air above artificial turf fields were typically not higher than the local background, while the concentrations of heavy metals and organic contaminants in the field drainages were generally below the respective regulatory limits. Health risk assessment studies suggested that users of artificial turf fields, even professional athletes, were not exposed to elevated risks Cheng, Hu and Reinhard, 2014 Environmental and health impacts of artificial turf: a review.

So the obvious question that must be answered is: if the tires contain all those potential compounds identified by the EPA then why is there so little risk? The answer comes down to the chemistry of the materials. You see when all the analytical chemistry was being done on the tire crumbs the analytical chemists were not asked to mimic natural conditions in their extractions, they were told to figure out what was in the tires. To do so they conducted what the EPA describes as “aggressive” analytical techniques. So what does aggressive mean in this case? To answer that question I have to discuss another useful chemistry topic: polar versus non-polar compounds and solvents:

In a previous post about oil spills (a non-specialist’s guide to how spilled hydrocarbons react in water) I introduced readers to the concept of polar and non-polar compounds and the idea of “like dissolving like”. I explained that polar compounds will dissolve in polar solvents and non-polar compounds will dissolve in non-polar solvents. Water is very polar. The rubber in tires are derived from petroleum hydrocarbons which are highly non-polar. Following the chemical rule of “like dissolves like” a non-polar compound will not dissolve in a polar solution. In their natural state oil products are “hydrophobic” which literally means “afraid of water”, so they do not readily dissolve in water.

Now I’m pretty sure your eyes glazed over, so let’s think of this from a kitchen chemistry perspective. If you’ve been crushing garlic, all the water in the world will not clean the garlic oil off your hands. Instead, we are all taught to rub cooking oil on our hands and then clean the mixture off with soapy water. The garlic oil will not dissolve in water but will dissolve in the cooking oil and only then can you wash that oil off with soapy water. Now consider the report by Marsili et al 2014 Release of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Heavy Metals from Rubber Crumb in Synthetic Turf Fields: Preliminary Hazard Assessment for Athletes this is one of the studies that describes an evaluation of the compounds in those tire shreds. In their research they reported heavy metals (Zn, Cd, Pb, Cu, Cr, Ni, Fe) in nine samples using “microwave mineralization” while they identified the levels of the 14 US EPA priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) using “Soxhlet extraction”.

You might ask what is “microwave mineralization”? Well the tire rubber was dissolved in a combination of concentrated nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide and then cooked in a microwave. As for the Soxhlet extraction? Well in that case the tire crumbs were dissolved in a solution of potassium hydroxide (caustic potash, a very strong base) and methanol cooked in a Soxhlet extractor where it underwent essentially continuous extraction using boiling fluids for four hours. The solvent was then extracted using a non-polar solvent (cyclohexane).

To call the above “aggressive” is a bit of an understatement. Soxhlet extraction is used when materials will not dissolve in water which is really the only solvent available on an outdoor soccer field. Even the human gut doesn’t come close to the conditions used in this extraction. What this means from a chemistry/toxicological perspective is that the contaminants components are stuck in the tire crumbs and are not “bioaccessible”. That means that while the crumbs may indeed contain all those compounds they are not available to make people sick. In fact, toxicologists have tested the materials using synthetic bodily fluids to see how accessible the components were and the results have also been virtually unanimous:

So when asked whether we should be afraid of our kids’ soccer fields my answer is simple. The academic and public health research is essentially unanimous: rubber tire crumbs do not pose a significant risk to players. Put in the toxicological jargon: the contaminants of concern do not appear to exceed a de minimis exposure concentration. Had anyone from the journalistic community spoken to an environmental chemist they might have heard that the mode of action is chemically implausible.

