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]]>In April, I wrote a three-part series on Earth Day and the carbon removal challenge. Earth Day seemed significant a few years ago. It appeared that much of the world was on board and taking the global warming threat seriously. Not so much now.
In Canada, where a federal government consumer carbon levy had been introduced to drive down emissions, it is now gone in the face of America’s climate change denial rhetoric. The tough milestone-reducing emission targets are a thing of the past here and in many other countries.
In the absence of various national and regional Canadian governments imposing carbon limits, market-driven policies were introduced to combat global warming. Watching the latest retreat from policies initiated after the COP-15 Paris Climate Agreement has been disheartening. I say this, not for me at age 77, but for my granddaughter, who recently turned 5, and will inherit greater climate challenges as a result than the ones we already face today.
Market-driven carbon pricing policies in Canada have dramatically altered with last year’s repeal of the consumer carbon levy, a point-of-sales tax levied at gas pumps. Now, with the latest agreement on industrial carbon pricing coming from meetings between the federal government and the Province of Alberta, industry will be the driving mechanism for Canada to reduce total emissions. This political bargain includes building the carbon capture and storage (CCS) network by a consortium of oil sands operators known as the Pathways Alliance.
The original benchmark industrial carbon price in Canada was to rise from CDN$ 95 today to $170 by 2030. Under the new agreement, the target is $130 by 2040. It is being levied on large fossil fuel, steel and cement operations. When announced, one of Canada’s premier oil sands producers remarked it would have no impact on the company’s operations and do very little to reduce total emissions.
The industrial carbon price is a charge per ton of emissions. The companies do the measuring and reporting. Independent verification is supposed to ensure an honest accounting. Unlike the consumer carbon tax, it is not a blanket levy on every ton emitted.
So, how will it reduce demand for carbon-based fuels, and how will it help Canada reduce the national carbon footprint? It will not apply until large industrial emitters exceed their current established emission benchmarks. For companies that exceed their benchmarks, they can buy carbon credits from others whose emissions are below their benchmarks. That means the large carbon emitters, whether doing business as usual or expanding output while buying offsetting credits, can continue to pollute and contribute to global warming.
How this new climate change tackling problem will get Canada to net-zero carbon by 2050 is a pipedream, and harder to believe even when experts claim that industrial pricing alone can deliver from 20 to 48% of all emission reductions by 2030 under Canada’s climate plan. I am a skeptic.
The six oil sands producers who formed the Pathways Alliance in 2021 account for 95% of oil sands output and between 8 and 12% of Canada’s total carbon emissions. Their plan involves the construction of a 2,000-kilometre (1,240-mile) network of pipelines to transport captured carbon emissions for storage underground at six continuously monitored sites. Phase 1 involves 400 kilometres (250 miles) of pipeline at a cost of CDN$ 16.5 billion.
Nothing has been built to date, which means the Alliance has four years to get the network built and achieve its Phase 1 reduction target of 22 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2)by 2030. Pathways calls for a full network deployment in place by 2040. By 2050, the Alliance describes their network as Canada’s backbone for achieving industrial net-zero CO2 emissions. In fairness to the Alliance, no CCS project has ever been constructed before at this scale.
With $16.5 billion for the Phase 1 down payment, who will pay for the network in totality remains unresolved. The Pathway partners want the Canadian and Alberta governments to offset their risk by contributing a healthy chunk of money to the project. The two governments want the Pathways Alliance to foot the majority of the bill.
Is the cost of getting rid of carbon emissions always going to be this high? To date, capturing CO2 at the source from oil sands operations, steel, cement, or coal-fired and gas-fired power plants is proving very expensive. It involves inventing new processes and materials.
Direct air capture (DAC) to pull CO2 molecules from ambient air is proving equally expensive.
Then there is the cost of storage, which involves finding and preparing suitable underground sites and building the safety infrastructure to ensure CO2 never escapes.
All these projects have involved numbers followed by nine zeros.
What if materials could be found or synthesized on the cheap to absorb CO2? Many materials are excellent at capturing CO2. They can repeatedly be used to absorb and discharge the gas, dramatically reducing material costs.
