It’s a clear explanation of exponential growth and its consequences.  I recommend it.

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Join us for an echo of St Patrick’s day.  Our next monthly Danforth Greens pub night falls on March 30.  We welcome newcomers.

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An economic model that respects resource limits recognizes that once we have provided the fundamentals required to live comfortably, we should stop striving for more and more things and start putting our efforts into building relationships, and spending time with our families and friends.

So once again, I’m ready to step out and promote a future where we work less frequently but more efficiently.  A world with fewer status goods and more time devoted to people.  A world where limits on materials, energy, waste and land use are recognized, and these limits are translated into meaningful prices.  This is a world that has a more local, more resilient economy, a greater sense of community and belonging, and more leisure time.

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Mr. Schmeiser’s story is one of profound and infuriating wrong.  When I first heard him speak, he was embroiled in a legal battle with Monsanto, which had identified their genetically modified crop on his field, and demanded that he pay for using their patented product.  As a heritage seed developer, he certainly didn’t welcome Monsanto’s “contribution”, which had contaminated all his fields and destroyed 50 years worth of work.  All he did was refuse to pay.  And in retribution, Monsanto dragged him right up to the Supreme Court, counting on the fact that he would succumb to the immense pressure of overwhelming legal bills.

In the end Monsanto did not win their case, and Mr. Schmeiser set a precedent in Canada protecting traditional farmers from financial liability for unwelcome contamination.  But Monsanto has since only bought up many seed companies and virtually eliminated some types of non-genetically modified seeds from the market.  Under the guise of feeding the world, they are tampering directly with our food security, in a nasty and aggressive attempt to hold the patent to global food production.  Not one of their products increases food yield, and many are designed to be sprayed with the strongest herbicides on the planet, massively increasing the chemical load of the food we eat.

On the good side, the keynote speaker was German MP Bärbel Höhn, who outlined EU legislation regarding genetically modified organisms.  In Europe, GM producers are legally liable for any costs incurred through contamination, so heritage and organic farmers can be compensated if their livelihoods are affected.  Furthermore, significant setbacks are required to help prevent the spread of genetically modified crops.  All GMO foods must be clearly labelled for the consumer, which puts the onus where it belongs – on the company making the dubious product rather than on the wary consumer.  We can have such sane and reasonable policies too.  It’s a Green priority.

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We meet on the last Tuesday of each month.  Please join us!

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[Tiger Valentine image courtesy of Charlene Chua Illustration.]

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By the time this article was published in August 2008, one of the authors, James Hansen, NASA’s best known climatologist, had already declared that 450 ppm was no longer a responsible target. It was based on his assessment in December 2007 that the 350 movement was born, calling to keep global temperatures within 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. The movement is supported by Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of scientists which reviews and summarizes published climate science for policymakers. It’s also supported by notable Canadians such as David Suzuki, Thomas Homer-Dixon and Sheila Watt-Cloutier. As a result of his assessment, Hansen has been calling for a much more rapid, urgent phaseout of both coal and unconventional oil.

In March 2009, 2500 climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to update scientific assessments in advance of the Copenhagen climate meeting in December. They also concluded that the 2 degree limit could no longer be considered safe.

About a year ago, Hansen called the tar sands “one of our planet’s greatest threats”. Based on alarming science just emerging, he now believes that our planet is in grave peril of becoming Venus-like, with a thick atmosphere retaining temperatures far above the boiling point and making life impossible for our descendants. This is outlined in his book, Storms of my Grandchildren, published in December 2009. The rapid phaseout of the dirtiest fossil fuels has now become very urgent.

A huge campaign against the tar sands has emerged in the United Kingdom. Other countries have small but rapidly growing campaigns as well. It would be prudent even for those Canadians who doubt the climate science to recognize the vulnerability we’re creating by focusing our economy too heavily on a product that’s becoming the object of global boycotts.

Recently, I’ve frequently been asked, by people who are either curious or angry, why it is that people concerned about climate change are picking on the tar sands. Isn’t there another way to contain emissions? Couldn’t we cut our birth rate, drive more economical cars, change more lightbulbs and so on?

The answer is no.

