Questions about the City of Vancouver May 27th Trans-Mountain Expansion Proposal Summary of Evidence

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Blair

Yesterday my twitter feed was stuffed with multiple re-tweets of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Proposal (TMEP) Summary of Evidence (SoE) prepared for Vancouver City Council 27 May 2015 (ref). I was first directed to the document by Jeff Lee (@SunCivicLee on Twitter). The following blog post represents my initial impression of the SoE with particular emphasis on the air quality analysis component.

My initial response, upon scanning the SoE, was to challenge some of the statements at the front end of the report. Specifically, the report makes a number of, what I feel are, questionable but commonly held assumptions about future of oil sands development/ production and the use of fossil fuels in Canada. The SoE presents an analysis that suggests that the TMEP is an unnecessary project that will become a “stranded asset”. I strongly disagree with that statement and said so on Twitter. In my opinion the SoE ignores oil sands projects currently operating and/or under construction, that on their own are sufficient to keep TMEP fully subscribed.

As I described in my post On the economic and environmental folly of trying to “strangle the oil sands” just because oil prices are low will not stop the production of oil sands crude. To explain, a company that has sunk multiple billion dollars into an oil sands project is not going to shut it down simply because it is insufficiently profitable. The income from those projects is used to pay for the sunk costs on those projects. Profits are calculated only after the capital and debt costs are accounted for. If a project stops producing the oil company will still have to pay the banker for those capital and debt costs but will have to do so without any income. Imagine that your job only pays you enough to pay the car bill, the mortgage and groceries but doesn’t pay you enough to put money aside. Would you just up and quit your job knowing that once you quit you still had to pay the car bill, the mortgage and groceries, only without a salary? Dr. Leach from the University of Alberta explains this concept very well in this Maclean’s article. He also points out that any project with substantial investment already in the ground will complete that investment rather than abandon it for exactly the same reason.

In my opinion, the SoE also makes some faulty assumptions about the future market for fossil fuels in Canada. As I wrote in my post: “Starting a Dialogue – Can we really get to a “fossil fuel-free BC” even using the sunniest forecasts Canada is not going to be a fossil fuel free country in the next several decades. Until that blessed day comes we will still have a need for fossil fuels. As I wrote in that post: given our dependence on fossil fuels, I would prefer they travel in pipelines and via double-hulled tankers rather than on trains, barges or tanker trucks.

What really jumped out at me, however, was later in the report. It was a series of slides (starting on page 35/42) presenting an air quality analysis created by “Metro Vancouver”. The slides are incredibly compelling showing how much of Vancouver would be exposed to dangerously high benzene concentrations in the case of a spill. Based on the models, in the event of a major spill, most of the City of Vancouver will be exposed to benzene concentrations ranging from 4,000 µg/m3 to 166,019 µg/m3while a portion of the central core would potentially be exposed to concentrations ranging from 166,019 µg/m3 to 2,554,137 µg/m3. For the non-chemically-inclined the US EPA provides a conversion factor for benzene from mg/m3 to ppm (ref) of 1 ppm = 3.19 mg/m3. Doing the math, the Metro Vancouver numbers translate to 1.25 ppm – 52 ppm for the City and the high values range from 52 ppm to 800 ppm.

Now these numbers caused my chemist’s antennae to shoot skyward. If correct these numbers would represent a devastating risk to the City of Vancouver in the case of a spill. Any regulator seeing these numbers would have to seriously reconsider the risks of an oil spill. The problem is that these numbers are completely out of whack with the numbers you see in the academic literature. Consider this practical experiment where the US Navy simulated an oil spill and then took measurements (ref). The Navy scientists measured benzene concentrations ranging from 7 ppm under a simulated wharf (a location sheltered on three sides) to below the detection limit in open areas. In open areas the maximum recorded benzene concentration was 0.4 ppm. Further testing carried out by the Navy and reported in a different paper (ref) using ultra-light crude (API Gravity 36.0, see below for an explanation of API Gravity) and sampled from a mere 2.5 cm above the oil surface resulted in immediate benzene concentrations ranging from 80.4 ppm to 3.5 ppm. Over the first hour the benzene concentrations went down to a range from 68 ppm to 23 ppm. The two-hour time-weighted average was 15.8 ppm at 2.5 cm above the oil slick. The conclusion of the paper indicated that a crude oil spill with an API Gravity under 25 (dilbit has an average API Gravity around 21) would be expected to result in a negligible benzene exposure except under ideal conditions and even the worst case scenarios came nowhere close to the numbers presented in the SoE.

To be fair, the SoE presents the outputs of a modelling exercise and everyone knows that while modelling is a useful way to get data, models are often overly conservative and do not always accurately reflect real-world scenarios. That being said, these numbers even jump out of the page for a modelling exercise. Consider one of the more famous modelling exercises of this type, one where the scientists conducted a detailed modelling exercise based on the conditions during the Exxon Valdez spill (ref). In that report the maximum calculated hourly-average concentration of benzene was 4.86 ppmv or 0.1% of the maximum benzene concentration reported in the SoE?

So you can understand my confusion. The numbers presented in the SoE are not even in the same ballpark as the literature would have us believe. Because the SoE was only a summary document, I sought the underlying data and was rewarded when the City of Vancouver generously provided me with a copy of a technical report prepared by Levelton Consultants Ltd (the Levelton report).

Time for some conflict of interest info: in my dealings with Levelton in my professional life (outside this blog) I have found them to be a very competent consulting company. My company does not currently do modelling of this sort in Canada and to the best of my knowledge nothing I write hereafter is in conflict of interest or will help me in my professional or private life. Okay back to our regularly scheduled blog posting.

As I said, Levelton is a very reputable company and my examination of their report indicates that they are using state-of-the-art modelling programs? So how did they end up with numbers so completely out of the mainstream with respect to oil spill benzene concentrations? Well, as a chemist, I know that modeled benzene vapour concentrations are very sensitive to the inputs into the model, in particular the initial concentration of benzene in the originating crude, the time from spill initiation, the outside air temperature, the spill thickness and the wind speed (ref). Being an inquisitive sort, I went looking for the numbers the modellers used to derive their assumptions and was completely befuddled. The authors reported that they used data from crudemonitor.ca which I understand to be industry-supported web site, however when I looked at the data they used the numbers did not jibe? The report indicates that the data for the modelled crude was for Cold Lake Blend Crude (a dilbit blend) and looking at the summary data it seems pretty correct. The density, specific gravity and viscosity presented in Table 2.1 looked pretty standard. But when I looked at Table 2.2 all I saw was a mess. Rather than using the accepted concentrations for various components of the Cold Lake Blend they used a feature called “pseudo-components/surrogate chemicals” which broke the dilbit into “15 Pseudo-Components”. As they put it:

Each of the pseudo-components was represented by a single surrogate chemical, which was modelled in CALPUFF and compared directly to corresponding ambient air quality objectives and/or human health exposure thresholds. The use of surrogate chemicals is consistent with the approach taken with the Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) conducted by Intrinsik as additional supplemental information for the Project application, where Intrinsik associated surrogate chemicals with the pseudo-components modelled by Tetra Tech EBA. A listing of the speciated components for Cold Lake Blend crude oil has been obtained from the available crude oil speciation data on http://www.crudemonitor.ca, and each of these components was assigned a surrogate chemical and corresponding chemical properties. In order to prepare a distillation curve for OilWx, the boiling points of the surrogate chemicals were sorted in ascending order and the cut percentage of these surrogate chemicals.

To explain, they took the dilbit mixture and pretended that instead of being made up of thousands of components that it was made up of only 15. Now I am not entirely sure how they established (as the helpful City of Vancouver representative did not have this information) how much of each of the pseudo-compounds to use in the model but the simplest approach (which I will use here) would be to simply split the pseudo-components down the middle. If I read Table 2.2 correctly the middle of the “hexane” cut would appear be at 6.37% and the middle of the “benzene” cut is at 7.45%. The mean of these two would be 6.91% so presumably everything from 6.91% to 7.45% was treated as “benzene”. On the other side the mean of the “heptanes” (9.24%) and “benzene” (7.45) would be 8.34% By my back-of- the-envelope calculation using this method their cut of “benzene” would therefore represent as much as 1.4% of the total volume of the spill. Now I know from their definition that my approach is not exactly what they did  but the point is the same. The “benzene” reported in the technical report (and thus the SoE) is not really the chemical benzene used in all the toxicity testing; it is “pseudo-benzene”. The funny thing is that if we go back to crudemonitor.ca we find that the five year average for benzene concentration in Cold Lake Blend is 0.23% +/- 0.03 % so at the very lest every value should be off by at least a factor of 7.

The bigger problem with using this “pseudo-benzene” in the subsequent calculations is that benzene is very much more toxic than the other components in the dilbit “cut”. The vast majority of the materials in a dilbit blend have substantially less toxic effects than benzene and are less soluble. So in this report they use the most rotten apple in the barrel as a representative of the entire barrel? Moreover, throughout the remainder of the report (and in the SoE) they then continue to refer to this “pseudo-benzene” as “benzene” and use that surrogate value in all the calculations for toxicity. But as I have described, it is not “benzene”, it is several hundred hydrocarbon compounds 99.99% of which have much lower toxicity effects and are less volatile than benzene. The entire page 35/42 of the SOE talks about “benzene”, but that is not what the model is talking about. I don’t think I can repeat this enough, the benzene in this report is not the benzene known to chemists and toxicologists around the world and the toxicological calculations and plumes are not those for benzene. How can anyone be expected to make an informed opinion when the data you are presented has no relationship with reality. At least it does explain why the numbers presented differ so much from every other literature value I could uncover in my research.

Well this blog post has gone overlong, so I don’t have enough time to continue to critique the model. I won’t go into how they appear to fail to incorporate the solubility of benzene in seawater (I think they might ignore it even though some benzene will dissolve in the sea water) or any of the other areas where I would differ with the author’s choice of assumptions. To be clear here, any major oil spill (in this case an unprecedented and incredibly unlikely spill in a harbour in the world since double-hulled tankers were made mandatory) will have negative air quality issues. If such a huge spill were to occur directly in First or Second Narrow there would undoubtedly be some risk to the public, but regulators and decision-makers would be better served by looking at papers that actually model benzene based on its reported concentrations in dilbit ( or a comparable API crude ref or ref) rather than making an untenable assumption that dilbit is only made up of 15 compounds and that the toxicology should be calculated using only those compound’s toxicological characteristics as surrogates.