Among them are cheap solvents and sorbents such as formaldehyde and cyanuric acid, traditionally used to preserve specimens in laboratories and to treat swimming pools.
Another is melamine, a powdered polymer that is used today to make Formica countertops. It is really cheap at $40 per ton.
Equally effective are natural rock-based solutions. Mineral-carbonation storage using heated basalt and sandstone, when exposed to liquefied CO2, rapidly fixes the gas permanently to create the carbonate mineral limestone.
Minimally-heated potassium carbonate, to no more than 60 Celsius (108 Fahrenheit), is a good medium for storing CO2.
Synthesized solid nitrogen-doped carbon materials called viciazites, invented by researchers at Chiba University in Japan, capture and desorb CO2 easily from chimney stacks and flue streams.
Applying these less expensive materials and processes should make CCS viable. For now, however, the fossil fuel industry and its expensive proposition are reluctant participants in a problem of their own making with enormous planetary and human consequences.
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]]>A hat that I have worn since retiring from my technology consulting business is focused on developing grassroots policy for the Liberal Party of Canada. I run policy meetups where those who come are asked to make suggestions. The latest meetup looked at how Canada should respond to Donald Trump’s annexation and tariff threats. The group came up with many good ideas, but were unanimous in one: Canadians need to buy Canadian. A “Made in Canada” and “Buy Canadian” campaign is underway across the country, and smartphone apps with barcode scanning capability are tailored to help shoppers make discriminating choices.
I have a Google Pixel 7a Android smartphone. A quick search of the Play Store found many apps that are undoubtedly equally available to iPhone users. A Google search also discovered useful websites that identified where to buy Canadian. Here are the websites and app sites I quickly discovered:
The above is by no means complete, and I encourage you to do your online search or visit the iPhone App and Google Play Stores to see for yourselves. One thing is certain, it appears there is nothing like getting emotions high, which in Canada appears to have happened with Trump’s 51st state annexation threats and his tariff announcements that have Canadians on the invention warpath.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to harness all that passion and apply it to other challenges Canadians face? Barcode-accessible data apps could serve all of us well when applied to other issues important to us.
For example, food. The nutritional content of packaged foods is always somewhat of a mystery. Current labelling lists vitamins, fibre and protein percentages but doesn’t untangle the mystery of whether this is what we need in the packaged foods we buy. Nutri-Score is a labelling system first introduced in France in 2017 and now adopted by several European Union (EU) countries. It provides consumers with barcode-scannable nutritional information in greater detail than what can be found in print on the packaging.
What about climate change? Similar to Nutri-Score, there have been attempts to add carbon content in packaged foods to product labels. Rather than a green symbol, the eco-content could be specific to carbon footprint. An Australian company in 2019 called GreenSWRM introduced barcode scanning for carbon content. The SWRM app was only available on iPhones.
Another Australian app developer, from The George Institute for Global Health, recently produced ecoSwitch, an app for Apple and Android smartphones. It is only available for use in Australia. Use it to barcode scan packaged foods to calculate the products’ carbon footprint contribution.
Where nutritional content appears to be increasingly acceptable beyond the EU, carbon content labelling remains a work in progress beyond Australia. This is unfortunate because climate change represents a much bigger existential threat than Trump’s tariff wars and annexationist threats against Canada.
As for the proliferation of barcode apps to identify Canadian-sourced products and merchandise, should Donald Trump’s tariff wars continue against the EU and other nations, I imagine other countries will launch similar apps to the many “Buy Canadian” ones that are emerging rapidly since November 2024.
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]]>The post Donald Trump Threats Go Beyond Settling Economic Scores – It’s Personal for Canadians appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>So in 2024 with the Supreme Court ruling that a President while in office is above the law, the guardrails that can keep Trump from decisions with extreme consequences no longer exist. Trump unleashed is already showing what a malignant narcissist is capable of doing.
What characterizes a malignant narcissist? It is a long list. Can you recognize any of these traits in Trump?