Posted in Chemistry and Toxicology | 7 Comments

On scare reporting of science and the risk of eating red meat

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Blair

My twitter feed went insane this morning following a news release from The Lancet about an article titled Carcinogenicity of consumption of red and processed meat. For anyone interested in toxicology, human health risk assessment or simply regular readers of the academic literature the Lancet article was nothing particularly new. Unfortunately, that group does not typically include the news media. For the news media the article appear to be ground-breaking news worthy of front pages and blaring headlines. Even some scientific news outlets got into the swing of things with Scientific American going farthest off the deep end with an initial headline that pronounced: Processed Meat Poses Same Cancer Risk as Smoking, Asbestos…apparently someone with half a lick of sense read the article and they quickly changed the headline to read: “Processed Meats Cause Cancer, World Health Organization Says”. As a blogger on topics of science communication, this is the sort of thing I write about all the time and so thought I could do a quick take to add some clarity to the mix.

Let’s start with the basics. It has been known for a long time that both the grilling of meat and the processing of meat increases its risk for human consumption. Reports to this effect have been coming out for years in general interest journals like PLOS (Public Library of Science) A Prospective Study of Red and Processed Meat Intake in Relation to Cancer Risk, to cancer journals like the International Journal of Cancer Meat consumption and risk of colorectal cancer: A meta-analysis of prospective studies to specialty journals like Meat Science: Red meat consumption: An overview of the risks and benefits.

To explain the toxicology, the grilling of meat has long been known to produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heterocyclic amines both of which are associated with cancers. Similarly the processing of meat and the use of preservatives have been linked to human health risks for a very long time. Moreover, meat can be relatively challenging to digest so even non-grilled meat poses a challenge to the human gut. Vegans and vegetarians have been using this line of argument as a reason to stop eating meat for years as well as anyone who has ever visited a PETA web page knows.

So I suppose the question being asked today is: what is so new about this report? The answer is that after all this time the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) finally decided to get into the mix. As I have discussed previously in a post titled On Wi-Fi in Schools and the Precautionary Principle the IARC has the job of assessing what is a carcinogen and what is a possible carcinogen. The thing to understand is that the IARC is only looking at carcinogenicity, it doesn’t ask the obvious next question which is whether the risk meets the standard of being really important. You will notice I did not use the word “significant”. The word significant is an often misused one in the scientific community and will be avoided in this discussion. The IARC is tasked with producing monographs evaluating carcinogenic risks to humans. Based on the Lancet summary (the IARC report is not out yet) the following conclusions were made:

Overall, the Working Group classified consumption of processed meat as “carcinogenic to humans” (Group 1) on the basis of sufficient evidence for colorectal cancer. Additionally, a positive association with the consumption of processed meat was found for stomach cancer. The Working Group classified consumption of red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). In making this evaluation, the Working Group took into consideration all the relevant data, including the substantial epidemiological data showing a positive association between consumption of red meat and colorectal cancer and the strong mechanistic evidence.

The IARC the Group 2A designation (assigned to red meat) is often misunderstood. A Group 2A carcinogen means a compound that is “probably carcinogenic to humans”. This is a compound where but where “there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals”.

What the Lancet report also points out is that the increase in incidence of cancers is around 17% per 100 g a day of red meat. What it fails to tell you is what that means in the real world. Based on the Canada food guide 75 g of meat is a serving. In restaurants the serving size for a steak is typically in the 6 ounce range which is about 170 grams. So 100 ounces doesn’t seem like a lot, but put into a different perspective I do not know many people who eat 100 g of red meat a day 365 days a year. If you are like me you likely eat red meat once or twice a week as part of a healthy, varied diet.

That being said, colorectal cancer is the 3rd most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada with a 5 year survival rate of around 64% -65%. The incidence of colorectal cancer is about 35.2 cases per 100,000 population. So 17% turns out to be about 6 cases per 100,000 so an increase by 17% is a non-trivial number.

What all these numbers fail to discuss is whether red meat has positive effects that could counter-weigh the negative. This is an important point that is very often missed in the rush to judgement after the publishing of a report of this kind. The Canadian food guide recommends red meat as part of a healthy diet because red meat provides a number of critical components for a healthy diet. Even the Canadian Cancer Society points out that red meat is a valuable source of several nutrients, in particular protein, iron, zinc and vitamin B12. Vegetarians are often warned of the importance of getting enough of these nutrients as well as critical fatty acids that are plentiful in red meat but are more difficult to obtain via a vegetarian diet.

