The Sixth Estate

As promised, I am steadfastly avoiding discussing the Globe & Mail, and its latest partisan salvo — a preposterous endorsement of the BC Social Credit-turned-Liberal Party that reads like it could have been written by said party’s PR hacks — doesn’t help matters. (The Globe describes the NDP leader as a “business-minded socialist,” which is sort of like calling someone a “nonpartisan Globe & Mail editor” — it’s an oxymoron. I do, however, continue to read the comment pages, because it’s unfair to punish them for the sins of the editors, and mostly because I just can’t help myself.

Which is why I feel compelled to respond, despite my sort-of boycott, to a recent op-ed by McGill economist Chris Ragan on the subject of climate change. Ragan and I appear to have very different political opinions, but he’s a serious, intelligent and responsible writer, at least so far as I know. Which, again, is why I felt compelled to write.

Ragan’s concern is that conservatives are not participating in the climate change debate. (On this part we agree: by and large they aren’t, even though they should be.) He goes on to argue the following: first, we need to have a “real conservative” alternative to the “left of centre” big-government types who currently dominate the climate change scene. Second, the conservative option would involve a mix of market-based pricing and taxing solutions as opposed to regulation. Third, we need a nonpartisan think tank-style commission to steer the debate away from hyper-partisanship. Fourth, ideally, that commission should be led by economists.

Now, it should be immediately apparent here that the real problems are (1) lack of education and (2) hyperpartisanship on the part of people who call themselves “real conservatives.” I’m not the slightest bit interested in judging whether Ragan’s “real conservatives” or the pro-global warming crowd that also call themselves “real conservatives” have a better claim to the label, but it’s worth noting that reality-based thinking is not really a defining feature for the conservative crowd by and large, so it’s maybe kind of a moot point anyways.

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One of the most irritating features of government-by-press-release is the “re-announcement” — the enthusiastic proclamation, with full fanfare, of something that has already been proclaimed before, often many times. Today the Conservative government engaged in this practice, or, just as conveniently, had the media do it for them by playing up a funding announcement for a biofuel experiment by Pond Biofuels as though it were evidence of the “new” commercially oriented National Research Council:

Hard on the heels of announcing a new commercial focus for the National Research Council, the federal government today provided an example of what this new mission could mean for Canada’s premier science agency.

Yeah, well, that’s nice. One of the problems with this notion is that the NRC was already working on the algae file. In fact, unless I’m reading the entrails wrong, they were already funding Pond Biofuels to do exactly these sorts of projects. So while it’s nice to see that Pond Biofuels has made it another step toward full commercialization by building a subsidized bioreactor for a tarsands company in Alberta, this really isn’t the “new” NRC. This is the “old” NRC. Whether there will be a “new” NRC, and what form it will take, remains to be seen.

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Today’s column comes to you courtesy of Rex Murphy. When I was growing up, I remember listening to Rex on the radio and liking him. Later, he turned to newspaper columns, and I think it was only then that I realized what a dunce he was. And is. After poking fun at the Europeans for the latest tainted meat scandal — it seems that eastern Europeans are raking in money by labelling horsemeat as “beef” and shipping it west to unsuspecting buyers — Rex just can’t resist getting another dig in at the pesky greenies across the pond:

Lay aside the dubious pork, that maybe-it’s-beef, for a while. Britain and Europe have an easy way out: meat from the multitude of our country’s vast seal population. Seal meat is a wonder — very nutritious, nice game taste, can be prepared variously, makes splendid “flipper pie.” It is also, almost by necessity, organic. And free range? The whole North Atlantic is their pasture. Seal meat will see Europe through this crisis.

I’m trying not to take this too seriously, because no doubt Rex doesn’t want his readers to see him as a serious, insightful critical thinker. But the fact that he can even utter such an asinine statement is proof of how appallingly ignorant the denialist right has become when it comes to environmental issues. That’s the same denialist right, incidentally, 40% of which tell pollsters that a 20-foot sea level rise wouldn’t pose a significant problem for coastal cities. (Don’t get too upset at me, right-wingers: I’ll be turning my guns on the denialist left in just a moment.)