Author’s note: To be completely clear here, I hold the modellers from Levelton in the highest regard and do not in any way suggest that their work is underhanded. They were commissioned to do a challenging modelling exercise and the model they use appears to be a standard one. Moreover, they fully document all their choices and decisions in their report and include provisos and limitations on the interpretation of their work. Unfortunately these provisos failed to make it to the SoE, as often happens when reports are summarized by people who did not write the report themselves. Absent those provisos, the results reported to council (and subsequently in the press) are completely misleading.

Primer on API gravity for the non-chemically inclined:

Crude oils are described based on their API gravity. API gravity is the standard specific gravity used by the oil industry. As described in an earlier post (More on Oil Spills: Some Toxicological Calculations and What if it were Dilbit?) specific gravity simply refers to the relative density of a liquid versus water. API gravity, however, is calculated using the specific gravity of a specific oil. To borrow from a useful web site (ref):

Specific gravity for API calculations is always determined at 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  API gravity is found as follows: 

API gravity = (141.5/Specific Gravity) – 131.5

Though API values do not have units, they are often referred to as degrees. So the API gravity of West Texas Intermediate is said to be 39.6 degrees. API gravity moves inversely to density, which means the denser an oil is, the lower its API gravity will be. An API of 10 is equivalent to water, which means any oil with an API above 10 will float on water while any with an API below 10 will sink.

The API gravity is used to classify oils as light, medium, heavy, or extra heavy. As the “weight” of an oil is the largest determinant of its market value, API gravity is exceptionally important. The API values for each “weight” are as follows:

  • Light – API > 31.1
  • Medium – API  between 22.3 and 31.1
  • Heavy – API < 22.3
  • Extra Heavy – API < 10.0
Posted in Canadian Politics, General Politics, Risk, Trans Mountain, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

On the “conspiracy” to force people to remain connected to sanitary and sewer systems

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Blair

The topic for tonight’s blog arrived on my radar because of the story of a Florida woman who went to court in an attempt to legally get herself off the grid (ref and ref). Her story created a pretty significant storm on my twitter feed and so I thought it would be a useful to further discuss the basis for laws requiring our connection to various grids. As I wrote in my earlier posts about Ecomodernism and Degrowth and Modern Environmental Fairy Tales: “Moving Back to the Land” and the 100 Mile Diet, there is a movement out there to get “off the grid”, to simplify and to live closer to the land. This mode of living is proposed as an ideal by the Degrowth movement and is the topic of any number of web sites explaining how to “live off the grid” (ref, ref, and ref). In this post, I hope to demonstrate that these grids are not there, as suggested by some, in order to enrich faceless corporations but rather to preserve our shared ecological and natural resources. Moreover, I hope to show, that at least in the case of sewer and water services, getting as many people as possible hooked into communal systems is the only way to help improve our shared resources. On a slightly different tack, connections to common grids also form a necessary initial step in any Ecomodernist future. These grids enhance our ability to un-couple and reduce our per capita drain on our natural resources. Just a note, this blog post is nowhere near long enough to go into the complexity associated with solar power and electricity grids (see this Scientific American article for some basic details). That is a topic for a blog post all of its own.

Let’s start with a tiny bit of a background. As described in the linked news reports, the news story deals with a Ms. Robin Speronis who currently lives off the grid in Southern Florida. She used a rainwater cistern for drinking/cooking and solar power for her electrical needs. Her sole connection to the city services was a connection to the sewer system which she used to flush all her excess wastes (ref) before the city shut the line (arguably for lack of payment). Many, (including myself in this specific case) would consider her decision an acceptable one, but her local community took it a bit differently. The case is sufficiently convoluted that it does not serve as a useful case study since both Ms. Speronis and the city appear to have been less than pure actors (the city for shutting off sewers and she for non-payment of bills and possible animal cruelty issues) but the story did bring out a class of activists who view connections to our communal grids as a means for the government to maintain control over the populace (ref and ref). The truth, however, is far less menacing and far more straightforward.

Those of us who were taught our social history in school are reminded that after physical protection of the person, the primary role of governments in early communal societies was to ensure the provision of basic services. In earlier feudal societies, basic services were reserved for the rich and the powerful. Anyone familiar with the rise of cities in the Middle Ages in Europe will have heard of the regular outbreaks of dysentery. In the Middle Ages dysentery was a disease of the cities and was the second leading cause of death by disease (ref and ref). It was caused when human waste got into the communal drinking water supplies and was particularly deadly for the very young and the very old. One of the major advances in the Roman Era was a system that allowed for clean water to be supplied to their cities via aqueducts and one of the hallmarks of the rise of responsible and representative governments was when they started to ensure that basic sanitation and water services were supplied to all levels of society. I was taught in my high school social studies that you can establish a pretty reasonable gauge of the level of representativeness of a government by the types of services provided by the government to all its citizens. While this topic is a pretty huge one I would direct you to Marq de Villiers’ book “Water” which presents a terrific history of water in societies and discusses how we are using, misusing and abusing our shared water resources and the roles of governments (historical and present-day) in its supply, protection and allocation. The take home message from this paragraph should be that: governments aren’t using services as a means to control the public, but rather the primary reason for governments in a modern society is to ensure the fair allocation and provision of services.

So why is the provision of common services an important role for government? Well as the human population has risen, our ability as humans to rely on natural/ecological services to provide us with clean, potable, water and to dispose of our waste has become unbalanced. Rather than depending on natural systems to address these needs, we have developed engineering solutions to these problems. Were we, as a society, to move back to the land and get off the grid we would encounter the scenario described by Garett Hardin in 1968 in the seminal paper The Tragedy of the Commons. For those of you not familiar with this important work, it recounts the tale of the mistreatment a common resource (the British common lands) by competing private interests (farmers with their personal sheep). Given an absence of personal stake in the ownership of the common land, and the benefits accrued by exploiting those common lands for personal profit, the commons were overgrazed and ultimately the resource was lost to the community.

For a direct case relating to water/sanitation, let’s consider my local community: the Township of Langley. The Township of Langley is located in the Metro Vancouver region and is part of the Greater Vancouver Water District (GVWD) and the Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District (GVS&DD). Unlike the majority of the users in the GVWD, 23% of the Township is not supplied with potable water by the GVS&DD and residents in these areas rely on private wells (ref). The Township is underlain by 18 identified aquifers with five being big and shallow enough to be used for the provision of water (ref). Four of these five aquifers are “unconfined” (ref). An unconfined aquifer is an aquifer that is refreshed via surface water percolation (ref). Another feature of the Township is that over half its surface area is in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and is used for various farming practices. Even with only 23% of our population in Langley relying on groundwater, our groundwater aquifers are in trouble. Water levels have been receding and the local salmon-bearing streams reliant on water from these aquifers are under threat. As a consequence, the Township has had to spend millions of dollars hooking communities like Aldergrove into the main GVS&DD water system (which is primarily fed from reservoirs in the North Shore Mountains. Were 100% of the Langley population made reliant on our limited groundwater reserves that water would be gone in a generation. From a naturalist’ point of view, it would also mean the end of the Nicomekl River, the Salmon River, The Little Campbell River and Bertrand Creek as breeding grounds for fish as all depend on flow from these aquifers and all would dry up in the summer absent those flows, destroying those fish habitats. It is only through the provision of potable water via the GVS&DD that we can maintain our population in this region. Now consider that we live in a coastal rainforest area? If we can’t depend on groundwater from unconfined aquifers in a coastal rainforest with our current population densities how will the populations in the Eastern Seaboard described in my post Ecomodernism and Degrowth: Part II Future Scenarios make it work?

Now earlier in this post I talked about dysentery. Now in a future “off the grid” Langley we could mostly avoid the threat of dysentery through the use of septic tanks and septic fields. The problem with septic tanks is that they need to be maintained and if not maintained can fail (resulting in a risk of dysentery). One of the issues with septic fields is that they require space. The size of your septic field is dependent on the percolation rate of your soil but a typical septic field for a family of four is about a quarter/half acre. The problem is that too many septic fields, too close together, can cause too much stress on aquifers. The US EPA suggests that any more than 1 system per 16 acres puts a community at risk to groundwater contamination (ref). Moreover, at high densities even perfectly functioning septic fields can harm an aquifer as was discovered in the Santa Ana Region in California (ref). The reason for this is that septic fields are not magic, they cannot eliminate all waste and one of the serious concerns with high densities of septic fields is nitrate contamination of the groundwater. Due to their chemical nature, even a perfectly designed and operating septic systems flushes nitrates, pretty much undisturbed, into groundwater (ref) and nitrates are recognized as a cause (or arguably at the least a co-factor) of blue baby syndrome (Methaemoglobinaemia) (ref). Nitrates can also build up in aquifers over agricultural areas due to poor farming practices and over-fertilizing (as is the case in Langley Township). Nitrate pollution represents only one of many chemical issues associated with too many septic fields in too small an area and anyone interested should read the Santa Ana case study to see the other problems they can cause.

I hope this blog post has made it clear that going “off the grid” is not simply a personal choice, as suggested by Ms. Speronis, but one that can affect a whole community and all the animals and plants that live in that community. Thus the community has a stake in ensuring that as many people as possible are connected to the grid. This control is not to keep the utility users in the pockets of big government or big corporations but rather to preserve our shared resources and avoid a collapse of our commons similar to the one described by Hardin in The Tragedy of the Commons.

Posted in Canadian Politics, Risk, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

On Seattle’s Kayaktivists: Are they really hypocrites?

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Blair

My Twitter feed has been filled these last few days with pictures of the “Kayaktivists” protesting Shell’s Arctic Endeavour drilling platform at the Port of Seattle. I am of two minds on this topic. First and foremost, I do not want to see further drilling in the arctic. I firmly believe that we already have access to more fossil fuels than we can burn without engendering serious and possibly irreversible global warming. Moreover, drilling in the arctic represents an overly risky endeavour. It involves some of the most technically challenging drilling in one of the most ecologically sensitive habitats on the planet. That being said I can‘t help but consider the point of view that says that many of the protestors in Seattle (and frankly the Obama administration) are being more than a little bit hypocritical in all this. Since my first point is self-explanatory, the intention of this post is to dig deeper into that second thought and see if we can establish whether the kayaktivists really are hypocrites or not?

I think we can all agree that if anyone is acting hypocritically on this file is has got to be the Obama administration. Last week President Obama gave a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy where he declared:

“Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act — and we need to act now.” (ref)

This is the same president who used his presidential veto to block the Keystone XL pipeline (ref) and has “pledged to cut US Greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below their 2005 levels by 2020” (ref). To then turn around and authorize drilling in the arctic runs contrary to everything he has said up to date. I think we can all agree that anyone able to simultaneously hold two diametrically opposed positions shows a level of cognitive dissonance worthy of a world class politician.