The question not asked, nor answered by the IARC is how the typical person should read this report. As I note above, except for the true heavy duty carnivores the results of this study are not really that problematic. I think the best conclusion was presented by the authors of one of the peer-reviewed scientific article above:

moderate consumption of lean red meat as part of a balanced diet is unlikely to increase risk for CVD or colon cancer, but may positively influence nutrient intakes and fatty acid profiles, thereby impacting positively on long-term health.

Put more completely, meat, and red meat can be part of a good diet and the exclusion of meat from your diet should not be done without careful thought about how you will replace the essential nutrients you currently get from meat. You can live a healthy life eating meat and you can also live a healthy life while eating meat-free in moderation is the key. The other conclusion of this report is well-known to mothers across Canada, excess consumption of red meat, especially grilled red meat, is not good for you…but then we all knew that before the Lancet broadcast it to the world didn’t we?

Note for readers:

I have written a lot in the last year about how risk is communicated to the public. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my blogging platform (read free and simple since I am a chemist and not a web designer) it is not terribly easy to figure out what I have written in the past so I will summarize here. I prepared a series of posts to help me out in situations like this. The posts started with “Risk Assessment Methodologies Part 1: Understanding de minimis risk” which explained how the science of risk assessment establishes whether a compound is “toxic” and explained the importance of understanding dose/response relationships. It explained the concept of a de minimis risk. That is a risk that is negligible and too small to be of societal concern (ref). The series continued with “Risk Assessment Methodologies Part 2: Understanding “Acceptable” Risk” which, as the title suggests, explained how to determine whether a risk is “acceptable”. I then went on to explain how a risk assessment is actually carried out in “Risk Assessment Methodologies Part 3: the Risk Assessment Process. I finished off the series by pointing out the danger of relying on anecdotes in a post titled: Risk Assessment Epilogue: Have a bad case of Anecdotes? Better call an Epidemiologist.

Posted in Risk, Risk Communication | 3 Comments

On inane criticism in the climate change debate – the Ridley affair

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Blair

I have been following the climate change debate for over a decade now and have been writing on the topic for several years. Even with that level of exposure, the inane level of personal criticisms thrown around in this debate never ceases to amaze me. Selected individuals, on both sides, appear to believe that the only way to maintain their stature in the field is to belittle and disparage those with whom they disagree. To demonstrate the inane levels some go one need not look further than a tweet from my favourite geophysicist and climatologist Michael E Mann. Dr. Mann tweeted:

Ouch! “Climate Science Denialist @MattWRidley Criticised By Same Scientist He Sourced On Greening Planet Claims” http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/10/19/climate-science-denialist-matt-ridley-criticised-scientist-he-sourced-claims-about-greening-planet.

Dr. Mann was referencing a dispute about an article written by Dr. Matt Ridley. The article (The Benefits of Carbon Dioxide presented as a link to his web site as the original article is stuck behind a paywall) presents a number of well-understood positive effects associated with the rise in global carbon dioxide concentrations. Any reasonable policy discussion of climate change has to include considerations of both the positive and negative effects of increases in global carbon dioxide concentrations. As I have discussed previously in my post “What is so Special about 2 degrees C in the Climate Change Debate?”there are strong arguments to suggest that, at least initially, increased global carbon dioxide concentrations have had/will have a positive net effect on the global economy and human and ecologically health. The literature is equally clear that at some, still undetermined, higher global carbon dioxide concentrations the positive effects will be outweighed by the negative effects with the balance spiraling further into the negative territory thereafter. None of this is particularly contentious.

As for the concept of the CO2fertilization effect (the topic of Dr. Ridley’s article) it is a well-understood by-product of the global increase in carbon dioxide concentrations. The CO2 fertilization effect was first discussed by the IPCC in their first round of reports and has been incorporated in every round of IPCC reports thereafter. To put it another way: a Google Scholar™ search of CO2 fertilization effect comes back with over 100,000 hits. Let’s be clear here, we are not talking about regular Google™, we are talking about over 100,000 hits on Google Scholar™. So we are not talking about a point of significant contention in the climate change debate. People can argue about the intensity and scale of the CO2fertilization effect but the effect itself is not one up for much serious debate.