Because here’s the thing: someone who makes a statement like this proves, by saying it, that they have absolutely no idea what the ecological footprint of the human race has become. They are absolutely, appallingly, utterly ignorant on the subject. Which I suppose goes a long ways towards explaining why Rex Murphy is something of a climate change denialist. Even in jest, it’s just a really stupid thing to say. It’s like saying: “oh, you don’t like driving in to work from the suburbs every day? That’s okay: invest in a kayak.” It’s nonsensical.

To see what I mean, juxtapose the following two statistics. First of all, even using decade-old figures, the European market consumes 35 million tonnes of meat per year. About one-fifth of that is beef. There’s also 80,000 tonnes per year of legal horse meat — i.e. the horse meat people actually want to buy, not the stuff included in the new “horse-beef” scam.

Second of all, although I’m not sure what the total North Atlantic seal population is, I can tell you that according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans the northwest Atlantic seal population includes 8 million harp seals, 600,000 hooded seals, 350,000 grey seals, and 1 million ringed seals. Assuming that every one of those seals is at the top end of the weight range given by Wikipedia for each species, which they obviously aren’t, and that every pound of animal weight can be turned into a pound of marketable meat, which it obviously can’t be, by my math at any rate, that adds up to a hypothetical meat supply of a few million tonnes.

Or, put another way, if Europeans did what Rex Murphy is telling them to do, they’d eat their way through the entire Canadian Atlantic seal population in a couple of months.

Which is where Rex Murphy, curiously, runs into the left-wing environmental denialists. These ones aren’t like him. They embrace climate change. Believe in it, even. But they also think that the way forward for humanity is to get simpler: organic food, country living, small farms, no more nuclear power plants, 100 mile diets, etc, etc.

It won’t work, folks. There are too many of us now. Like it or not, at its present population level and given present growth projections, humanity requires large-scale industrial production just to stay alive, just to keep treading water. Given presently used and foreseeable future technology, said production will send us careening into an existential crisis in very short order. Left to its own ends, evolution is inexorable, inescapable, and inevitable. We’re committed to our present course, just as surely and for the same reasons as a few lost migratory birds “decided” a few million years ago that on the small islands they were marooned on they didn’t really need wings anymore. Those birds became dodos. What we will become remains to be seen.

So far the only difference between us and them is that a few of us can see the trainwreck coming, which is enough to qualify us as unique. Actually stopping the train requires us to pull off two miraculous exceptions to the natural order of things. Now there are actually quite a number of people who have won the lottery, but I’m not sure how many of them have won the lottery twice.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that selling a controlling stake in this country’s largest energy resource to a foreign dictatorship is not really a good plan. We don’t even trust our own government with that kind of thing. I honestly thought we had a chance on this one. I guess the Harper regime’s shortsightedness is even greater than I thought possible. Remember that in 2015, everyone.

Anyhow, to mark the occasion, let me venture a guess. Today the Globe & Mail’s editorial labelled the Chinese government’s totalitarianism a “preposterous” attack on basic liberties. Some time within the next 72 hours, the very same editor will label the Chinese government’s acquisition of vital Canadian natural resources a sound investment decision that paves the way to Canada’s bright and glorious future.

Go ahead Globe and Mail. Prove me wrong.

Incidentally, their reporters were already excited. One of them hopes that as a reward for this deal, the Chinese will let a Canadian bank purchase a 20% minority stake in a Chinese bank. It’s 20%, because under Chinese law, no foreign company can hold more than a 20% stake in a Chinese bank. Interesting, isn’t it?

The Conservative Broadcasting Corporation has just published a howler of an article which appears to be basically an uncritical reprint of some pro-industry schmozzling intended to suggest that climate change is a relatively minor problem easily solved with some minor biotech tweaks. The author for this piece of trash is Max Paris.

There’s a minor piece of good news: Pond Biofuels has partnered with St. Marys Cement and U.S. Steel Canada to attach algae systems to plant smokestacks. Some of the carbon emissions are then absorbed in the reproduction of the algae rather than being released into the atmosphere. As a result, emissions are cut. Slightly. This article doesn’t bother to tell us how much, which would seem to be a relevant factor. It does quote one industry representative announcing that “algae is the solution to climate change.”

Which is where Max Paris, with all the logical capacity of a 2-year-old, flies straight off into cuckooland:

In addition to keeping that CO2 out of the atmosphere, the algae can later be turned into biodiesel.