Eliminating the tar sands can’t be compared to efforts at personal reductions. It’s a different calculation. You can choose to drive a more economical vehicle, become a vegetarian, add insulation to your attic, work from home and so on. These choices will reduce the amount of carbon you’re responsible for and they’ll make it easier for you to adapt when we can no longer burn fossil fuels, either because they run out or because we stop using them. However, any personal reductions you make won’t stop an oil company from finding someone else who will be happy to buy the oil you didn’t. What’s more they’ll probably buy it at a lower price than they would have had to pay if other people weren’t making personal reductions. If other consumers are unconcerned about the climate, your hard work at reductions only makes it easier for them to buy more.

So Hansen and Kharecha were making a different calculation. Since they determined that we can’t burn all the fossil fuels available to us unless we want to risk murdering our own descendants, they were picking and choosing which sources of fossil fuels to leave in the ground forever. Whatever personal choices are made, any fuels purchased would have to come from the sources still available.

So the next question might be “Why can’t we pump less oil from Saudi Arabia instead?”. The answer is that Kharecha and Hansen were choosing to close down those fossil fuel sources which were responsible for the most carbon for every unit of energy released. It’s important to look at this in the reverse – they were choosing to close down those sources of carbon dioxide emissions that would give us the least amount of energy. If we choose to close something else instead, all we will do is reduce the amount of energy available to us for the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

We do not yet have a working political tool to cut down carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Even as climate science has become more alarming, global (and Canadian) emissions are rising instead of falling. The Copenhagen talks were a tremendous disappointment. While a handful of countries have succeeded in reducing their emissions, emissions in other countries have only grown faster. What the tool for cutting down emissions will look like when it emerges I can’t say for certain, but whatever it is, it’s clear to me that it will kill the tar sands operations.

We can imagine, for example, that when the world takes climate science seriously, we will decide to simply close down the dirtiest fossil fuel sources until the only sources still operating can emit only the carbon within the budget we will allow ourselves. The tar sands would close.

Perhaps instead, we will develop a global carbon tax. What this would do is drive a wedge between the price consumers pay at the pump and the price that producers receive for their product. Because there’s a limit to what consumers are willing to pay before they choose other options that don’t require as much fuel, less fossil fuels would be burned and the price would fall somewhat. Those fuel sources that are most expensive or energy intensive to extract would no longer be economical to produce. The tar sands would close.

Or perhaps we will divide the carbon budget by year, so that every year we emit less carbon. We could allow only as much carbon to be extracted as we allowed, and permits would have to be bought at auction for any fossil fuels extracted. The auction would again create a carbon price which would drive the same price wedge between consumer and producer. The tar sands would close.

Maybe the world will develop a clean fuel standard that only allows so many emissions to go into the production of its fuels. The United States is developing such a standard now. If such a standard becomes universal, the tar sands will close.

Given the directions we’ve taken in the past, it’s likely that world leaders will divide the carbon budget both by year and by country, and allocate a fixed amount for each country within the carbon budget that the planet will allow. Most countries will have to be on board to prevent oil companies from finding new markets for their product. Whether individual countries choose to tax, auction or simply constrain their carbon won’t matter, so long as in the end they burn less. And whatever method they choose, when you can’t burn all the fuel on the planet, the fuel that will always be chosen will be the fuel that’s most economical and energy efficient to produce. The tar sands will close.

But what about carbon capture and sequestration? It’s not going to help here. The problem is that the fuel is ultimately burned in cars, home heating units and other locations for which carbon capture will never be available. So the amount of that fuel burned has to go down, it can’t be sequestered. If carbon capture and sequestration eventually comes to be economical in some circumstances, and the tar sands industry chose to employ it in the extraction and refining process, it would only make tar sands operations even more expensive and energy intensive per gallon of fuel in the car. Tar sands fuel wouldn’t get any more appealing. If you’re going to choose a fuel to burn in your car or home, you would never choose tar sands fuel, given a choice.

When sober scientists say the tar sands must close, they are not picking on one country or industry. I’m not a scientist but I promote policy. It’s not my objective to close the tar sands. My objective is to reduce emissions. But I recognize that in order to reduce emissions enough, the tar sands will have to close, whether we want them to or not. Any government that’s serious about climate change and understands the science must be prepared to see the tar sands close, and soon. Government leaders who claim they’re serious about climate change but still envision tar sands growth for decades into the future are lying to you. They are owned by the oil industry, and they’re willing to sacrifice your children’s future for short-term profit.