So you might ask: what egregious error was significant enough for DeSmog blog to prepare a full article that was subsequently trumpeted by Dr. Mann? Well, Dr. Ridley’s article is chock full of information. It presents over a dozen points from a Global Warming Policy Foundation report titled “Carbon Dioxide – The Good News”. It includes references to literally hundreds of articles that support the point under consideration and runs at around 2400 words (including postscript). However, buried deep within the pile of information, references and data is a single interesting piece of trivia:

The satellite data show that there has been roughly a 14 per cent increase in the amount of green vegetation on the planet since 1982.

The interesting piece of trivia was pulled from a presentation by Dr. Ranga B Myneni of Boston University at the “Probing Vegetation Conference from Past to Future” held 4 – 5 July 2013 in Antwerp, Belgium. This sounds pretty inane so far does it not? However, DeSmog blog hunted down Dr. Myneni to ask him about the use of this data in Dr. Ridley’s article. Dr. Myneni’s response was typical of an academic, he waffled about uncertainty and precision and was reported as saying:

His [Dr. Myneni’s] analysis of satellite data covering the last 30 years did show a 13 to 14 per cent increase in vegetation growth. He said some of this could be attributed to increased levels of carbon dioxide, but changes in the way land was management [sic]was also a factor.

So Dr. Myneni quibbled about the number (it could be 13%, it could be 14%) in the way academics are prone to do while confirming that Dr. Ridley was absolutely correct (in that Dr. Ridley said roughly 14%). However, in the world of DeSmog (and apparently Dr. Mann) Dr. Myneni had “hit back” at the “Climate Science Denialist Matt Ridley”. Anyone who has read Dr. Ridley’s writing knows full well that Dr. Ridley is not a “denialist” but rather he is a “lukewarmer”. Heck, he wrote an article that appeared in the Times on the topic. Dr. Ridley acknowledges that global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue. He simply differs with scientists like Dr. Mann about the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide. That is like calling someone who points out that birds have the ability to fly a denier of the law of gravity?

Dr. Ridley is, however, a well-known science communicator and author. His voice is respected and his words read in the public sphere. Therefore in the eyes of the activists he must be disparaged and torn down at every possible opportunity.

As a noted author, Dr. Ridley knows something that every good science communicator knows: non-specialist readers like numbers they can sink their teeth into. He also knows that in the grand scheme of things the average reader really doesn’t know, or care, what the numbers mean, but they like to see numbers so they have something to relate to when discussing a topic. Dr. Ridley could have just discussed the CO2fertilization effect in general but to improve the story he chose to use the number from Dr. Myneni’s presentation. The number that Dr. Myneni confirmed was correct when interviewed by DeSmog blog.

So let’s re-examine the basis for the debunking of Dr. Ridley: Dr. Myneni, a well-respected climate scientist, presented a number at one of the most important international conferences on the topic of vegetation change. The conference, being sufficiently confident in Dr. Myneni’s professionalism, published the number in their promotions. Dr. Ridley used that number in an article about popular science in a non-scientific venue. Most importantly, the number itself is really a side-note since, for the purposes of the article, it could have been 10% or it could have been 15%; Dr. Ridley was simply using for illustrative purposes and to make for a more readable text. Dr. Myneni, stepping out of his role of a scientist and moving into the role of an advocate complained that the “benefit of greening is not worth price of all the negative changes” all the while confirming that the rough number provided by Dr. Ridley was indeed correct. That is certainly some debunking there.

What is most frustrating is that given the insane nature of the climate change debate this controversy was seen as deserving a full post on DeSmog blog in an attempt to discredit Dr. Ridley, the scientist. Moreover, once DeSmog blog had posted the article promoters of the alarmist climate change narrative felt the need to highlight the post and add their two cents worth. Talk about a tempest in a teapot!

The oddest thing about this whole controversy is that from my twitter feed, it is clear that many of the activists in the climate change debate feel they have won a victory in this little skirmish. They don’t get how unserious articles like this make them look. Until the activists on the alarmist side can get their act together and become somewhat serious in their criticisms, outsiders, like myself, are going to continue to not take them seriously. We all know about the fable of the boy who cried wolf. Well when blogs like DeSmog and other climate alarmists cry “denialist” and “debunked” at every opportunity it will be hard to take them seriously when they actually do manage to debunk someone.