Apparently any old idiot can be a CBC reporter nowadays. I won’t belabour the point. I assume you’ve seen the obvious flaw in this scheme. Idiotically, Paris and some equally crackpot editor decided to title this article “CO2 emissions could feed algae biofuel bonanza,” as though as soon as we figure out one possible way to reduce our carbon emissions, the next thing to do will be to get them back out into the atmosphere again where they really belong.

It is nice to hear that we may be recycling some of our carbon emissions, but you can either fix the carbon in the ground, or you can burn the carbon-containing mass for energy. In the long term it’s one or the other, I’m afraid. Unless you think Pond Biofuels is going to miniaturize their technology and plug it into the exhaust system of every car, which I’m sure they’d love to do if it was technically feasible.

A fairly big if, there, which leads us to a second problem, one which Paris is at least dimly aware of: there are no perpetual motion machines. Not even algae. To make more algae, you need more light, not just more carbon dioxide. (And more water, which is less problematic.) To do this on an industrial scale, in a plant setting like this, you specifically need artificial light, especially in a balmy climate like Canada’s. Which means you need electricity. Which I guess you could get by burning your new biofuels, although it would kind of defeat the purpose. St. Marys says they’ll use solar panels.

We have a third problem, if Paris wants us to take seriously this notion that algae will solve climate change. Canada generates something like 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year. Leaving aside the technical difficulties of how to apply Pond Biofuels’s impressive work to every other carbon emitting system, I leave it to you to decide where you’re going to put all this algae. Which, incidentally, will have to be in a suitably inaccessible location. Because algae dies. And then what happens to the carbon it’s “storing”?

I don’t know, but I’m sure Max Paris has an answer.

An extraordinary exchange took place in the House of Commons environment committee a few days ago. It was so extraordinary that it made the news, but only just. A little more exposure, and the 26-year-old yahoos who run the Prime Minister’s Office would have been wishing they’d ordered the whole thing done in camera, just to save themselves the embarrassment.

Harper has named as deputy minister of the environment — the country’s seniormost civil servant on climate change and other environmental problems — one Bob Hamilton. He has an advanced degree in economics and spent two decades in the finance department, which more than qualifies him for tackling a real problem like climate change. Recently Hamilton was hauled before one of our interminable Parliamentary committees to explain his credentials.

And then this happened:

Megan Leslie (NDP): My first question for you, Mr. Hamilton, and it’s a straightforward question… What causes climate change?

Bob Hamilton: Wow. They didn’t tell me I’d have to answer questions like that when I took this job.

Really? Exactly what kind of questions did you think you might need to know the answer to when you took on the post of Canada’s most senior bureaucrat on environmental policy?

This is a stupefying display. It’s almost on par with the B.C. legislature’s infamous “are bacteria fish?” debate. A realistic answer might have begun with “I don’t know all of the scientific literature…” — and indeed, that’s something Hamilton gropes for later on in the proceedings. But “wow, I didn’t think I’d need to know that kind of thing”? Seriously?

Anyways, that’s the part the media caught, but it didn’t end there. Sensing trouble, one of Harper’s tame backbenchers, Stella Ambler leaped into the fray to defend the deputy minister:

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This weekend’s warm-up natural disaster, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake west of the Queen Charlotte Islands, should but won’t serve as a vital wake-up call to the federal and provincial governments: British Columbia is in an extremely hazardous position geologically, and it is only a matter of time — on geological timescales, a very short time — before an extremely large earthquake occurs closer to a major population centre, very likely followed by a tsunami which will inundate major coastal communities. This one was neither close to Vancouver, nor of the sort that would cause a tsunami. Eventually we won’t be so lucky on either count.

The Globe & Mail has started asking questions, but in a slapdash sort of way. I’ll try and pick up the slack, but before I do that, I need to point something out: all shortcomings in the B.C. government’s disastrously inept response to this fortunate non-event are the fault of the Globe & Mail itself. Them, and all the rest of the far-right, anti-government crowd that controls most of the newspapers and governments in this country. You wanted a small government? Well, you got one. All of a sudden you want a big, omni-present government to take care of you when things go wrong. Tough luck.