Next let’s talk about the City of Seattle tucked into the end of the Puget Sound. As readers of my blog know, the Puget Sound is home to five major refineries with a combined capacity of approximately 640,000 barrels/day (bbl/d). The State of Washington imports approximately 8.5 billion gallons of crude oil annually (ref) and virtually all of that goes to the Puget Sound. The refineries in the Puget Sound supply most of the Pacific Northwest with its gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, fuel oil and asphalt. The largest individual private sector employers in the Seattle area are in the aerospace industry (Boeing, Alaska Air etc…) which employs over 103,000 people (ref). Anyone aware of the environmental (and fossil fuel) footprint of air travel will attest to the fact that having Boeing and Alaska Air as two of your top private sector employers doesn’t exactly give you clean hands in any debate about fossil fuels. On the transit front Seattle is in the middle of the pack for American cities with respect to transit (ridership was 18.19% in 2010 American Community Survey ref) but runs way behind cities like New York (55.66%), San Francisco (34.05%). As for more local comparisons Seattle comes in a distant second when compared to Vancouver on transit ridership (ref). As for whether transit is expanding? on that front the answer is a clear no. The current goal is not to expand transit but rather to avoid major transit cuts (ref). As for the mayor we keep hearing on the news? He stated that: “I’m willing to draw the line, and I’m willing to be called the anti-transit mayor if it’s to protect the property tax,” (ref).

On a community level Seattle is something of a study in contrasts. Seattle was the #1 top “green” city in 2009 (ref) and was still in the top 5 (ref) in 2014. Continued good outcomes in this file can be attributed to good leadership on a community front. But outside the city center Seattle is known as a city of suburban sprawl (ref). Compared to other major North American cities Seattle has relatively low walkability and bike scores (ref). Given the aforementioned where does Seattle fit in our scale? It would seem that Seattle is a bit of a split personality with strong environmental credentials in some files (especially in its central core) and weaker ones elsewhere. Overall it seems a bit of a wash.

Having established that the politicians involved in this fight are politicians and the community is pretty balanced from an environmental front, let’s talk about those protestors in their kayaks. I can’t count the number of hits on my twitter feed showed the “Irony” of the protestors pointing out that the Kayaktivists:

“Came in automobiles fueled, by oil, wearing clothing made from oil, to protest oil, in kayaks made from oil. Then they tweeted their photos on phones made from oil and drove home. Share the irony”.

A lot of the activist tweets then directed me to “The Stranger” website (ref) where Ansel Herz responded to the complaint. His response had three points (paraphrased below):

  1. During the time of abolition people in the North wore clothes made of cotton picked by slaves. That did not make them hypocrites when they joined the abolition movement.
  2. It’s about telling Shell they can’t lock us into this catastrophe anymore.
  3. “If someone—or, say, the planet—is getting beaten up with a baseball bat, is it immoral to use a baseball bat to fight back?

My response is to suggest that these 1 and 3 represent some pretty poor arguments and number 2 is just barely defensible.

Let’s start with the “cotton” gambit. During the height of the US slave trade cotton was indeed used by the Northern abolitionists. That statement comes with a mighty big proviso: in the early 1800s there was no readily available alternative to cotton. They didn’t have nylon, polyester or other synthetic fabrics suitable for use in summer clothing. Can you imagine William Wilberforce wearing cotton if he had had the option of polyester? Abolitionists, however, did use boycotts to spur the downfall of slavery. Consider that one of the first blows to the slave trade in Europe came when abolitionists in Europe boycotted sugar, even though few contemporary alternatives existed for the product (ref). In Seattle, in 2015, there are numerous alternative energy choices to gasoline. I was amused to listen to Ron and Don in Kiro Radio (ref) who suggested that “if given a choice people would not use gasoline”. In the same conversation, however, they go on to admit that they do have a choice; they can use solar panels at home and electric vehicles on the road. However, they bemoan the price of said alternatives. This is the crux of the problem. Unlike the abolitionists wearing cotton in the 1800’s, the Kayaktivists have an alternative; they just want an alternative that is as cheap and easy as gasoline. Well, I will tell you a secret from someone who has lived a low-carbon lifestyle for the last decade. Making that choice is neither easy nor cheap but it is still necessary if you want to take a leadership position in this discussion. It might mean paying more for a house closer to work; taking transit when you’d prefer to drive; paying more to shop locally; and putting up with inconveniences so you can not only “act locally”, but you can “act personally”. The problem is that if you are only going to do what is cheap then the market won’t exist for renewable and their costs won’t come down.

As for argument number 3: “the baseball bat argument” that one is simply laughable. Actually reading the article I first guffawed as I realized that the author Ansel Herz, quotes himself in the third person for point 3. If you are making a statement against fossil fuels then why not make an effort to avoid their use in your protest? I find it constantly amazing when I hear people (like Ansel Herz) claim to be trapped in the system? It is your fault Ansel. You can choose to take the bus, to carpool, to use a modern automobile with modern emission systems and better gas mileage, but those choices cost money and can be inconvenient. In reality the argument can be summarized by its final line: “herp derp”. It is a mindless statement made by someone who has no coherent rationale for his point of view. It is a vacuous statement from a vacuous mind.

Now let’s look at argument #2: the “it’s all around us” argument. I have pretty much addressed that argument above. Certainly there are some fossil fuel-related conveniences that are necessary to maintain a modern lifestyle and I am not suggesting that the protestors give them all up. But there are many alternative choices that individuals can make and each choice has its consequences. I find it particularly ironic that the 350.org activist leader in the story brags about going to the protest via the least environmentally sensitive mode of transport left on our roadways: a ’76 Chevy pickup? Are you trying to rub your hypocrisy into our faces? Perhaps if you informed us that the ’76 Chevy had been retrofitted to operate on the tears of baby polar bears you could have done a better job, but lacking that you did a pretty good job there. Maybe next time you may want to tone down your attempts to sound cool and stick with the program just a little bit?

So let’s go back to our initial question: are the kayaktivists hypocrites? My initial answer is: probably not. Many, if not most of them, likely live lifestyles that we would call low or lower carbon and are protesting from a sense of moral outrage and to protect our shared future. Those people are not hypocrites. As for the native leaders in their handmade canoes who are fighting to protect our shared natural resources? They are clearly anything but hypocrites and would appear to occupy the moral high ground in this discussion. As for the rich protestors who live in their 3000+ square foot houses with lots of yard-space in the suburbs? the intellectual and pseudo-intellectuals who skipped work at their public sector jobs (why are there always so many university professors and grad students at these things?) and drove to the protest in their luxury SUVs? the people who commute to work every day in their single occupant vehicles and fly off on vacations (or to annual conferences) and then absent-mindedly throw a pittance out for a “carbon offset” [for my view on carbon offsets read my post Carbon Offsets: a Basilica to Bad Policy]? Well these people pretty much epitomize the word “hypocrite”.

Posted in Climate Change Politics | 6 Comments

Ecomodernism and Degrowth: Part II Future Scenarios

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Blair

In my last post I introduced readers to both the Ecomodernist and Degrowth movements. Both movements look to provide a roadmap to get humanity off its current ecological/climate change path and on to one that is more sustainable. The Ecomodernists see a world where we seek continued economic and social growth conducted in a manner intended to de-couple human activities from environmental destruction while the Degrowthers seek to stop economic growth and return to a harmonious co-existence with nature (ref). As I discussed in my previous post, based on my reading of the literature, the critical difference between the two movements is their vision of humanity. To my best understanding, the Ecomodernists view the world from a more libertarian lens [author’s note: it has been pointed out that I am wrong in this in that Ecomodernism is completely compatible with social democratic government]. Their plan acknowledges that humans are the products of our evolutionary and genetic heritage and that changing human nature is not going to happen soon. Thus their approach allows for this by encouraging green-growth and de-coupling that growth from the environment through improvements in technologies. Degrowthers view a future through a more socialist lens and believe that we can grow to be better than our evolutionary and genetic heritage. As any reader of my blog knows, I am a pragmatist and as such I do not believe that we can ignore the lessons of history and those lessons are clear. Every society that has attempted to implement a socialist worldview has failed in that quest. In every case, the reason has been that egalitarianism ignores the fact that once an embryo starts undergoing cell division we start becoming less equal, and by the time our genetics combine with our varied upbringings all ideas of egalitarianism go out the window. Most importantly, parents have a genetic predisposition to aid kin first, community or social grouping second and strangers last. Given a choice between kin and stranger humans will almost always choose kin.

An Ecomodernist Tomorrow

Form my reading I understand that in a future Ecomodernist world, life would be very similar to life in the cities today. Humans would live more densely packed than is the current norm but would otherwise have lives very similar to those lived in a modern New York, Tokyo or Boston. There would be universities, high-tech hospitals, manufacturing and modern services. Power would be supplied by some combination of solar, geothermal, wind and run-of-the-river hydro and supplemented, when necessary, by a major expansion of nuclear energy. The biggest change would be the reduction/elimination of the suburbs. Suburban lifestyles, with large yards and large distances between houses would no longer be feasible. Instead the areas currently dedicated to suburbia would be allocated to greenhouses and food production. Resource extraction would continue but in a less destructive manner. An Ecomodernist world would still need rare earth metals, steel and aluminum, but the footprint for these facilities would be limited. By densifying our cities the energy needed to transport food and household supplies would be reduced on a per capita basis. Providing services like sewer and potable water would be simplified by reducing the number of miles of underground pipe resulting in lower per capita costs for supply and maintenance. On a personal level, an individual willing to work harder than their neighbor would still be able to excel and pass on the fruits of their hard work and excellence to their progeny. Outside of the human footprint nature would be allowed to re-establish itself in areas previously dedicated to human resource exploitation or human habitation.

The implementation of this future scenario would require the expenditure of tremendous amounts of political and financial capital and could only be accomplished following a number of major technological advances, including cheaper, more plentiful nuclear energy (thorium reactors etc…). Major investments would also be needed to improve renewable energy technologies. Suburban and rural land-owners would need to be compensated for loss of access to their lands and many outdoor wilderness activities would need to be curtailed as we decoupled the human from the non-humans parts of the planet. Huge costs would be incurred in building cities as the only way to make this vision work would be to invest in infrastructure in some of the world’s poorest countries. Moreover, those investments would necessarily be covered primarily by the richer countries. Call it climate reparations or what you will but a huge transfer of wealth would be necessary from the wealthier societies to the less wealthy societies. In the absence of such transfers the Ecomodernist scenario would fail. Investments in cities in North America and Europe, absent similar investments in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, would only result in the creation of an unsustainable two-tiered world and the continued degradation of our shared ecological and environmental heritage. Of interest to me, I have yet to read a critique of the Manifesto which considers the tremendous outlay of capital necessary to bring the lesser-developed world up to a standard where they could be part of an Ecomodernist world-view.