Posted in Climate Change Politics | 4 Comments

Thoughts on the new Liberal Government and the Environment

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Blair

Like many interested observers, I was shocked at the size of the Liberal victory in our Canadian election. I was confident in a Liberal minority but had no clue that the Liberals would end up with a majority. From an environmental perspective the new Liberal majority government should definitely be a step up over the previous Harper government’s anti-science, laissez-faire on the environment agenda. That being said, I am strongly of the belief that a lot of what I have read in the last several days about the Liberals and their environmental policies represent projection on the part of observers rather than an accurate reflection of Liberal policy.

To clarify, one problem with elections campaigns is that the people involved often incorrectly read into their candidates features and characteristics that are not actually part of that candidate’s platform. As such, my concern is that many environmentalists have been reading their personal desires into the Liberal victory. Throughout the last couple years Justin Trudeau has been viewed by many as the “anti-Harper”. He is clearly cut from a very different mold than the outgoing Prime Minister. Mr. Trudeau is viewed as happy and outgoing while Mr. Harper has been seen as dour and secretive. But these personality differences do not make Mr. Trudeau a polar opposite to Mr. Harper. Mr. Trudeau is not the Ying to Mr Harper’s Yang. Rather, Mr. Trudeau is an entirely independent being with his own hopes, needs and desires. To be clear, Mr. Harper’s environmental and science policies could, at best, be considered regressive and as a consequence, the new Liberal government will definitely represent a step forward for the environmental cause in Canada. That being said, I would suggest that my friends in the environmental movement spend a little bit of time reading the Liberal policy documents before they get too excited about the next five years.

The first thing I will point out is that while the environmental community views Mr. Trudeau as a potential environment-first Prime Minister, the Liberal policy platform is a little less supportive of that title. A look at the “Platform” section of the Liberal election web site has 106 topics of which I count six that would represent “environmental” priorities and as the business adage goes “too many priorities means no priorities”.  A look at the Liberal policy backgrounders also does not bode well for “environment-first” title. Of the 29 detailed policy backgrounders presented on their web site only two address topics related to the environment.

The first “protecting our oceans” provides some solid red meat for the environmental cause. It clearly states that a Liberal government will reinstate monies for ocean science and monitoring. It also provides hope that the recent shredding of the Fisheries Act will be reversed. Finally the document pretty much rings the death knell for the Northern Gateway pipeline as it says that a Liberal government would enact the North Coast crude oil tanker ban. Under that blanket prohibition the Northern Gateway would only really be possible if David Black’s Kitimat refinery were brought online to refine the crude oil/dilbit prior to shipping.

The second platform document is bigger than the first but is surprisingly light on substance. The document is titled “A New Plan for Canada’s Environment and Economy” and deals with six major themes:

  • Taking Action on Climate Change
  • Investing in Clean Technologies
  • Creating Clean Jobs and Investment
  • Restoring Credibility to Environmental Assessments
  • Preserving and Promoting our National Parks
  • Protecting out Freshwater and Oceans

As the old expression goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the problem with the document, as is often the case in environmental policy, is in the details, or lack thereof. The “Action on Climate Change” reads as surprisingly non-committal on the action front. It has a lot about communication, and working together with various levels of governments and NGOs but has very few identifiable deliverables. It includes a “portfolio of actions” while describing few strong commitments (it does include a very important commitment to phase out subsidies for the fossil fuel industry). Surprisingly, I cannot for the life of me find a detailed policy document that includes any mention of the “Low Carbon Economy Trust” which some have mentioned but few can describe.

The Liberal’s “Investment in Clean Technologies” details a pretty paltry additional $300 million a year directed towards various industrial sectors. The wording of this section is sufficiently vague that it could range from a terrific tool to enhance the prospects of cutting-edge companies to a political slush fund like many of the regional development agencies used to buy votes for the last several decades.