The definition of malignant narcissism also includes a reference to these behaviours starting before the age of 15. Mary Trump, his niece, has described the Trump family dynamics. She has described her grandfather and Donald’s father, Fred Trump, as a “high-functioning sociopath.” It appears the nut has not fallen far from the tree.
On January 23, 2025, via teleconference, Trump spoke to attendees at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Besides bragging about his unprecedented win and mandate, none of that being true, he claimed that free speech and democracy in America had been restored.
Then he began to attack the European Union which he claimed had treated the United States “very, very unfairly, very badly.” He described the EU policies as “noneconomic or nonmonetary tariffs” that blocked America from doing business in Europe. He claimed the U.S. had “hundreds of billions of dollars of deficits with the EU” and that American high-tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were being discriminated against with EU regulators charging them “billions and billions” in fees. This was hardly friendly.
Trump saved more enmity for Canada. He described the trade imbalance of goods and services between the two countries as Canada ripping off the U.S. to the tune of between $200 to $250 billion. This was more than twice as big a number as he had used in previous speeches. He then told the Davos audience about his offer to Canada’s Prime Minister. Here is the quote:
“You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit. we won’t have to tariff you, et cetera.”
Why would he want Canada? His speech indicated that the U.S. doesn’t need cars made in Canada, lumber from Canadian forests, and oil and gas from Canadian producers. Why then would absorbing Canada have any value? Think Manifest Destiny and “Make America Great,” all in one and the image it portrays of the fantasist leading it all.
Trump turned his spleen on Mexico and then others in his Davos speech stating “There’s hardly a nation in the world” that hasn’t taken advantage of the U.S. He is describing the world’s most powerful country with the largest economy as a victim. Talk about fantasy!
Is this tirade for real a Trumpian invention? Should Canada consider this level of vitriol from America as a threat to its existence? Canada has felt American Manifest Destiny before during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Is this latest Trump manifestation an equal threat? Trump has stated he only wants to apply economic pressure on Canada to lay the seeds for a future merger between the two countries with the inconvenient and artificial 49th parallel boundary erased.
Doesn’t Trump know that today, Canada and the U.S. couldn’t be more integrated? The countries have a shared economy beginning with the St. Lawrence Seaway Agreement in 1954 and the Auto Pact in 1965. Both have bound the countries’ economies together.
The Seaway made the Great Lakes a common ground for trade and development. The Auto Pact integrated the Canadian and U.S. automotive industry removing tariffs from parts and equipment coming across the border. Cars built on both sides of the border share parts.
Both agreements have been preserved in NAFTA and the USMCA. Now Trump is upending all of it with a 25% tariff on trade between the countries to be imposed beginning on February 1, 2025, or so he muses.
Is this Trump the bully, the malignant narcissist who acts with no remorse or accountability, or is it evidence of a person who believes he can act outside of common conventions, social norms and laws because they don’t apply to him? What has begun as a war of words may on February 1 unlock a tariff war, and may eventually lead to outright hostilities.
Consider this. The President just pardoned the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy militia members who stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, to stop the transfer of power from a defeated Trump to his successor, Joe Biden.
Now pardoned are these militias a private goon army that Trump can wield against enemies both domestic and foreign? In 1865, it was Irish-born Americans serving in the Union army who called themselves Fenians and raided Canada to try and incite a war to annex British North America before Canada came into existence. In 2025, 160 years later will it be Oath Keepers and Proud Boys playing a similar role, serving their leader Trump and disrupting the peace between Canada and the U.S. that has remained in place since the Treaty of Ghent signed 210 years ago?
As I read the Davos speech, I noticed that Greenland wasn’t mentioned, nor the Panama Canal. Maybe, Trump didn’t want to appear to EU attendees as threatening the sovereignty of one of its members, Denmark. For Canada, however, Trump’s musings about acquiring Greenland either by purchase or force and making “America Great Again” with references to its Manifest Destiny, looks like a first step in creating a single North American nation stretching from the Rio Grande to the North Pole. When you look at the world map, it appears that America would be carrying out a policy of containment against an ally, Canada, rather than against perceived enemies like it has done in the past with the Soviet Union and China.