The Globe has, to its credit, pointed to one obvious problem with the B.C. natural disaster plan, which — judging from this weekend, anyways — centers on getting the word out to residents via Twitter. Well, that’s brilliant. It works on the obviously solid assumption that if there is a major earthquake that decimates Vancouver and Victoria, not only the general public but also the civil servants running the provincial emergency program will still have Internet access.

Another problem is that the government obviously lacks the capability to warn local communities of an incoming tsunami. The Globe apparently was unable to talk to any community governments closer than Tofino, but the fact remains: according to them, at any rate, it took the provincial emergency program three hours to hold a tele-briefing with local emergency officials. That’s one hour after the waves from the earthquake reached Tofino. I remember us criticizing Indonesia a few years ago for not having an adequate tsunami warning system in place. First World countries do things differently, we were assured.

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Sixth Estate’s budget coverage continues; previous reports are on the MP pension reform scam and the removal of 30 of Canada’s 47 longest rivers from protected status as navigable waters.

As I noted previously, the Navigable Waters Act is being renamed the Navigation Protection Act and the environmental protection which the federal government once extended, basically, to any body of water you could paddle a canoe on is now being restricted to a special shortlist of 62 rivers and 97 lakes (plus the three oceans). In a country that has tens of thousands of rivers and lakes, obviously this is going to involve a great deal of environmental and legislative carnage. Last post, I noted that this removed the majority of Canada’s longest rivers from protection under the navigable waters law.

Today I’d like to do the same thing for lakes. According to Wikipedia, Canada has about 32,000 lakes “larger than three square kilometres” and 561 lakes “larger than 100″ square kilometres. The first list is obviously too long to go into here: it goes without saying that 97 out of 32,000 is not very impressive. (Plus there are some that are not that large yet still are protected: for instance, the Conservatives took special care to protect a small puddle in the middle of Ottawa called Dow’s Lake, which I can’t imagine is that large, though I could be wrong.) There’s not even any point working with the list of 561 lakes, since I can already tell you without looking that more than 85% of them can’t be on the list, mathematically speaking.

What we can do, though, is look at Natural Resources Canada’s list of lakes over 400 square kilometres — that is, the very largest lakes in Canada. From there, we can see that the federal government has failed to include three of B.C.’s five largest lakes (Babine, Atlin, and Ootsa); all of Alberta’s largest lakes; and, as with the rivers, has all but written off the northern territories as free and ungoverned.

For strict comparison purposes, I decided to shorten the list even further, to just those lakes over 1000 square kilometres. Only 15 of Canada’s 43 largest lakes — lakes over 1000 square kilometres — are now protected as navigable waters. Those that didnt’ make the cut include lakes Aberdeen, Bras D’Or, Lesser Slave, Lac la Ronge, Cree Lake, the Gouin Reservoir, Lac Seul, Lac Mistassini, and the Smallwood Reservoir, Lac Manicouagan, and the Robert Bourassa reservoir.

Continuing Sixth Estate’s fall 2012 budget coverage, which began with a look at what appears to me to be some appalling chicanery in the MP pension “reform” scheme, I thought it would be nice to look at the end of the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Symbolic of the shift in emphasis by this government, the Navigable Waters Protection Act is technically no more. Henceforth it will be known as the Navigation Protection Act, which, you will note, is not quite the same thing, is it?

More to the point, and quite incredibly, the Navigation Protect Act reduces its scope from covering all bodies of water (lakes, rivers and oceans) that you can move a boat along, to just those bodies of water that appear on a special list maintained by the Minister of Transport. That list now appears as Schedule 2 of the Budget, and, incredibly, it contains just 97 lakes and 62 rivers, in addition to the three oceans. According to Wikipedia, Canada has about 32,000 lakes that are larger than 3 square kilometres.  So obviously there is a great deal of legislative carnage here.

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Years ago now, the big argument in the climate change community was about how to lower emissions. The left favoured regulation. But, in order to draw in right-wingers who insisted that regulation kills profits, the goalposts shifted. The right invented ideas like “carbon taxes” and “cap-and-trade systems” because it argued that market incentives would encourage businesses to innovate creative solutions to climate change, whereas regulation would just raise prices and contract the economy.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read the current position of Canada’s Reform Party environment minister, Peter Kent:

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