Based on my experience I believe that Ann Peel is an electable candidate who will widen the party’s base and attract new voters. She is the type of candidate people can see representing them on Parliament Hill.

This has been a difficult decision as I have known and worked with Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu for many years. Adriana is the heart and soul of this riding association. I applaud her outstanding commitment to making this world a better place.

A political party exists to get its candidates elected. The question we each must ask ourselves is who can best sell the party and it’s amazing platform to the average voter on the street. I believe that person is Ann Peel. I encourage you to vote for her at the nomination meeting this Sunday.

Mary Ann Grainger

1. Natural gas supply

Here’s the first statement you claim to be from “climate zealots”, along with your rebuttal:

Natural gas is a declining resource — an outright lie, natural resources are growing worldwide.

First of all, this statement is far too broad for the discussion we’re having.

If I were to take the statement above completely literally, “natural gas is a declining resource” would have to be correct. By contrast, your counter that “natural resources are growing worldwide” is obviously wrong.

We live on a finite planet and we’re using up virtually every resource (fish, wood, land, clean well water, oil, etc.) faster than it’s being replenished. That’s most obvious when we look at the decline of forests worldwide perhaps, but the rate of overuse is actually greater for the fossil fuels, which are rebuilt on geologic time scales. We’re using thousands of years worth of concentrated energy every year.

It would be more correct to say that the rate of discoveries of natural gas is increasing, and I think this may be what you intended to say. This may be true today, as compared to a year ago, but it’s not a long-term trend. Furthermore, even if it is true today, it is only true because the price of gas now allows us to explore pretty extreme sources of the stuff at unprecedented rates. The general trend is to decline, as you can see by this chart of long-term global natural gas discoveries which peaked in the 1970′s and haven’t been anywhere close for decades.

[Chart: Global giant gas discoveries by decade]

As David Hughes (who is certainly not a climate zealot, but rather a senior researcher with the Geological Survey of Canada for 32 years) points out, between 1991 and 2009, the amount of drilling to find new wells in North America increased by 300% for a gain of 15% in production. So we’re drilling more and more feverishly to get piddling production gains.

Shale gas exacerbates this trend, since shale gas wells have a much faster depletion rate. While conventional gas wells have a depletion rate of about 32% annually, shale gas wells can deplete by up to 80% in the first year.

What I actually said was that conventional natural gas sources in North America are in deep and irrevocable decline, with no appreciable production gains in spite of tremendous efforts being made to find the stuff. That is an undisputed fact, and the reason why we in North America are turning to shale gas and other exotics.

So to clarify, what “climate zealots” like me might say is that “Conventional natural gas wells are in decline in North America, unable to keep up alone with demand. So keeping up with future demand, if it continues, will require greater reliance on shale gas”.

2. Conventional vs shale gas

Now here’s the second statement you pin on “climate zealots”, again with your correction.

Nat gas from shale or tight rocks is different than conventional — totally misleading, same hydrocarbon, differenet geology

Here my problem is that I disagree with your statement that “climate zealots” claim that the gas itself is different. I have never heard any climate activist of any type claim that the gas is fundamentally different if it comes from shale. The problem environmental and climate activists have with shale gas is the production process.

It’s comparable to a distinction between bottled water imported from France and tap water. No environmentalist is saying “Don’t drink Evian because it’s bad water”. They’re saying “Don’t drink Evian because it’s essentially the same as tap water. France can’t be expected to provide drinking water for the planet and it’s crazy to waste energy moving water around uselessly that way”.

So I agree with your “correction” but deny that I (or anyone else I know) made the statement you accuse us of.

3. Shale gas vs coal

Here’s the third statement you accuse “climate zealots” of making, along with your rebuttal:

Shale gas is worse for the environment than coal — another outright lie which no serious scientist would ever support. It wilts under even the most cursory scrutiny.

The production of shale gas releases greenhouse gases equivalent or higher than mountaintop removal coal mining. There are serious analyses that demonstrate this (including peer-reviewed studies), whereas I know of no serious scientific analysis that disputes this. I pointed you to the Howarth study from Cornell. If you have something which disputes that, please point me to it.

Still, I’m not sure a “climate zealot” would make the above statement, because “shale gas is worse for the environment”, is a much broader statement than a simple analysis of its greenhouse gas impacts. Mountaintop removal, uhm, removes whole mountains, causes flooding, spread of nasty toxins, destruction of wildlife and a complete change of local ecosystems. On the other hand, shale gas production has been known to poison local drinking water supplies. I don’t know if anyone has made an overall comparison of the two, nor do I know how you would, since you can’t compare the value of deer habitat against the value of safe drinking water without a value judgement.