The “Creating Clean Jobs and Investments” section is simply standard boilerplate that could be drawn from almost every environmental policy document ever written. It does, curiously, include a section on protection of marine environments which is sorely needed, especially on our West Coast.

For the pipeline opponents, the “Restoring Credibility to Environmental Assessments” sounds like a great section. Interestingly enough the section does include this interesting piece of wording:

We will explore, consult, and work collaboratively to move towards a system where federal environmental assessments of projects include an analysis of upstream impacts and the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the projects being assessed.

This text could be something straight out of a Sierra Club Report or it could be a standard requirement for a risk assessment depending on how you interpret the word “resulting”. Environmentalists surely read it like the Sierra Club would have us do. The only problem with this interpretation is that it undermines the whole concept that emissions are calculated on where fossil fuels are consumed not on where they are produced. Using the logic proposed I could easily develop a process by which Canada could meet its Kyoto targets overnight. Since the Sierra Club version of the methodology blames the producer of the energy, not the consumer, Canada could go to zero CO2 emissions simply by importing all our fossil fuels from outside our borders. No need to adapt our industry; no need to stop idling our cars or insulate our houses; since the consumer’s pattern of use doesn’t count towards their emissions we would all be free and clear. Oddly enough that is not how the rest of the world views the problem. In International venues/agreements producers of fossil fuels are only expected to account for the energy used to generate the fossil fuels not the CO2 generated when the fossil fuels are burnt at the other end. I would suggest that any plan to change environmental assessments in this manner is bound to fail international muster.

The final two points involving the protection of our parks, freshwater and oceans are strong policies I would love to see implemented ASAP.

Going back to the earlier point in this post, the problem with the Liberal agenda is that the environment represents such a miniscule proportion of it. Only 2 of 29 policy documents discuss the environment and the amount of money earmarked for the environment is miniscule when compared to other priorities. The $300 million dollars for innovation and investment is barely more than the amount the Liberals have allotted in additional funding for the CBC. That should pretty much tell you where we, environmentalists, fit in this new order.

To be clear, I look forward to the next few years from an environmental perspective. I was strongly opposed to how the Harper government stripped away protection for Canada’s waterways and shredded much of our environmental research infrastructure. It is my hope that Mr. Trudeau will reverse many of those decisions/laws. That being said, I cannot simply assume that Mr. Trudeau is going to be an environment-first Prime Minister and suggest that my colleagues in the environmental movement who assume otherwise are in for a bad shock

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On the Indifference of our School System to Parents and Teachers

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Blair

To date on this blog I have avoided discussing the school system. As many of my readers know I am the husband of a school teacher and have avoided writing on topics that would potentially affect my wife’s workplace but I am going to make an exception to my informal rule. The reason for this is that our local school district continues to show indifference to the needs of parents and teachers in our district and I am simply tired of staying silent on the topic. You see, I am also the parent of three kids: two are school-aged and one starts kindergarten next year and I am amazed at how many decisions our school district has made in the last few years that have negatively affected our household and those of our friends and family.

We have all been taught that it is important to make a good first impression, but our school system immediately starts off badly with parents. Next year our family will be re-introduced to the concept of “gradual entry” into kindergarten. For those of you unaware of the program, it is a two week regime designed to gently ease children, who have been attending daycares since age 1, to the “rigours” of full-day kindergarten. My nephew went through the gradual entry program this year and it was ridiculous. Elementary schools start the Tuesday after Labour Day and as his first step in the gradual entry process my nephew had no school on that Tuesday. On the Wednesday he attended school for 30 minutes. As for Thursday and Friday, he didn’t have any school on those days either. So for the first week of gradual entry kindergarten he attended 30 minutes of school.

Now if you happen to have a stay-at-home parent in the household this glacial process would not be a problem, but for two-income families it ranges from a major inconvenience to a real financial hardship. As most families know, daycare is hard to get, expensive and most daycare slots go from September 1 to August 31 to fit in the school calendar. If you have a child in school, you certainly aren’t going to pay a full month worth of daycare to hold a slot for one week in September. This means that during the two week gradual entry program families either need to find alternative child-care or take time off work. Since most kids in working families have been attending daycare since age 1, gradual entry represents a struggle to figure out, or pay for, child care arrangements for kids who are completely ready for school, but no longer have a daycare slot. For families like my own, with only one parent available to do home care during the week (I will discuss that issue later), it means I will be using two weeks of my annual holidays to accommodate this questionable requirement.