Trump called climate change a scam and hoax in his speech. He announced he had pulled the U.S. out of UN climate agreements. He called for NATO members to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP, 250% larger than what is currently in place. He told the Davos audience that his win in November was “the most consequential election victory in 129 years.” He may have been talking about domestic consequences but the entire world will feel these results.
In giving Trump this mandate, the American people have let loose a malignant narcissist and megalomaniac to wield the economic and military clout of the United States on other nations. We have not seen anyone like him since the Western democracies allied to fight the common threat from another megalomaniac in World War II. Unfortunately, in this case, the malignant narcissist and megalomaniac is supposed to be on our side.
From this side of the American border, it is hard to imagine what the next four years will bring. What will be the state of my country, Canada, and the rest of the world with Trump as U.S. President?
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]]>The post Carbon Pollution Pricing Seemed Like A Good Idea A Decade Ago appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Why get this money to offset the federal price per ton on carbon pollution that shows up at the pump when we buy gasoline or diesel fuel, and that is charged when we use natural gas to heat homes? The federal government recently exempted the carbon price for home heating oil in what appears to be an attempt to shore up political support in an area of the country where the majority of homes use it.
The current price per ton of carbon is CDN $85, roughly US $62, which came into effect on April 1, 2024. Each year the carbon price per ton will rise by CDN $15 until 2030. As the price rises so too will the rebate payments.
Is it unusual for governments to put a levy or tax on fuel? No. In Canada, the federal government collects a fixed excise tax per litre of gasoline and diesel. Provincial and municipal governments also tax gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and home heating oil. For drivers of internal-combustion-engine vehicles, federal, provincial and municipal levies inflate the price of these fuels by as much as 30 to 40%.
Canada is not alone in putting a price on carbon pollution. Its rebate paid to families, however, is unique. The world map below shows where carbon pricing schemes were in place in 2022.
As you can see, placing a price on carbon whether described as a tax or as a levy, appears to be the exception to the global rule. Note as well that in Canada, marked in the lighter green, carbon pricing and policies vary. Québec, for example, entered into a cap and trade agreement with the U.S. state of California.
This second world map shows an alternative scheme to reduce carbon emissions using a trading system that popularly goes by the name cap and trade.
To say the least, the policy of pricing carbon pollution is perceived by many to be a tax in my country. Some provinces have challenged the federal government’s constitutional authority to impose carbon pricing. The challenges have failed in court.
The majority of Canadians recognize the need to reduce fossil fuel demand but don’t necessarily understand how pricing carbon pollution gets us to net zero by 2050.
The recent pricing increase in April has caused leaders of provincial, municipal, business, and federal opposition parties to call for a rollback. The leader of the opposition in the federal parliament launched an “axe the tax” campaign.
So how did a market-driven carbon pricing scheme come into being? Its origins date back to the creation of the American Environmental Protection Agency under the Nixon Administration in the 1970s. Offsetting emissions led to regulations to deal with noxious chemicals in the air and water. Companies entered a marketplace with assigned pricing per ton on pollutants like lead, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and more. The acid rain crisis and the chemical threat to the ozone layer could be addressed by using this market-driven policy to make companies pay for every ton of contributing pollutants and reward others for not polluting.
In the 1990s, the idea of putting a price on carbon emissions using a market-driven scheme began to take hold. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 included carbon pricing mechanisms within the global treaty. In 2008, the province of British Columbia was the first Canadian jurisdiction to implement carbon pricing and make it revenue-neutral. The federal government adopted the British Columbia approach to reducing carbon pollution in 2019.
Pushback against carbon pricing to combat rising emissions and global warming can produce two results.
The first is to do nothing, to be in utter denial, to act as if there is no carbon problem for humanity to address, that science is wrong, or it’s our fate and God’s will.
The second is to develop an alternate policy like that of the current U.S. administration where a carbon tax has been an unsaleable national program. In the absence of a national strategy before the 2020 election, individual states, 24 in total, had adopted carbon reduction strategies that included pricing carbon, cleaner transportation initiatives, and emission caps.