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I was studying Anthropology at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s.  At that time, Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson were embroiled in a bitter feud about the significance of Australopithecus afarensis.  Johanson had found remains of the 3.2 million year old hominid and was sure that it was a human ancestor.  Leakey was initially unwilling even to acknowledge that it deserved its own species name.  Johanson was still fighting off accusations of professional misconduct because he publicized his findings in a popular magazine and gave the specimen the catchy name “Lucy” before submitting his research to peer-review.  Some old textbooks that we used still referred to Piltdown Man, which had been revealed as a fraud four decades before.

In those days, creationists hyperventilated about how the science of evolution was corrupt, conflicted and contrary and missing critical evidence.  Any moment we were all going to realize the whole field was a hoax and return to our biblical creationist beliefs.  Yet paleontologists continued on and emerged respected for their work.  Few people even remember that Lucy was supposed to be a gift to creationists.  She sits today in a museum in Ethiopia, proudly recognized as an early member of the human family.

So all of this seems very familiar to me.

There is nothing in climate science that is remotely as controversial as paleontology was then.  Success in paleontology truly depended on spectacular finds so there was tremendous incentive to forge, exaggerate and sensationalize work.  On the basis of tiny bone fragments, scientists deduced how ancient hominids moved, ate and socialized.  The potential for error was huge, and errors were routinely revealed as dueling paleontologists attacked each other.

Despite claims by contrarians that climatologists are paid to exaggerate their work, nothing could be further from the truth.  The Bush administration famously suppressed the bad news by editing it out, but every government hopes to find a reason to continue using the cheap energy that makes life so much easier for us all.  The policy response doesn’t live up to the scientific challenges in any country on the planet.  IPCC reports require consensus from Saudi, Russian, Chinese, American and other scientists, none of whose governments want to limit fossil fuel use.  That is perhaps why the Arctic is melting much faster than IPCC reports predicted.  It is also why climatologists and those who follow them desperately hope for better news that almost never comes.

The latest scandal rocking climate science, which contrarians are sure will tear the science apart, is trivial by comparison.  Within a meticulously researched and scientifically dense summary thousands of pages long, covering the work of four years of global research, one number turned out to be wrong.  What’s more, it was wrong because in that one instance, the scientists didn’t adhere to the rigourous source checking they were supposed to.  Any reasonable person will understand that mistakes happen.  The IPCC acknowledged the error as it became clear and apologized.

Unfortunately, the error also comes on the heals of two other setbacks.  One is the collapse of the climate change talks in Copenhagen.  This grim episode reflects poorly on politicians and lobbyists, but really does nothing to undermine the science.

The other setback involves the theft and publication of thousands of emails between climatologists from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.  It is only to be expected that the publication of emails will reveal awkward or embarassing details.  However, the claims that these emails reveal scientific fraud or systematic distortion of the facts are false.

We now have the preliminary results of the first inquiry into the issue.  Pennsylvania State University has found no evidence that the science was faked.  Their inquiry looked into the heart of the allegations about “hiding the decline” and found that, just as the scientists had said, it referred to a tactic that was openly revealed in published data.  Having looked at these emails and the background as well, I’m confident that the inquiries at East Anglia University and the IPCC will come to similar conclusions.  We can now all hope that all these inquiries will lead to improved methods of data handling and increased confidence in the science.

What we must also hope for is that the science will spur the necessary policy response in time.  In that respect, the situation today is very different from the controversy surrounding multi-million year old bones safely buried in the soil.  If we fail to acknowledge the science and act accordingly in time, the consequences of climate change are far more grim than the lack of a museum exhibit and tourist attraction.  What all reputable climatologists agree is that when climate diverges significantly from a pattern, it can change abruptly and brutally.  Decades ago now, climatologists identified Arctic melt as one of the clearest dangers to avoid.  The fact that Arctic ice is disappearing in a fraction of the time it was supposed to should give deniers pause before they go on to dismiss climate science as exaggerated or entirely bogus, because the implications are terrifying to people like me who treat the science seriously.

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