So I would not say that shale gas is environmentally worse than coal overall. But I would say that if you’re trying to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and moving off coal to do so, then moving onto shale gas is a bogus direction.

 
I have never advocated quick fixes or silver bullets. Quite the contrary. It is natural gas advocates who imagine it is a quick fix. I have spent a great deal of time taking a sober look into the pros and cons of every type of path forward out of our unsustainable and polluting addictions. I do not think the answers are going to be easy. But we owe it to our children and grandchildren to offer them a livable world at the end of our lives. And that means we can’t just grasp at straws like natural gas (and ethanol and tree-planting offsets and many other interesting notions) and defend them even when the scientific evidence suggests that they are not any better than what they’re replacing.

Best, Adriana

The main thrust of my posts was to counter the deliberate misinformation that zealots in the environmental movement try to put forth about nat gas. The biggest ones being:

1. Natural gas is a declining resource – an outright lie, natural resources are growing worldwide
2. Nat gas from shale or tight rocks is different than conventional – totally misleading, same hydrocarbon, differenet geology
3. Shale gas is worse for the environment than coal – another outright lie which no serious scientist would ever support. It wilts under even the most cursory scrutiny.

My agenda in all of this is to try and steer the environmental debate in this country away from the demagoguery that too many of its leaders espouse and try and focus on practicality and real-world solutions. More than anything, choices that are based on hard science and above all else economics.

Although I am positive Adriana and Greens like her feel they are acting in the best interest of the cause, there is a reason they have performed abysmally in past elections. If Greens are going to get a seat at the table making real impact to legislation they have to offer practical solutions and act in an honest and truthful manner. Distorting and making up facts destroys creditibility and thus, electibility.

Practical solutions are the bridge to solving our environmental issues not frantic doomsaying and irrational hyperbole.

I always tell environmentalists that they must study economics and business. If they can remove themselves from the Ivory Tower and discover how the world’s economies really works they can discover the real solutions to environemntal problems.

So the point here and on countless other issues is, yes natural gas is not the perfect solution for weaning Ontario from coal but it is the best of the lot. The sooner people in our movement discover there are no quick fixes or silver bullets, the better.

I’m sorry, but you are wrong on the bigger picture w/ nat gas. You keep comparing natural gas to coal. We need to get off both of them. While natural gas will suffice for peaker-plants as a bridge, it simply doesn’t make sense to try substitute nat. gas for coal, mainly from the carbon budget needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, but also because there are economic alternatives that we in Ontario can pursue that are better. That’s not to say that nat gas. doesn’t play a role, but there are much better alternatives for both liquid fuel, base load generation, and general reduction of consumption. While hydrocarbons are needed in the near term, your assessment of nat gas. only compares it against coal use and you’re not doing a stand-alone comparison of the cost/benefits of a massive switch to nat. gas. those cost/benefit analyses are out there, but I fear you won’t like what they say.Finally, your blanket condemnation of any alternative that does not include hydrocarbons reveals that you aren’t aware of these alternatives, nor have calculated the carbon budget in which we need to operate within….

Thank you for your consideration.

1. It’s critical to have travel options that get beyond oil dependence, so I strongly support infrastructure that helps. That includes public transit, bike lanes, electric vehicle plug-in stations and so on.

2. I am personally more of a walker than a cyclist. I do ride my bike for pleasure, mainly off-road through the ravine system.

3. I remember the deep pleasure I had in my youth when I travelled through Europe and rode a rented bike in Amsterdam and Stockholm. Cities that have a lot of bike riders are safer for cyclists, because car drivers expect them and drive accordingly. Bike riding in Toronto is still far more dangerous than it should be, precisely because too many people have the mentality expressed by Mayor Ford, that roads are for cars. The truth is that the whole city, including the roads, are for people, not cars. Roads help people get places, including by car, but if that endangers other people, then our priorities have gotten mixed up.

Bike lanes are one way of helping more people get on bikes to move around, so they should be encouraged. Using precious money to tear up existing infrastructure is hypocritical from a mayor who claims to be worried about city spending.