With the change in leadership beginning in 2021, the federal government in the U.S. passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and along with other government legislation has produced multiple strategies combining policies, investments, subsidies, and regulations aimed at decarbonizing the entire economy.
The IRA includes initiatives to:
Of course, putting a price on carbon pollution could have been incorporated into the mix of such aforementioned policies and practices. In Canada, along with carbon pricing have come many programs similar to those in the U.S. But in choosing carbon pricing Canada has attempted to have citizens participate in the process of tackling carbon emissions and dealing with climate change more directly. Through the market mechanism of carbon pricing, Canadians are either buying in or not.
Of the two strategies, the market-driven one or the regulatory one, which is preferable?
A majority of economists believe carbon pricing is more effective to decarbonize and combat climate change. Assigning a cost to carbon in the form of a tax or levy, or in creating carbon trading markets, polluters, in their best interests, find ways to reduce emission exposure. That’s not to say that combining carbon pricing, regulations and subsidies doesn’t have merit, particularly in targeting specific sectors of the economy.
The majority of economists ascribe to a balanced strategy that includes efficiency and equity. Efficiency comes from carbon pricing using market forces to reduce emissions. Equity comes from rebates to households that offset the disproportionate impact of carbon pricing on those earning a lower income.
Finally, regulations and subsidies when applied to individual economic sectors spur investments and innovation in emission-reduction technologies.
So carbon pricing almost a decade later in Canada remains a good idea that maybe needs a better sales pitch.
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]]>The post Why Do Conservatives Reject Market-Driven Carbon Emission Pricing? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>But in Canada, it was a Liberal federal government that acted to put a price on carbon pollution and it is the current Conservative Party that is opposed. The latter has started an “axe-the-tax” campaign that has encouraged street protests and buy-in from many of Canada’s provincial premiers.
On April 1, 2024, the federal government raised the price of carbon pollution with an average increase of 3.5 cents per litre of gasoline and diesel, as well as proportionate increases on other fossil fuels by raising the benchmark $15 CDN to $80 per ton. Every ton of CO2 or methane (CH4) emitted is, therefore, accounted for through Canadian purchases of fossil fuels. Some have criticized the government for choosing April Fool’s Day to increase the price, but the truth is the date coincides with the start of the federal government’s fiscal year which begins every April. The $15 annual increase is slated to continue each April until at least 2030 when carbon pricing will reach $170 per ton.
A few years ago I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby Canada (CCL), a voluntary group focused on lobbying the government to work towards a more livable future. CCL has been a staunch advocate for carbon pricing as an effective way to deal with climate change. It has taken this stance because it sees carbon pricing as pivotal to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, driving innovation, and safeguarding economic competitiveness. What is interesting is that CCL is a group of everyday citizens who have taken on the task of becoming more informed about carbon pollution and have been sharing what they have learned with their political representatives. It has proved to be an effective means of moving forward with government environmental policy related to climate change mitigation.
Recently, a note from CCL contained an Open Letter from Economists on Canadian Carbon Pricing signed by approximately 200 Canadian economists. The letter presented evidence and facts to back “economically sensible policies to reduce emissions at a low cost.” It looked at affordability concerns for average Canadians. It addressed the impact of pricing on business competitiveness and the overall Canadian economy.
The open letter contains 5 claims by critics of carbon pricing. I have summarized these below:
Critics’ Claim #1: Carbon pricing won’t reduce GHG emissions.
What the evidence shows: Not only does carbon pricing reduce emissions, but it does so at a lower cost than other approaches.
Critics’ Claim #2: Carbon pricing drives up the cost of living and is a major cause of inflation.
What the evidence shows: Canadian carbon pricing has a negligible impact on overall inflation.
Critics’ Claim #3: It makes little sense to have both a carbon price and rebates.
What the evidence shows: The price-and-rebate approach acts as an incentive to reduce carbon emissions as the price rises while maintaining most households’ overall purchasing power.