In summary, looking at the Ecomodernist future there are some holes in the application of the philosophy big enough to drive a supertanker through the biggest being: who will pay for what? and can we really de-couple to allow for growth without increased environmental degradation? That being said, in my mind this path represents the best future alternative because it does not call for us to completely overhaul our human nature. It provides outlets for human ingenuity and allows for a future where people can lead healthy, happy, productive lives on a healthy and ecologically productive planet.

A Degrowth Tomorrow

As I pointed out in my last post, I am not fully familiar with all the ins and outs of the Degrowth movement and I have solicited suggested readings. The most promising suggestion was Tim Jackson’s “Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet” which I will seek out to further educate myself. Otherwise an article in Adbusters (ref) seems to be the most cited suggestion. I have also read A Degrowth Response to An Ecomodernist Manifesto (ref), An Ecomodernist Mishmash (ref) and Life in a ‘Degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it (ref). All these articles share a similar view that we can simplify our lives by returning to an existence that is more in tune with nature. Most describe scenarios where central governments are virtually eliminated and the majority of decision-making is moved to the community level. This world-view is consistent with the worldview I described in an earlier post (Modern Environmental Fairy Tales: “Moving Back to the Land” and the 100 Mile Diet). As I wrote at that time the idea of moving to a neo-Walden and experiencing a Thoreau-like existence is not new and was discussed by one of the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto: Martin Lewis in his 1992 book “Green Delusions”. In the book Dr. Lewis wrote about the new “Arcadians”. The term was used to describe environmentalists who wanted to go back to a simpler time and live off the land. The members of the “back to the land” movement who desire to live off the land (ref) have long been recognized as a subset of the greater environmental community. For those of us from British Columbia their adherents are well known on the Gulf Islands, especially Saltspring and Lasqueti. There even exists a nongovernmental organization, The Simplicity Institute, dedicated to this cause. The Simplicity Institute literature (ref): suggests we move to small cooperatives where we would live in “small, ecologically designed houses, using locally grown timber and eventually tiled from local clay, and all built from earth.” They suggest we would all live lives as “jacks-of-all-trades most of the time” and live a simpler way of life:

“The Simpler Way of life is very productive at the level of the home economy, involving gardening, preserving, repairing, fixing, looking after animals, making furniture, toys, chicken pens and gadgets, keeping bikes going, recycling, cutting fire wood, maintaining pumps and machinery, and engaging in hobbies, arts and crafts.”

All this sounds so delightfully pastoral and beautiful. The problem is that with the exception of the “maintaining bikes” the life described is that of a sustenance farmer from the Middle Ages. For the non-history buffs out there sustenance farmers in the Middle Ages lived lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (H/T Thomas Hobbes).

The reason our society flourishes the way it does is because of the benefits of specialization and mechanization. An agrarian town is fine until your bicycle frame breaks and cannot be fixed, the last tractor breaks an axle and the farmers are forced to farm by hand. It is unclear to me how an agrarian village is going to pay to train and equip a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon or to be less extreme, how about a hospital with a functioning emergency room? Without the benefits of high tech who is going to build the defibrillator and who is going to insert the rod into your child’s leg when they fall off the fence and get a compound fracture? Who is going to manufacture the insulin so the type I diabetic baby doesn’t go into insulin shock and die? Who will make and distribute the vaccines when the last of the vaccinated generation dies and the measles, and whooping cough return with a vengeance? Our lives of relative safety, security and health are built upon specialized skills that can only be developed and maintained in a society with a sufficient number of taxpayers to support a service economy. Water treatment plants and sewage treatment facilities don’t build themselves and infrastructure like our water and sewer systems cannot be maintained with the free labour of a handful of “jack-of-all-trades”?

Okay I readily accept that the Simplicity Institute represents the far end of the spectrum and that advocates of Degrowth seek simply to move a much more organic and mindful existence. The problem is that given our current planetary population density any move to return to a sustenance economy, while maintaining a viable and healthy environment, does not seem possible. Consider the following extract:

The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies. Very few populous countries have more than an average of 0.25 of a hectare. It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.. In India, the amount of arable land is already down to 0.2 of a hectare; in Philippines, 0.13; in Vietnam, 0.10; in Bangladesh, 0.09; in China, 0.08; and in Egypt, 0.05. By 2025 the amount is expected to fall to: India, 0.12 of a hectare; Philippines, 0.08; China, 0.06; Vietnam, 0.05; Bangladesh, 0.05; and Egypt, 0.03(ref).

So under the Degrowth economy most of Southeast Asia and over half the world’s population live in countries where sustenance agriculture would not be possible due to population constraints. In the extract they suggest that a person can live off 0.5 hectares, using the most optimistic numbers I could find (ref) a person would need 0.44 acres to survive growing an absolute minimum number of calories to survive and assuming no famines, crop losses, insects etc… . As of the year 2000, the US Northeast had a population of 49.6 million people who live with a population density of 359.6 people/km2 (ref). This translates to 0.69 acres per person. So under a radical Degrowth scenario there would barely be enough land to support the population of the US Eastern Seaboard with a minimal vegetarian diet. Without modern sewage treatment and water supplies the population would indeed undergo massive Degrowth as diseases and weather slowly eliminated the majority of the population. You see, under the 0.44 acre scenario, the only power would be supplied by solar panels. Solar panels will certainly supply a house in South Carolina with reliable power in summer, but the same cannot be said about those same panels in a northern winter. Consider the “Snowpocalypse of 2015” and think about how those solar panels would provide power in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record, while buried under two meters of snow?

As for nature, once you discounted the areas where humans cannot farm (bogs, lakes etc..) there would not be an unallocated acre on the Eastern Seaboard. There would be no room for growing crops for profit and more importantly there would be no room for nature of any sort. I don’t see that existence as being in harmony with nature as much as being utterly antithetical to nature.

I hate to keep harping on the topic, but the reason we live so well in this era is that we have the excess financial capacity to train, equip and pay specialists to build and run our hospitals and water treatment facilities. We pay electricians and electricity companies to ensure consistent access to power, even in the worst weather. Even in the most simple of the simplicity scenarios the citizens had access to bicycles and solar panels. Bicycles and solar panels do not grow on trees. They are manufactured in facilities that require raw materials, power and workers. In order to maintain a reasonable quality of life we would need to keep many of those facilities open and the only way to do that is to produce an excess of resources elsewhere to pay the specialists so that they too, might be able to feed and clothe their families. I do not understand where those specialists will come from in a Degrowth society.

Posted in Environmentalism and Ecomodernism | 9 Comments

On Ecomodernism and Degrowth Part I: Initial Thoughts

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Blair

As detailed in my previous post, the last E in PELE stands for “Ecomodernist”. Having had the time to read and digest An Ecomodernist Manifesto I thought I should expand on why I think of myself as an Ecomodernist. To begin I need to add some qualifiers here. As I implied in my post expanding on a broader definition of a “Lukewarmer”, I believe that many terms describing social movements are open to enhancements as definitions can evolve to reflect how movements refine their thinking. The difficulty lies when outsiders attempt to re-define terms in order to re-label or re-frame a debate in a negative manner. For those of you who took debating this would be considered the difference between a friendly amendment and an unfriendly amendment in a parliamentary debate. I like to think that my broader, more inclusive, definition of a “Lukewarmer” would be considered a friendly amendment. The re-framing of the definition by the denizens of Skeptical science and their ilk, appears intended to strictly limit the definition to a smaller, less agreeable one. In my view that would be considered an unfriendly amendment.  My intention, in this post (and a following post), will be to propose some friendly amendments to the concept of Ecomodernism. In doing so I will try to keep to the spirit of the authors of the Manifesto, while suggesting some ideas that may make the concept more palatable to some of its critics. In the process of describing my version of Ecomodernism, I will also consider the arguments of the “Degrowth” movement.

You may ask why I would deal with the arguments of the Degrowth movement (who I will call Degrowthers hereafter) in a post about Ecomodernism? The reasons are two-fold: firstly, the Degrowthers appear to have been the first group to really take the ideas put out by the Ecomodernists and challenge them in a direct manner. I have read numerous articles that dismiss the Ecomodernists out of hand, without ever addressing their major points. The Degrowthers have not done this. Rather, they have put on their scholar hats and attempted to refute the Ecomodernist world-view. In doing so they have allowed me to crystallize my thoughts on the topic and frankly they have helped me understand why I now think of myself as an Ecomodernist. The second reason for addressing the Degrowthers is that they look at society (and frankly humanity) from very different worldview and an interesting angle. As a consequence, they have looked at the same issues of societal growth, climate change etc…and come up with not an opposite solution but rather one that a chemist might describe as enantiomeric. To explain: enantiomers are molecules that share the same chemical formula/general conformation but they represent mirror images of each other and are thus not superimposable. I use the term “enantiomeric” because the obvious alternative term: “a mirror image of” has too many negative connotations in our modern culture. Too many times the concept of a mirror image has been associated with ideas having different underlying motivations, thus driving towards a “good” versus “bad” narrative. Enantiomers do not have that baggage. In a pair of enantiomers, neither enantiomer is inherently better than the other; rather enantiomers are made up the identical components in approximately the same configuration and yet they can have vastly different properties. In this first post I will describe what I understand to be some of the theoretical underpinnings of the two schools of thought and in a subsequent post I will address what that can mean in a practical/ecological sense.

On the Communal versus the Individual:

As I wrote in my earlier post on Ecomodernism (and Mannsplaining): in university I was taught that a few simple premises underlie human and societal development:

  • as societies become more affluent, their birth rates tend to decrease
  • as societies become more affluent, populations tend to become more urban as specialization and improved  technologies allow for a reduction in the need for as much human labour in food production and increased per hectare crop yields
  • as societies become more affluent, their willingness to devote more resources for environmental protection increases as does their desires for improved environmental health outcomes.