Please note, Olivia, that it is not absolutely necessary to have special bike infrastructure in a city to have a lot of cyclists. In many ways, bike lanes are there to keep cyclists from annoying car drivers. In many Asian cities, cars and bikes share the road and there are a lot of bikes. Some small European cities have taken out all road signage, stoplights and lanes and created a traffic free-for-all. Studies show that because drivers do not know what to expect, they actually drive more carefully. The rate of car accidents does not go up. To encourage people to get on their bikes, it’s most important to create a bike-friendly atmosphere. Bike lanes are one way to do it, there may be others.

The problem with Rob Ford’s way of talking is not so much that he’s removing bike lanes, but that he speaks with annoyance about cyclists, encouraging “road rage” – animosity between people who have to share the road. That’s a bad idea.

4. Cars and trucks with internal combustion engines are also responsible for terrible air quality and urban asthma rates, as well as some cancers. There are a lot of very good reasons to figure out how to eliminate our need for these vehicles.

5. Not even oil companies believe that oil will last indefinitely. Petroleum geologists all pretty much agree that we’ve already found all the easy oil, and pumped out a lot of it. From now on, oil will get more expensive to find and extract and more energy-intensive to refine. The International Energy Agency has admitted that oil production has been pretty much stagnant since 2006 or so and is likely to start declining soon (within this decade), and the IEA has been historically very optimistic about the resources to be found in the future.

Please note though, that electric cars are emerging, and will probably replace the cars we now know in the next couple of decades. I believe that energy prices will mean that people will travel less, so I suspect there may be fewer cars on the road in the future, but that’s just a guess.

6. Of course. As you and I have pointed out above, internal combustion engines (which account for pretty much all the cars on the road today) have a tremendous impact on climate change, air quality, water quality, asthma rates, cancers and road kill. Clearly halving the rate of all these things would have some tremendous benefits. Decreasing the demand for gasoline could also stop enormously destructive extraction operations like the tar sands, which are tearing up an area of pristine boreal forest the size of France and turning it into a toxic waste dump.

7. I cannot presume to enter Mr. Ford’s brain. We all focus on specific things we like and oppose things we dislike. Mr. Ford clearly dislikes bicycles and likes cars. The reasons I cannot know. Perhaps Mr. Ford simply wants not to have to worry about cyclists when he is in his car and hasn’t given much thought to other points of view. He has expressed very little interest in environmental, health and safety issues, and seems completely impervious to research studies that show benefits to policies which he doesn’t support.

8. As climate change critic for the Green Party of Canada, I’m mostly working on policies at a national and international level that could help us find a way out of this crisis, but a lot of the policies I promote would help here.

For one thing, the price of fossil fuels needs to rise a lot to reflect the damage that it does. Right now, municipal, provincial and federal governments subsidize fossil fuels in a huge number of ways – for example, roads are maintained by governments whereas rail corridors are maintained by rail companies and get few subsidies. Fossil fuel companies get subsidies for exploration to find more fuel and to develop extraction. The tar sands alone gobble up 1.4 billion dollars a year in federal subsidies. There are tax benefits to companies that provide company cars, employee parking or mileage allowances for car travel. We also subsidize fossil fuels more indirectly with our health, air quality, water quality and so on. And from now on, the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels are going to get increasingly serious and costly to deal with. If the cost of a gallon of gasoline included all the subsidies and the cost of cleaning up the mess it makes, people would be using a lot less gasoline. And that would force cities to deal with moving people around in smarter ways.

I also support working with local communities to build safe and healthy environments that respect everyone who shares the road. While different communities might end up with different strategies, I suspect bike lanes would be a popular choice.

9. Thanks, Olivia. I support your direction and wish you luck in promoting bike lanes. They would be a big help.

1. How are you involved in the Toronto bike lanes? This includes politically, emotionally, etc.

2. Are you a user of these lanes? Why or why not?

3. In your opinion should Toronto add more bike lanes throughout the city? Or, do you feel that Mayor Ford should go ahead and continue to try to take lanes away from our city? Why do you feel this way?

4. Cars and light trucks are the single largest users of petroleum, consuming about 43% of the total. Urban runoff is the leading source of river pollutants. Over a million animals are killed by cars each day. Cars are major noise polluters. After reading just a few of the thousands of statistics about how terrible cars are for the environment, does this change your answer for the previous question?

5. Do you think it is possible for resources to last indefinitely if we only used cars to travel?

6. Do you think switching half the drivers on the road to bikes could really have an impact on the health of ecosystems? Why or why not?