Critics’ Claim #4: Carbon pricing harms Canadian business competitiveness.
What the evidence shows: Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme is designed to help businesses reduce emissions at low cost, while competing in the emerging low-carbon global economy.
Critics’ Claim #5: Carbon pricing isn’t necessary.
What the evidence shows: Here the critics are right. Canada could abandon carbon pricing and still hit our climate targets by using regulations and subsidies—but it would be much more costly.
The CCL note contained the following:
Cathy Orlando is the National Director of CCL Canada. She describes Canada’s carbon-pricing policies as “exemplary in achieving all these objectives,” referring to reducing emissions, addressing affordability, maintaining business competitiveness and facilitating a transition to a low-carbon economic future.
Why the federal Conservative Party continues to balk at carbon pricing mystifies me since they have always believed that the market should dictate our future path, and have advocated market-based environmental policy in the past. Instead, the Conservative Party wants industry to invent solutions and the government to impose regulations.
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]]>The post Canadian Fossil Fuel Companies Sit On The Sidelines Regarding Decarbonization appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>In the last month, Canada announced a plan to cap greenhouse gasses (GHGs) coming from the oil and gas sector to cut emissions to achieve 40-45% reductions from 2005 pollution levels by 2030. The government stated that this sector contributed 28% of national emissions in 2021 making it the largest carbon polluter in the country.
The response from the fossil fuel companies in light of the current government’s low polling numbers is to do as little as possible to help achieve the emissions cuts. Instead they are playing a wait-and-see game at least until the next election when they hope policy changes from a Conservative government will allow them to maintain the status quo.
Canada’s fossil fuel giants are acting no differently than the companies in the same sector elsewhere. Why is that? This is an industry that has traditionally received significant support from governments.
Just look at how the two Western Provinces in Canada that house oil producers responded to the latest government announcement of a pollution cap. Their governments went ballistic, slamming the proposal and calling it unnecessary. They were backed up by the federal Conservative opposition.
Go back three years and fossil fuel companies were jumping on the net-zero 2050 bandwagon. BP, the British-based fossil company announced then it planned to cut oil and gas production and rollout an ambitious program focused on renewables. Shell, the Dutch fossil fuel giant, facing court decisions in The Hague, was instructed to cut its carbon emissions by 45% from 2019 levels by 2030.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of oil and gas sanctions on Russia’s producers drove up the price of fossil fuels and created temporary shortages. The lure of profits proved to be a strong antidote helping to change the industry’s approach to environmental sustainability and decarbonization.
Exxon Mobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, in remarks made in 2022, urged his fellow energy producers to stop trying to pick winners and losers in the market. He was referring to renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration projects. Woods warned that moving away from oil and gas immediately would be a disaster for the burgeoning renewable energy sector because the capacity to meet growing global energy needs would show the inability of these technologies to fulfill future, let alone short-term demand.
BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and other oil and gas majors have revised the pace of their carbon reduction plans since the 2022 Russian-Ukraine war. They continue to make record earnings for shareholders.
The debate at COP28, in Dubai just a month ago, was heavily focused on the fossil fuel industry and its contributions to climate change. There were clarion calls for phasing out the use of fossil fuels from many countries and organizations. But with the president of the conference also the head of a large oil company, the likelihood of success in agreeing to a timetable for a phaseout was seen as impossible. The negotiations ended with a phase down rather than a phaseout. The headlines screamed that the end of the fossil fuel era was at hand.
The final agreement included the 200 countries in attendance to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency improvements by 2030. The agreement also called for a phase down in the use of unabated-coal in thermal power plants. Unabated means coal-burning plants would need to adopt carbon capture technology. There was agreement as well to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. But the oil and gas majors remained standing on their feet by the end of the event.
In Canada, the industry’s response to the latest pollution caps has been we can wait out this government’s mandate and do nothing until the next federal election. A mid-December 2023 Reuter’s article headline contains the phrase dead “Anti-Oil & Gas” policies walking referring to the attitude of many fossil fuel producers in the country.