In light of these premises, scientists and sociologists see a world where the human race continues to expand until the population tops out at an approximate maximum population of 10 billion souls sometime this century at which time the population will begin a decline which could either move towards a demographic cliff or a steady-state number dependent entirely on the choices made in those future decades. I will now add another important consideration not included in my previous post:

  • humans remain deeply driven by their evolutionary and genetic heritage

While many try to ignore this last fact, humans are first and foremost the products of our evolutionary and genetic heritage. While we as a society continue to work to grow past our evolutionary and genetic heritage, Homo sapiens, as a species, have been around for almost 200,000 years. Our current civilization, meanwhile, is much less than 2000 years old (one might argue that our industrial society is less than 200 years old). Given the vast disparity in time it is not unexpected that our pre-industrial evolutionary history will still influence our industrial-era brains. We do not completely understand brain biochemistry but we do know that human brains are driven by combinations of hormones over which we, as individuals, often have very little control. One feature of our genetic heritage is a drive to procreate and the preference of kin over strangers. This appears to be hard-wired into our genetic make-up. While much research has been carried out on the evolution of altruism, most of the research demonstrates that altruism is typically only observed in limited contexts, typically amongst interrelated social units or in small readily identifiable groups. As groupings get larger, humans tend to become more insular, seeking to share amongst smaller kin or social groups and trusting/sharing less with the greater whole. Yes, I recognize I am being very simplistic in this discussion, but we are talking in general terms here. There will always be altruistic individuals who are altruistic for no identified cause, but the small number of such individuals in our population provides the exception that proves the rule in the case of the majority.

The thing I appreciate most about the Ecomodernists is that they recognize our humanist nature and Ecomodernists acknowledge both the best and worst features of humanity in their discussions. In this they are very different from the Degrowth community. The thing I found most problematic in my reading of the Degrowth literature is how much it ignores human nature. Ironically, it does so, in my view, by pre-supposing that we can be a much better species than we actually are. The Degrowth literature reads like an outgrowth of a form of communalism or utopian socialism (please note I am by no means an expert on this and would accept corrections and further readings if offered). The article that summed it up best for me was in Adbusters (ref), and in reading that article the same thought kept bouncing around in my mind: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. For those of you not familiar, that it one of the most recognizable lines from Marx’ Communist Manifeto. The problem with the Communist Manifesto, as demonstrated repeatedly in the 20th and 21stCenturies, goes back to one of the failings of human nature. As I noted above, while individuals can act in an altruistic manner, we, as a species, tend to only do so based on identifiable groups. Once the individual becomes less attached to the whole, levels of individual altruism fall. For a degrowth-based society to flourish we would need to deny the lessons learned from attempts to apply communism across the globe. We would need to ignore our ultimately human failing: our genetic drive to protect kin over non-kin. In this I don’t think of Degrowthers as naïve, rather I see them as idealists in a less than ideal world.

On the Intrinsic Value of Nature and the need for true wilderness

The second area where I most strongly agree with the Ecomodernists is that they, like me, appear to cherish the importance and intrinsic value of nature. While we, as a society, seek many services from nature, in my view that cannot be nature’s only role. In order for humans to coexist with nature on our planet we need to give nature the opportunity to grow, evolve and adapt; absent (as much as possible) of human influences. The Ecomodernists describe this in their description of decoupling of the human enterprise from the natural enterprise. While the Ecomodernists acknowledge that we will always have need for ecological services, they want to limit our human ecological footprint on the planet. By exploiting denser energy sources and densifying our populations into a smaller physical footprint the Ecomodernists seek to carve out a foothold for nature to do its own thing. One way in which I disagree with the Ecomodernists, is their strong preference towards nuclear energy. I acknowledge the need for nuclear power in an Ecomodernist energy mix, but I would not give it the dominance that it receives in the Manifesto. I see a world where geothermal and solar power play much larger roles, with nuclear energy forming a role as the ultimate backup/base supply. I envision a world where flexible solar panels allow every window blind to incorporate a solar panel so the act of shading your room from the sun actually results in the generation of power. Similarly, the walls and roofs of our cities should be turned over to the generation of power and/or the growing of foodstuffs. This type of expansion of solar power would not be cheap and the broad implementation of solar energy will definitely require some regulatory changes, but it should be possible to implement gradually and with a minimal amount of regulatory creep. Similarly, I see a strong role for wind (especially vortex-based wind power) and geothermal energy in our future. Moreover, when designed properly, I see run-of-the-river hydroelectricity as an important power source that can be developed to maximize energy output while minimizing our human presence.

The Degrowthers point out that historically the generation of increased power has not driven a reduction in power use (ref) but rather has only served to fuel more demand. This is indeed true to date, but any attempt to apply Ecomodernist theory would require a paradigm shift both in how we view power and how we view growth. My view is as long as the paradigm shift is designed to acknowledge our human failings, it can still be made to happen. I know that is a pretty big qualifier, but I believe it is one we can handle. The biggest challenge to Ecomodernism by the Degrowthers, however, has to do with how the two philosophies deal with how we interface with nature. Sadly, this post is already overlong and so I will leave that for a future post.

Posted in Environmentalism and Ecomodernism | 3 Comments

On being a modern PELE: a Pragmatic Environmentalist, Lukewarmer, Ecomodernist

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Blair

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to my 30th high school reunion. The reason my reunion is being mentioned in my blog is that part of a 30th reunion is the inevitable question: “so what are you doing with yourself”? After talking about my wife and kids (the important things in my life) I would simply say that I worked as an environmental chemist. For some that was all the details they needed: I had ended up in science (not a big surprise to the people who knew me then) and was happily employed with a young family and a happy life. Many wanted more details and over the course of the weekend my spiel got more polished:

I am an environmental chemist. I am employed in the field of contaminated sites where I work to clean up old industrial and commercial facilities so that they can be made safe for further uses. I design and execute investigation plans and then develop and implement remediation plans. I also do occupational health and safety testing to help ensure that people have safe and healthy places in which to work.

As a spiel it was relatively short but gave a flavour of what I am up to. What it also caused me to do was to ponder what I am in a more general sense. Outside of my identity to my friends and neighbours as a family man and coach (with three kids I have coached many teams of children’s sports) I also have my more “meta” identify. As regular readers of my blog know I am a “Pragmatic Environmentalist” and a “Lukewarmer”. As I have discovered through recent reading, I apparently fit into the mold of an “Ecomodernist”. As a fan of soccer, I was amused to realize that this makes me a modern day PELE:

Pragmatic Environmentalism:

In my mind I am first and foremost an environmentalist. I have worked in the environmental field for the better part of twenty years in activities ranging from ecosystem restoration to ecological and human health risk assessments. In doing this work I have come to understand that the vast majority of the population (including environmental activists) are for the most part “science-blind”. Most have little more than high-school science backgrounds with a very small number having any science at a university level. As for chemistry, most viewed the topic with suspicion in school and outright fear as adults. How else to explain a “food babe” who warns that: “There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” As such most Canadians are unaware of the marvels of science that keep their daily lives moving forward and are essentially unaware of the chemistry that helps them live the lives they love. This is how environmentalists can see no irony in complaining about the export of fossil fuels while wearing the fruits of those fossil fuel exports on their backs and feet. The do not understand how the petrochemical industry underpins their every daily activity from the cell phone in their hand, to the gortex jacket on their backs to the polypropylene socks that keep their feet dry, to the medicines they take to get better when sick. The environmentalists talk about moving towards a “fossil-fuel free future” oblivious to the fact that not only are we not close to such a future, but such a future is simply not possible given the state of our civilization. As I pointed out in a previous post (Starting a Dialogue – Can we really get to a “fossil fuel-free BC) at best we can approach a point where our home province (British Columbia) no longer relies on fossil fuels for electricity generation, but even then fossil fuels will still make up the lion’s share of our energy mix. Given the absence of alternatives for fossil fuels in the transportation and industrial sectors we need to look at how we handle fossil fuels for at least the next 50 years as we move towards alternatives.

Given the foregoing, a pragmatist asks a simple question: given we cannot do without a product, what can we do to make the transport of this product safer? In North America the majority of our raw petroleum supplies are located in the interior of the continent and thus cannot be shipped around by double-hulled tanker. Instead the choices are in order of environmental concern: tanker truck, rail or pipeline; that is it, period, there are no other options. Given the choices at hand, the obvious answer therefore is: invest in the safest, most environmentally benign of the transportation methodologies currently available. Thus as a pragmatic environmentalist I push towards improving our pipeline technologies and capacity. My acquaintances on the deep green end of the environmental spectrum, meanwhile, fight these pipelines tooth and nail, and in doing so they appear oblivious to the fact that the fuel has to move somehow. They talk of trying to “strangle” the oil sands not recognizing the economic folly of such an attempt. What is more, they do not even recognize the irony when at the same time they weep and wail about the dangers of transporting fuel by rail. They are the ones who have made oil-by-rail an economic reality, no one else but them.

Being a pragmatic environmentalist also means walking the walk. I would put my carbon footprint up against any of the people who call me a “sell-out” or a “shill”. My wife and I made a conscious choice, almost a decade ago, to live what is now called a “low carbon lifestyle”. At the time it wasn’t chic (and didn’t even have a label) but simply seemed socially responsible. We took the time, to find, and spent a bit more money, to get, a house close enough to my work (and our local grade school) so that I could get rid of my car and we could commute by foot. My wife, meanwhile, arranged to move schools so her commute to work is less than 3 km. This has allowed us to live a suburban lifestyle but only to own a single vehicle. We pay a bit more to shop locally and our kids do their sporting activities in local clubs so that even on the weekend we almost never get more than 10 km from our home (we do travel to the aquarium etc…).  We have not travelled by air in over 15 years and have limited our vacations to our home province. I can’t guarantee that this state of affairs will last forever, but for the last decade we have lived the “act locally” credo. I am not saying all this to get any acclaim, but rather because being a pragmatic environmentalist means making personal choices and making what little differences we can, however small they may be. In a personal sense it means working to reduce our personal emissions. In a provincial sense it means British Columbia imposing its own carbon tax even though it had the potential to cost us in competitiveness (which in the end it did not) and only made a minor dent on national CO2 emissions. In a national sense it means fighting for a national program to reduce Canadian emissions even when Canadian emissions only represent a fraction of world emissions. The old adage goes that the trip of a thousand miles starts with a single step and so we must all take that first step individually.

Lukewarmer and Ecomodernist:

As I wrote in my last post, I am also a Lukewarmer. But as I also wrote, I am of the variety that believes that action is necessary to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels with a goal of stabilizing global CO2 concentrations. My last post pretty much sums up my position on the topic so I won’t say more on that topic except to point out that we share our planet with countless other species and any attempt to stabilize global CO2 concentrations must acknowledge the importance of protecting our shared ecological heritage. This brings me to my final label: an Ecomodernist. I would direct anyone interested in the topic to An Ecomodernist Manifesto and leave it at that for the moment as this post is already getting long. My next post will go further into the idea of Ecomodernism and compare and contrast it with the concept of “degrowth” of which I only recently became acquainted.