7. In addition to killing animals and ecosystems, gasses created by cars could begin to kill humans. It is the leading cause of Premature deaths of up to 16,000 Canadians each year. Riding a bike is good for the human heart and reduces carbon emissions. Why then, do you think mayor Ford still opposes the issue when it could affect human population?

8. As you know, bike lanes can help us save ecosystems and human life. However, the lack of bike lanes is steering people toward choosing to take gas-guzzling cars. As a leader, do you have any plans to take action and solve this crisis that is destroying so many habitats?

9. After reflecting on your answers, has your position about the bike lane crisis changed? Please remember to take into account the fact that the less bike lanes there are, the more humans, ecosystems and animals are impacted negatively by the pollution created by cars.

Thank you or your time. Your answers are greatly appreciated.

If you people ever got in power I wouldn’t be able to dump my old paint and automobile oil down the sewer.

Go on now and eat a salad from The Big Carrot, the biggest rip-off in the GTA.

JHole

You mention that you got more than one flyer from us. I’m curious about that: We’ve only printed one card this election. Here’s a link to the PDF image of the card we’ve printed.

Is this the card you received? Did you receive multiple copies of the same literature, or different pieces?

Ryerson itself is in Toronto-Centre, where the candidate is Mark Daye. We’re in Toronto-Danforth; our candidate is Tim Whalley. Is that part of the confusion?

Back to our postcard, you will note that it is Forest Stewardship Council certified recycled, license code FSC-C103151, held by Warren’s Waterless Printing. Their licence can be checked online, and is valid until February 14, 2014.

As you might guess from their name, Warren’s uses an eco-friendly waterless printing process.

We’re always in a bit of a jam trying to run an election campaign while keeping our ecological footprint low. One candidate in our riding resolved to not print any signs or literature, and try to do it all online. Remember him? No, I didn’t think so.

Though I’m just a helper in this campaign, where we’ve printed only as many cards as we can deliver door-to-door with volunteers, I was the campaign manager for the last federal election in this riding, where we used a service to deliver multiple flyers to every house in the riding. You won’t be surprised that this got a reaction similar to yours, but from more people. You can read that discussion here.

I personally believe whilst trying to capture young Canadians votes- especially students, try to aim your campaign towards the overall goal (being green), and live up to the name of your party (GREEN).

I wish to have someone reply to me, if at all possible at the same email address provided above.

I’m grateful to live in a country as fortunate as Canada, because of our “democracy” we are able to move forward and take the next step. On http://www.truedemocracycanada.weebly.com the way we will grow as a nation will be explained. We all need to make our country just that much better for our chiildren’s children.

It starts today!

Wait – wait – but that is exactly what so much of our news actually looks like today!

“Coming up – a preview of our preview of the news”

Ouch!

And now, the Pembina Institute, an independent organization, has released a study which says the wind, solar and biogas power producers under Ontario’s feed-in tariff program are being blamed unfairly for rising power prices.

The alternatives are no cheaper. The FIT program would never add more than 1.5 per cent, or about $2 a month, to the typical consumer hydro bill, the study says.

Read it here: http://www.thestar.com/business/companies/article/1020264–don-t-blame-green-power-energy-bills-rising-anyway-study-says

I absolutely agree that we need to worry about the impacts of radiation and nuclear energy. I do not think it would be responsible to focus on just one environmental issue and ignore everything else. We need to worry about climate change, about radiation, about agro-toxins in our food supply, about smog and air quality, about acid rain, about depletion of ancient aquifers, about inundation by giant dams and then a whole host of non-environmental issues like equity, safety, health, education and food security. This list is by no means exhaustive.

But each single blog post tends to focus on just one or another issue. That should in no way imply that I don’t think other issues deserve attention.

Please keep in mind that you’re responding to a post dating to 2007, when we did not have three reactors melting down, but even then I was deeply concerned about nuclear power and helping to organize for smarter alternatives through things like the Power to Choose fora.

I will, however, challenge your suggestion that 40 years worth of spent fuel rods and three reactors in meltdown makes global warming pale in comparison. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has suggested that on our current path, we will kill off 90% of humanity in the second half of this century. Even the most dire assessments of the impacts of radiation do not come close to suggesting outcomes as horrible. If we had to focus on the one greatest challenge humanity faces, climate change would probably be the one.

Best, Adriana

Somebody needs to do some serious waking up alright. And soon.

http://mediaculpapost.blogspot.com/2011/05/george-monbiots-unedited-letter-to.html