The frustrating secret about the gradual entry process is that the first week is mostly devoted to the school system doing administrative tasks that they could have accomplished during the summer. As I described above, our nephew only got 30 minutes of face time that entire first week. He wasn’t getting acclimatized to school he was being shunted aside while the administration did the work they should have completed before September. Administrators are paid very generous salaries and perhaps requiring them to work a bit during the summer would allow thousands of British Columbian families to save a week’s salary/holidays. I can understand the need to for gradual entry but it is time the school system gave kids some credit for resilience and cut the “gradual entry” back to one week.

Now we have addressed gradual entry, let’s talk about professional development days. As we all know teachers get professional development days in the school calendar. In the 2013-2014 calendar there were six of these days. Each required a parent to stay at home or find alternate care for their children costing either money or vacation days. Well apparently the school district decided that ruining six days of work was not challenging enough for parents so since the 2014-2015 school year the school calendar was changed so that the district professional development was done by the half-day. So now instead of six full days they have gone to two full-day provincial professional development days, four half-day district professional days and six “collaboration” days.

So you may be wondering what a “collaboration day” represents? These aren’t really days, but rather they represent 80 minute blocks where school starts either earlier or later than normal in order allow teachers to work on schemes to “collaborate” both internally (within the school) and externally (with teachers at other schools). Six times a year our kids will be sent home 80 minutes early to allow for this process. On the bright side, during the first year of collaboration days they started school 80 minutes later. This precluded parents getting to work in the morning and cost a lot a parents work shifts. At least by moving the collaboration to the afternoon it allows families with after-school care to simply pay extra for the extra care.

As for the straw that broke the camel’s back, Thursday the school district announced that all parent-teacher interviews in the district will be coordinated to be held at the exact same two days at the exact same times. There will be one day when the teachers stay until 4:30 pm and another when the teachers stay at school until 7:30 pm. Even the dinner break for the teachers will be at the same time. This sounds like a good idea from an administrative perspective but completely ignore the fact that a large percentage of the teachers in our district are also parents; parents who are interested in the academic well-being of their kids. In previous years, elementary schools teachers could stagger their days to allow teachers, who were also parents, to attend to both tasks. This year, in a fit of administrative orderliness, the district will not even allow teachers who have an empty block in their schedule to leave their schools to discuss their kid’s performance.

That last point brings me to the level of “respect” our school district holds for its employees. The school district demands an incredible amount of flexibility from the parents in the district (as demonstrated above) but allows for exactly zero flexibility for its employees. They don’t trust their teachers to leave the school during breaks in the parent-teacher interview schedules; they won’t allow teachers any flexibility during the “gradual entry” period to allow the parent/teachers to help ease their kids into the school system; and they won’t allow any flexibility to cover the half-day breaks.

Going over all the numbers in the text above, I have come to a frightening realization. I am one of the lucky people out there who gets three weeks of holidays a year. Looking at the numbers above I can see that I will be using all that time filling in the gaps in our child-care arrangements. The two weeks of gradual entry (actually only 9 work days with Labour Day) combined with the 6 professional development days actually works out to my entire allotment of holidays for the year. It looks like we won’t be taking a family summer holiday unless I am able to bank a lot of overtime or take unpaid time off. Happily I have a job where I can bank overtime but there are going to be a bunch of Kindergarten parents who will not be spending any special summer time with their kids because our school system doesn’t consider their interests when it makes decisions. The sad part is they don’t even do this out of malice, instead it is mere indifference. The school district has shown time and again that they are indifferent to the needs, wants and desires of the working families and teachers in the school district. Administrative tidiness is all they care about. Given the choice between inconveniencing thousands of parents and workplaces and having nice orderly lines on their charts, they choose the orderly lines every time and are utterly indifferent to the time and resources their decisions cost the rest of us.

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