Posted in Climate Change Politics, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism | 9 Comments

On a Broader Definition of a “Lukewarmer”

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Blair

I have been offline for a bit of a holiday and as such am catching up on some very interesting posts that appeared in my absence. One of the most interesting was from Dr. Tasmin Edwards titled: The lukewarmers don’t deny climate change. But they say the outlook’s fine on the Guardian’s web site. Dr. Edwards has been a very welcome contributor to the climate change debate since the initiation of her blog (All Models are Wrong, now hosted by PLOS blogs). Dr. Edwards’ contributions have been universally civil, scientifically-sound and devoid of the partisanship that is often associated with the subject matter. While I have sometimes disagreed with individual points within her commentary, I have yet to be disappointed by any of her posts. This most recent post fits precisely into that mold. In it Dr. Edwards does a solid job of summarizing the views of one component of the Lukewarmer community but in doing so she conflates what I view as two divergent streams of Lukewarmers. You are probably asking yourself? Are there really two types of Lukewarmers? My response to that question is twofold:

  1. absolutely, and
  2. at least.

Just as a spectrum of views exist in other fields so one exists within the Lukewarmer community. There are Lukewarmers who believe that climate change will be mild and can be addressed through mitigative methods and others who believe that low climate sensitivity simply provides more time than the alarmists claim, to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. In the remainder of this post I will expand on this topic.

It was interesting, upon reading Dr. Edwards’ article, to do a few searches for the term “Lukewarmer”. To no surprise, most of the definitions were from people outside the community. The folks at Skeptical Science state that Lukewarmers ignore inconvenient evidence while Bart Verheggen apparently thinks they are total doorknobs. This is consistent with what I observed in an earlier post (Does the climate change debate need a reset? – on name calling in the climate change debate). As I describe, one way to damage the reputation of someone with a differing viewpoint is to label them using your terms. By relabeling “Lukewarmers” as some form of “denier” the “alarmists” attempt to reframe the debate to their advantage. As I presented in my original Lukewarmer post (My Lukewarmer post, or how to lose friends on both sides in the AGW debate) and further detailed in my post on the scientific consensus (About that climate “consensus” we keep reading about) being a Lukewarmer does not make you a denialist. Frankly, being a Lukewarmer doesn’t even require that you stand outside of the scientific consensus in the field of climate change. Rather, Lukewarmers fit neatly into the scientific consensus; they just exist on the lower end of the sensitivity debate. You see all it takes to be a Lukewarmer is a view that climate sensitivity is at the milder end of the range suggested by the IPCC. As Dr. Edwards points out, Lukewarmers are more apt to trust the instrumental record rather than simply relying on the outputs from the global climate models. In this regard Dr. Edwards asks the question:

Do lukewarmers believe ECS is low because they trust the instrumental studies more, or do they trust those studies because they give answers they want to believe?

I have argued previously that the former is clearly the case (although I don’t discount the possibility of the latter in a number of very limited cases). As I have argued in the past, I think it comes down to the types of individuals who make up the core of Lukewarmer community. I go into detail  on this type in my posts “Type I and Type II Error Avoidance and its Possible Role in the Climate Change Debate” and “Does the Climate Change Debate Come Down to Trust Me versus Show Me? – Further thoughts on Error Avoidance”. Both emphasize that most Lukewarmers tend to come from the “show me” intellectual worldview (engineers and non-academic scientists) and most recognize that climate models, while the best tools we have to date, are still not able to make skillful predictions about future conditions. Ever week new information is uncovered to improve the science underlying the models but we are not there yet and until the models can show a better skill at predicting conditions, the instrumental record (and the underlying theoretical geochemistry) wins the day in my books.

Going back to the concept of a spectrum of Lukewarmers, this is where I disagree most with Dr. Edwards. In her post, Dr. Edwards presents a picture of “Lukewarmers” as being (as the title suggests):

“not convinced there’s a substantial risk that future warming could be large or its impacts severe, or that strong mitigation policies are desirable.”

The problem is that Dr. Edwards is portraying only one extreme Lukewarmer position as the sole position of the entire intellectual community. It would be like suggesting that all Christians believe in papal infallibility while ignoring the difference between Catholics and non-Catholics or that all Muslims share identical beliefs while ignoring the differences between the Sunni and Shiite practitioners of the faith. In this it is possible that her view is coloured by her geographic location and her position outside the community. As discussed in her post, Dr. Edwards identifies a number of prominent British Lukewarmers, most of whom indeed hold the positions that jibe pretty well with her description. Prominent writers, like Dr. Matt Ridley and to a lesser extent Nic Lewis, appear to hold a view that climate change could potentially be a relatively benign thing. I hesitate to say more as I do not wish to get bogged down in that discussion. I would merely point out that on this side of the pond there exist a different type of “Lukewarmer” of which I am one and I believe Thomas Fuller the author of “The Lukewarmer’s Way” blog is another (having mostly completed this post I now see that Mr. Fuller just added a new post: “The Myth of Mitigation Skepticism” which confirms my earlier suspicion).

Lukewarmers, like myself, recognize that too much climate forcing has the potential for consequences that cannot be mitigated without economic, environmental and social hardship. As for climate sensitivity and its importance in the debate, I bring you back to a post I wrote in January where I explained my view on the importance of climate sensitivity: (Why I think Climate Sensitivity is Essential for Developing Effective Climate Change Policy). While Dr. Edwards considers it from an academic position, a Lukewarmer, like myself, would look at it from a pragmatic perspective. If climate sensitivity is lower, it gives us more time to make the necessary changes to address the problem before it gets too late. We don’t need to take the manic actions suggested by the purveyors of the 350 ppm terror scenario. Instead we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels in a step-wise and reasoned manner hand-in-hand with reducing human misery and improving global quality of life. Thus, I view the Lukewarmer’s way (apologies to Mr. Fuller for misappropriating his blog title) as one of moving towards the elimination of fossil fuels as our society’s primary energy source in a pragmatic and humanist manner. In this position, I believe I am joined by Dr. Fuller who warns in his post: “Answering Tamsin Edwards’ Important Question” about overspending, spending inappropriately and concentrate[ing] on appropriate policy options.

I have written several tens of thousands of words on my blog on the topic of renewable energy and have tried to concentrate on the topic of “regionally-appropriate renewable energy” (On “soft climate denial”, regionally-appropriate renewables and marginalizing potential allies in the climate change debate). Like Mr. Fuller I agree that there are some low-hanging fruit that should be addressed ASAP such as those described at Fast Mitigation. The biggest early culprit I see is what he calls “black soot” and I call “black carbon”. I wrote a detailed post on black carbon (Black Carbon, a Climate Change Topic We Should all be able to Agree on) earlier this year where I wrote:

Looking at black carbon we have a major potential forcing agent for climate change; a serious risk to the cryosphere; and a human health risk of the first order. By targeting black carbon I feel we can get out of our mutual trenches and start working together in a way that will improve the condition of the planet. In doing so we can identify those people actually interested in having a perceptible effect on improving the planet and smoke out the rent seekers and hangers on who seek only to extend the debate for their own purposes.

I also see a need to move towards wind, geothermal and hydro in my home province of British Columbia, while moving towards a much greater reliance on nuclear and solar energy from a global perspective. I also believe that getting our kin in lesser developed countries out of energy poverty is a morally necessary goal and by doing so we can help protect a highly stressed ecosphere.

To go back to the spectrum of views. As I am only connected to the European Lukewarmers via the internet I cannot explain why the highest profile members of the community tend to be on the mitigative side of the spectrum. As a Western Canadian, I can only say that those of us on the energy-action side make up a larger percentage of the population in my neck of the woods. I would venture a guess (and only a guess) that the prevalence of Lukewarmers, like myself, in North America is a function of the more alarmist rhetoric and toxic politics we encounter here. Interestingly enough Dr. Edwards ends her post with the question:

If you agree with mainstream scientists, what would you be willing to do to reduce the predicted risks of substantial warming? And if you’re a lukewarmer, confident the Earth is not very sensitive, what would be at risk if you were wrong?

My answer to her first question is simple: we ARE working to reduce the risks. We are just doing so in a manner that doesn’t ignore our shared humanity or cause greater harm to our shared ecological heritage. We do not accept an approach that sentences billions to live in energy poverty, using scarce natural resources to build the open fires they currently rely on to cook their food and keep their children warm. We also do not believe that taking an action simply because you can do so quickly is the right approach. We have had too many monstrous failures (like our policies towards biofuels) that have actually increased our global carbon footprint and it is time to do this right. While I do not require the solutions to be perfect, I do ask that they be both well-considered and good. As for her second question, I would turn it around: if you are so confident that sensitivity is high, what are you doing to reduce your personal carbon footprint? Because as I wrote in a previous post: simply buying carbon offsets is not enough. Every time I am lectured by a high-flying celebrity I become more certain that I do not want them dictating how I should live my life.

Posted in Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, Lukewarmers | 8 Comments

More on Gypsy Moth Spraying: Bioaerosols and Medical Symptomatology

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Blair

 I had really hoped that after my first and then second posts on gypsy moth spraying that I could get off the topic and move on to more interesting discussions, but the topic is like the bad guy in a horror movie: you think you have dealt it a death blow only to have it re-emerge for another fight. Like my last post, this one is going to be a bit shambolic as I will attempt to cover several topics that have been raised since the last blog posting.

On being a paid “shill”:

As my regular readers know, I have previously discussed the “shill gambit” in my post “On “Bullies”, “shills” and using labels to shut down legitimate debate”. In that post I was talking about other scientists being called shills, but I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew full well that as I continued to blog about evidence-based decision making, it was only time before I was labelled a “shill”. Now admittedly, I have been called it a couple times on the topic of pipelines, but if pipelines get people excited then spraying for gypsy moths turns it up to an eleven. In the last week I have been called any number of names from “shill” to “unethical” with a few people pointing out that my work as a government scientist, and the owner of a money-making blog, puts me in position of a conflict of interest. I’m afraid to say that both my employer and my wife would be a bit surprised by that line of reasoning. My employer because they didn’t realize that I had left my job to go work for the government and my wife because she knows nothing about the slew of slush money apparently coming my way from unknown “corporate interests”. To put this all to rest, let’s start with the obvious. I do not work for the government. I work in the private sector. I do not get paid to blog, and since my blog site has no ads I derive no income from my blog. I blog on my own time, and never on the company dime, as I enjoy my real job far too much to put myself in any conflict of interest on that front. It goes without saying that since I blog on my own time, the opinions expressed here are entirely my own. For those of you wondering, some friends at work read my blog but my wife does not.

On Bioaerosols and Inhalation Risk:

A number of people have directed me to a Facebook page: StopGypsyMothSpraying. At the site is a prominent link to an undated New Zealand TV article on Btk spraying (ref) which I believe refers to spraying conducted in New Zealand in May 1999. The story features a very likable epidemiologist Dr Simon Hales from the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Hales brings up some very important points about spraying programmes. Specifically he points out that at the time of the spraying, in May 1999, very little was known about the science of bioaerosol dispersion of this particular compound. For those of you not familiar with the term a bioaerosol is simply a suspension of airborne particles that contain living organisms. The Foray 48B spray is a bioaerosol made up of Btk (a biological organism) in a liquid suspension. Most of the “inert” compounds discussed in my previous posts relate to the liquid suspension. To explain, you can’t simply spray raw bacteria into the air. The sprayed material consists of an active agent (the Btk) in a liquid. If designed correctly, the suspension will not clump and when sprayed correctly will produce uniform droplet sizes which will disperse in a manner that effectively covers the area being sprayed. The chemistry of these suspensions is very tricky and most of the suspensions are the result of years of study (and are thus patented and not shared with competitors). As I discuss in my previous post, the components are known to regulators but are not shared openly to protect all the work invested in producing the recipes. You need the right particle size to get effective coverage and to ensure that the compound hits and stays on the target. For the keeners out there I include a reference that details particle sizes and how they relate to the effectiveness of sprays (ref).

In the clip from the television programme, Dr. Hales points out that not a lot was known about this topic at the time. That being said, a lot of research has been carried out and many of Dr. Hales’ concerns have been addressed. An example of this is a report titled: “Bioaerosol Health Effects and Exposure Assessment: Progress and Prospects” (2003). It indicated that in some cases, under the wrong wind/humidity conditions, droplet sizes can vary from designated parameters and respirable particles can result in both allergic and non-allergic responses in sensitive populations. The Annals of Occupational Hygiene did a major issue on the topic in 2014. I have attached a copy of the feature editorial which discusses the state of the art in the field (Advancing the Science of Bioaerosols’ Exposure Assessment 2014 ref). The literature indicates that for endpoints like cancer there exists no identified mechanism to elicit the response and thus the likelihood of cancer as a result of the spraying is extremely low (below the de minimis risk level). Moreover, the research indicates, when sprayed under the correct environmental conditions, only a very, very small percentage of the spray actually reaches respirable size. Specifically, Foray 48B spray droplet size is calibrated for ~120 μm. This is far larger than the maximum respirable size of <10μm. In the testing, approximately 0.17% of the volume of spray was determined to be <14 μm in size in bench tests (ref). So while it is clear that the possibility exists that respirable particles will be produced by the spraying, the recent literature dismisses the likelihood that it serves as a significant health risk for the typical community. The language used was pretty certain:

  • Some people may experience minor eye, nose, throat and respiratory irritation. The HRAs [health risk assessments] raised the possibility of asthma aggravation of asthma [sic], which was considered biologically plausible, although epidemiological research and surveillance from the WSTM [white spotted tussock moth] operation did not support this.
  • Some people would find the odour of F48B unpleasant. Some people may experience nausea, headache or other symptoms if exposed to unpleasant smells.
  • Available evidence does not support any effects during pregnancy on either mother or fetus, or effects on prematurity, miscarriage rates, birth weights, congenital abnormalities.

On Hospitalization and Asthmatics:

In keeping with the sensationalization of the topic, nothing beats the headline from The Province Newspaper on Tuesday: “Two hospitalized as spraying continues in Surrey and Delta against the gypsy moths”. Reading that headline, I thought it might be time to set up the barricades to protect us from the hoards of people rushing to escape Cloverdale for the kinder, gentler world of Langley. Upon reading the article I discovered that The Province was being a bit liberal with the use of the term “hospitalized”. The story describes two individuals who went to the Surrey Memorial Hospital Emergency Room after encountering the spray. Based on my reading of the story, neither “patient” was admitted but rather as a representative of the Health Service noted: “they were fine and they were released”. Now my understanding is that the definition of “hospitalize” includes the requirement for “treatment”. The simple act of walking into an ER and asking to see a doctor really doesn’t count as being “hospitalized” in my books…unless you are trying to drive readers to your online article…

Regarding asthmatics, here we have a group that clearly represents an “at-risk” population that was specifically described the earlier risk assessments. That being said this population has not been ignored in the research and the risk to them has been studied. Specifically, during the 1999 spraying in Victoria, a matched-pair cohort study was carried out to establish the risk to this population (The effects of aerial spraying with Bacillus thuringiensis Kurstaki on children with asthma). The result was reassuring. There were no differences in asthma symptom scores between subjects exposed to the spray and control subjects located outside of the spray zone. Moreover a larger study conducted at the same time (Human Health Surveillance during the aerial spraying for control of North American Gypsy Moth on Vancouver Island, British Columbia) had a similar conclusion:

Results to date show no apparent relationship between aggravation of asthma in children and aerial spraying of Foray 48B. As well, no short-term health effects were detected in the general adult population nor in hospital emergency room visits.

So when people claim that no studies have been done on this topic, the correct response is “balderdash”. Surrey and Delta are not the first places this spray has been used. It has been in use for almost two decades in a large number of jurisdictions and each and every one did a risk assessment prior to the spraying and all have found the spray to be safe. Of note, I keep reading a comment that Foray 48B was “banned in New Zealand” but I have yet to find any support for this statement and attribute it to an unsubstantiated urban myth.

The Big Conspiracy:

The strangest set of comments have dealt with some unspecified conspiracy between government agencies around the world to ignore the few enlightened individuals on this topic. As I mentioned previously, I have been informed that I am either a witting member of the conspiracy or simply an unwitting dupe. I’m not sure which version I prefer, but do not believe either case. As I mentioned in an earlier post: “Public Sector Compensation – You Get What You Pay for” most of the civil servants in the technical end are underpaid with respect to their private sector peers and many work in the public sector out of a sense of public duty. I cannot believe that every one of these people has been bought out by the dark forces. I think it more likely that if such a conspiracy existed we’d have read about it on WikiLeaks or through some other journalistic enterprise. As for the peer-reviewed literature, it is categorical in that researchers have been unable to demonstrate links to any effects beyond minor discomfort associated with ingesting the spray. The particles, when applied according to specifications, are not respirable and thus would not cause effects in non-sensitized populations. Given the number of exposures necessary to sensitize the population, only the most highly susceptible would appear to even have a chance of having issues. For the vast majority of the population symptoms are limited to minor headaches, a minor odor and a bad taste in the mouth. It is possible that the suspension solution may have food additives that may result in minor reactions but given the minute quantities ingested these symptoms would be expected to disappear shortly after exposure ceased. That being said all studies repeat the same warning: most negative reactions in affected communities will be linked to adverse effects promoted by expectation, otherwise known as “the nocebo effect”.

Posted in Gypsy Moth | 3 Comments

More on Gypsy Moth spraying: Toxicity redux

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Blair

 Much as I expected, my post on “the nocebo effect” and spraying for gypsy moths” drew a whirlwind of criticism on Twitter and in my email inbox. The major concern had to do with the fact that in my post I dealt with Btk in general and did not concentrate on the specific formulation used for spraying in Surrey and Delta: Foray 48B. Now Foray 48B is a proprietary formulation of Btk produced by Valent BioSciences and is sold in Canada by Valent’s Canadian Agent: Valent Canada Inc. Valent’s Canadian page for Foray 48B is here while a more detailed set of documents is available at Valent’s US website. The intent of this post is to address my previous deficiency and in doing so build on my previous series of posts on risk assessment and toxicology since, as many of you know, the intent of this blog is to enhance evidence-driven decision-making in British Columbia and understanding the science is the best way to do that.

Now as I noted above, I did a series of posts explaining the basics of risk assessment and toxicology in February. 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. The intent of that series of posts was to help me out in situations like this. You see talking about Foray 48B would be very hard if my audience didn’t understand the language of the field. 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 don’t have the space to recap that post here so feel free to read that post then come back…I will wait here for you…okay I see you are back so let’s continue. 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. Now anyone who has read all those previous posts can probably figured out what I am going to write next but that would be less fun for me so I will continue here.

The most common comment was by far the easiest to answer: I was informed “that the compound had an MSDS then it must, by definition, be dangerous”. This is simply incorrect. A Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) is a basic requirement of the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS). Now I agree that WHMIS does indeed have the word “hazardous” right in its title but that doesn’t mean that it only regulates “hazardous” materials. Rather the system provides a consistent method to supply employers and workers with information about chemicals and compounds used in their workplace. WHMIS was developed to provide a uniform system to communicate the risks associated with “controlled products”. So there you have another set of scare quotes. You see the unspoken secret about WHMIS is that it covers pretty much every compound that is used in an industrial setting. The reason for this is that due to the nature of industrial processes almost any chemical can have dangerous properties. MSDSs are available for some of the most terrifying compounds out there from distilled water, to Coca-Cola, to table salt? So you are probably wondering: how can distilled water be considered a hazard? Well let’s look at the MSDS. Distilled water is incompatible with: “Strong reducing agents, acid chlorides, phosphorus trichloride, phosphorus pentachloride, phosphorus oxychloride”. Moreover, as any first year chemist who loves seeing cool reactions will tell you, when you mix distilled water with sodium metal the reaction can be very entertaining. So to ensure the safety of employees, MSDSs exist for virtually every compound used in an industrial/commercial setting.

The next common comment was: look at the MSDS and all those restrictions on its use. Now while there are standards for use in preparing an MSDS, we live in a litigious society and some companies can be extremely cautious when they write an MSDS. Consider this MSDS for distilled water: it includes a pretty detailed description of the necessary skin protection when encountering distilled water. It is so entertaining I will present it unedited:

Handle with gloves. Gloves must be inspected prior to use. Use proper glove removal technique (without touching glove’s outer surface) to avoid skin contact with this product. Dispose of contaminated gloves after use in accordance with applicable laws and good laboratory practices. Wash and dry hands.

Full contact:

Material: Nitrile rubber

Minimum layer thickness: 0.11 mm

Now that is some scary stuff! Think about it for a moment, they are warning you not to touch distilled water unless you are wearing gloves. Forget those hospital-issued latex gloves, they aren’t enough to protect you from this dangerous substance, you need to use nitrile gloves. Remember not just any nitrile gloves are enough either, the only safe gloves need a minimum thickness of 0.11 mm. The part I find hardest to figure out is what substance you are expected to use to “wash hands” after exposure to that nasty distilled water! Now not only is that water dangerous to touch, it also has a reported LD50 under the toxicological Information. Specifically rats die when administered an oral dose of >90 ml/Kg. Even more frightening is the fact that distilled water has been “investigated as a mutagen”. According to the Sigma-Aldrich MSDS for distilled water: “To the best of our knowledge, the chemical, physical, and toxicological properties have not been thoroughly investigated” According to the David Gray & Co MSDS: distilled water can be a “very slight eye irritant” and “excessive inhalation may cause drowning”. Based on these MSDSs I would be considered derelict as a father if I put my beautiful daughter in the tub for fear of the potential mutagenic exposure. Can’t let her outside while it is raining as water is an inhalation risk and I will also have to weigh her regularly to ensure I don’t administer too heavy a dose of water through that sippy cup!

Another common complaint was that the compound may not be appropriate for use because according to “A Health Professional Gives Facts about Foray 48B” posted at the No spray zone web site, the material is not even organic. Well while the “certified organic” label is reserved for foodstuffs and is certified by the various appropriate governmental bodies, the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI ™) certifies the raw materials and chemicals used in the production of “certified organic” foodstuffs. Unlike normal users of products, the OMRI™ gets to look at the actual chemical composition of a product being considered for certification. As indicated at their Website: Foray 48B has received certification as for use in certified organic food production. So when “A Health Professional Gives Facts about Foray 48B” the first thing you may want to check is the background information. First and foremost what kind of health professional are you talking about (a toxicologist maybe?). In this case the “Health Professional” is actually an undefined “Mental Health Professional”. So what that means is that the person is apparently not trained in toxicology, epidemiology or other applicable field. Moreover, when this “mental health professional” informs you that “Foray 48B is not “certified organic” you may want to check with the OMRI™ anyways, because well, because. Given an unnamed “mental health professional” on one hand, and the body authorized to certify chemicals as organic by the United Sates Department of Agriculture on the other, you may want to trust the body authorized to certify compounds and formulations as organic.

The final point was that a large percentage of the Foray 48B is made up of mysterious “inert” ingredients. Well as noted OMRI™ got to look under the hood at that list and they still decided to certify the compound as organic. As for better toxicological data, I have linked to a New Zealand assessment of Foray 48B that includes details of testing up to an including the feeding of Foray 48B to people. Yes they had test subjects take capsules of the stuff daily for five days, they were that confident that it would cause no harm. As described in the document on the use of Foray 48B:

“Foray’s inert ingredients, which include various carriers, suspension agents, and stabilizers are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as inert ingredients of minimal toxicological concern to non-target organisms and the environment (EPA’s List 4B and 3)”

“All inert ingredients in Foray formulations are included in 40 CFR 180.1001. This list has been designed by the EPA as ‘exempt from the requirements of a residue tolerance on raw agricultural commodities” VBC verifies that none of its Btk formulations contain toxic inert ingredients, such as benzene, xylene, or formaldehyde”

So yes Foray 48B has proprietary compounds that are not on the MSDS, but that compound list is considered to pose an acceptable risk by the EPA , is certified as organic and appropriate for use on organic foodstuffs and is certified to be used up to and on the day of harvest. Yes read that again, you can apply the stuff to plants on harvest day and send them to your local organic market and they will still be considered both safe to eat and organic.

Honestly at this point I am just banging a drum here folks. The data is pretty overwhelming. The compound has been certified as safe in Canada, the US, New Zealand and every other place where it has been sprayed. It is a certified organic mixture that provides a safe and effective method of controlling a financially devastating pest with a risk that is below the de minimis level. For those people out there complaining about symptoms like sore throat, and difficulty breathing I would direct you to the pollen outlook for the Vancouver because my family has been suffering from the same symptoms described in all the news stories and we are well outside the spray area. We are, however, sitting in the middle of the pollen season and the days suitable for spraying (dry days immediately after a rainfall) are exactly the same days that are most suited for spore dispersal by trees, flowers, grasses, molds and mushrooms. As someone who tracks pollen levels for my work, I can tell you that the best way to avoid waking up with a headache and dry throat is to take a Claritin before you go to bed and if that doesn’t work then sleep with your bedroom windows closed until the end of the pollen season because based on the toxicology that is the most likely culprit for your symptoms.

Posted in Chemistry and Toxicology, Gypsy Moth | 1 Comment

On "the nocebo effect" and spraying for gypsy moths

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Blair

This week my inbox has been flooded by emails about the decision by our Ministry of the Environment to spray for gypsy moths in parts of Surrey and Delta. For those of you outside the British Columbia lower mainland you might not know about gypsy moths.

As a province dependent on the export of both agricultural and forest products British Columbia is particularly sensitive to the presence of European and Asian gypsy moths. Both are invasive species that can devastate deciduous trees (read destroy fruit trees) and the presence of gypsy moths can result in our wood products being banned for export. Based on these concerns our government has an integrated program including ministries ranging from the Ministry of Agriculture, to the Ministries of Forests and Environment. This program includes trapping moths, identification of outbreaks and, if necessary, spraying.

While the gypsy moth can cause devastation to our economy, it is possible to control it using a safe and effective, non-toxic, aerial spray called Btk. The best thing about Btk is it is the essence of a directed, organic response to infestations. You see Btk is not a chemical pesticide but rather is a formulation of naturally occurring bacteria mixed in a non-toxic solution appropriate for aerial dispersal. As anyone familiar with our environment knows bacteria exist throughout our environment. Each and every one of us carry three to four pounds of bacteria in and on our bodies. Without our natural gut bacteria we would be unable to digest certain foods and people who lose these bacteria either need a transplant or they become extremely ill and in rare cases can die. Due to our interactions with bacteria, our bodies are well suited to their presence and bacteria are similarly adapted. While some bacteria can make you sick, other bacteria (like Btk) cannot. There are literally thousands of studies demonstrating that Btk is harmless to people and pets. More details here. Ironically Btk can’t even hurt adult gypsy moths, their eggs or their pupae. It only works when ingested during the caterpillar stage of their life cycle at which point it gets into their guts, infects them and kills them. I simply lack the space to write about how safe this spraying is which brings us to the topic of this post: The nocebo effect.

So what is the “nocebo effect”? Well let’s start with something everyone knows: the “placebo effect”. The placebo effect is a long understood effect where, in the absence of an active ingredient, a “placebo” (often a sugar pill) has the same effect as if an actual pharmaceutical had been used. The placebo effect has been long understood, heck I first saw it discussed in a MASH episode back in the late 1970’s. Research on the placebo effect is both thorough and extensive. In a review article from 2012 over 2200 studies were identified (ref) demonstrating or discussing trials demonstrating the existence of the effect. The scientific basis of the placebo effect is also well-understood. Human perceptions are driven by our neurochemistry and human neurochemical responses are understood to vary with mood and perceptions. Interestingly enough even the simple act of smiling can cause a biochemical response improving one’s mood (ref). Convince a person with a minor illness that the sugar pill you are giving them will make them feel better and often that is all it takes. As everyone knows, the placebo effect does not work on everyone, nor does it work every time. All that is certain is that on a small percentage of people, in a small number of circumstances, it can have a real effect.

Let’s get back to the “nocebo effect”, it is essentially the placebo effect’s less attractive younger sibling. You could say it is Stephen Baldwin to the placebo effect’s Alec Baldwin. In keeping with the Baldwin theme, while Alec Baldwin is well known for being a liberal-Democrat Stephen is known as an ardent Republican. So while the placebo effect has the ability to help you feel better in the absence of any active ingredients, the nocebo effect has the ability to make a person feel poorly in the absence of any active stimuli.

As described in this review paper the nocebo effect is not as well studied as the placebo effect but it has been demonstrated to be real. It is important to recognize a couple things about the nocebo effect. First and foremost, people who “feel bad” or claim to be “sick” via the nocebo effect are neither lying nor are they fakers, rather they are doing one of two things. They are either associating actual symptoms from other causes to the “nocebo” or they are having phantom symptoms based on their minds playing tricks on them. Think about this in your daily lives. Every parent of young children dreads the arrival of the “pink sheet” from your elementary school. For those of you without young children, the “pink sheet” is the warning announcement the schools send home to tell families that one of the children in their child’s class has been diagnosed with lice. The sheet asks parents to check their kids for lice. Try watching a group of parents when their kids hand them the “pink sheet” and watch as virtually every parent in the group starts itching their heads. You would think someone had spread a dose of itching powder into the group. This is the nocebo effect in action. An itchy head is no longer just something you get from life; it is now all about lice. Until you have had a chance to check your kids and yourselves every itch is a sign that you are one of the unlucky ones. There are any number of celebrated cases where people have be shown that their “illnesses” were all in their minds but by far the most entertaining one is described in this article from Daily Tech. In that case a community complained about health issues associated with radio towers even though the radio towers had been turned off during the time the community members claimed they were being made ill by the towers. I have neither the time, nor the space to talk about fears of WiFi in this article, but I think we can all agree that any case where a transmission tower is turned off and people still complain it is making them sick is an example of the nocebo effect.

So let’s go back to the gypsy moth spraying. When a mother on television claims that following the spraying for gypsy moths she felt a sore throat, it could be that she didn’t look at the pollen count for the morning and woke up with a sore throat from exposure to high levels of pollen or it could be that she simply had a dry throat that on any other day would be solved with a glass of water. In either case once the “sore” throat is associated with the Btk spraying in a person’s mind, it will be that factor that makes it the cause of the “illness” thereafter. Regardless of the amount of research that shows otherwise, every time a community is told that there is going to be aerial spraying you will get a dozen or so people who claim to have symptoms of various indistinct illnesses all of them “caused” by the spraying. Ironically, the illnesses are indeed associated with the spraying but not in the way you would expect. It is not the spray itself but rather by the simple fact that spraying is occurring that caused people to display their symptoms.

This brings us back to a topic of a previous post “On Science Communication and the Difficulty Relaying Scientific Information to the Public” which introduced the concept of “dread risk”. As I describe in my previous post: dread is a term used by Dr. Paul Slovic in his seminal article on risk communication called “Perceptions of Risk“. For those of you without access to journal articles Dr. Roger Pielke discusses the topic in a blog posting. I have previously suggested that any reader who wants a non-technical but compelling read on the subject of Risk should get the book by Dan Gardner of the same name. For those of you not interested in too long a read, dread risks are risks associated with factors that cannot be seen or felt using our normal senses and can have serious or life-threatening consequences, often a long time after the initial exposure. In this the aerial spraying for Btk has features associated with dread risk. The spray, once released, is invisible to the touch, cannot be smelled [author’s correction: the Foray 48B formulation has a very minor odour associated with one of the ingredients used to hold the Btk in suspension] but can sometimes leave a minor residue on surfaces. This makes it an ideal source of dread risk. The problem is that based on all the existing science Btk does not cause any short-term, medium term or long-term risk to humans, animals or anything that is not a caterpillar. Unfortunately, as is the case in many other endeavours, a solid basis in science is never enough to calm all the fears in a population that is mostly science-blind. All our regulators can do is to continue spraying, all the time trying to educate the population about the fact that the spraying does not represent a real risk to human health.

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