The CEO of small oil sands producer Yangarra Resources, Jim Evaskevich told Reuters:
“If we get to where we’re having to spend a lot of money to become way more draconian with our reductions, then we’re going to look at the federal election and go, ‘yeah no we’re not spending that money, no way.'”
The CEO of Bonterra Energy, a Western Canadian small natural gas producer, had similar thoughts. He is Pat Oliver and told Reuters:
“Say that we would have to spend significant capital [to comply with the new cap regulations], we would have a look at, is this government going to survive and what are the chances of this legislation surviving?”
These heads of small producers don’t feel as politically constrained as those leading Canada’s fossil fuel majors, but the sentiment among the latter is much the same.
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]]>The post How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Help Solve the Growing Housing Crisis appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Mainstream media has discovered AI in the last two years with the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, creating debates over the technology’s promise and peril. From Forbes Magazine to conversations around the water cooler, debates over AI’s potential impact on academia, supply-chain management, communications, and more have become commonplace.
Thought leaders, academics, and pundits have begun applying AI to social and political issues to test its value with the hope of solving longstanding challenges. One of those is home ownership affordability which has become particularly acute in Canada.
Recently an article in Macleans Magazine, a Canadian news publication similar to Times Magazine and The Economist, even predicted “the end of homeownership.” A recent CBC report (the CBC is Canada’s public national broadcaster) stated that “Canada’s rental crisis is getting worse, according to a new report that found the average asking price for rent in September was $2,149, up by more than 11% compared with a year ago.” Meanwhile, a Royal Bank of Canada report added d to concerns noting that in the third quarter of this year, households in Canada required 62.7% of their take-home pay on average to cover the cost of ownership thanks to skyrocketing housing prices, inflation and interest rates.
Canada isn’t alone in facing a housing affordability crisis. The United States has the same problem. In both countries, it is characterized by a growing gap between cost and income, and driven by:
Canada’s various levels of government have struggled to solve the housing affordability issue. They have created programs, policies and strategies to stimulate the number of new builds, and have provided financial assistance programs for low-income earners, rent control measures, and changes to land-use zoning.
What they haven’t done yet is look at how AI could help. A computer scientist named Alan Kay once said, “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” Applying AI to solving the homeownership crisis may in the future, therefore, seem as normal to homeowners as doorbell cameras, smart thermostats, rooftop solar, and battery storage systems are today. The question is not whether AI will affect the housing issue, but how?
Rather than directly increasing the housing supply or focusing on boosting economic factors and incentives, what an AI solution brings to the issue is the ability to find efficiencies. The process of building new homes involves developers, inspectors, and government regulators. It generates tons of paperwork including applications, plans and design approvals. This is where AI can speed up our human-made systems to shorten the timelines so that shovels get into the ground faster. An AI can analyze the data contained in applications, plans, regulations, building codes and more to find faults or shortcomings in projects.
The catch, however, is an AI can only help if the quality of the data it sees is well-vetted. AIs are not just software algorithms or reinvented mathematically-grounded constructs and systems, but rather built from neural networks that mimic our brains and voraciously consume large datasets. When presented with raw or unstructured data, an AI neural network can over a short period, begin to see patterns and report human errors or inconsistencies. It can also propose solutions to the errors or inconsistencies it finds. This is how it can shorten the process of getting shovels into the ground so that more housing is built.
From the invention of the telescope to the steam engine, humans have shown a willingness to embrace new technologies to make discoveries and solve problems. If housing data made available to an AI is properly vetted, then applying this technology to the current crisis could be a real game changer.
It was Yogi Berra who purportedly said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” We cannot afford the future to be like the present or the past when it comes to solving the housing crisis. With AI helping we can ensure that solutions to availability and affordability can be found and implemented.
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]]>The post Tipping Points Getting Nearer as COP28 Continues appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>For the industry in Canada to be emission-free by 2050, the current 2030 cap will need to see rapid decreases beyond that date. The federal governing party is in the minority and could lose its mandate anytime in the next two years. Its Conservative opposition wants to eliminate Canada’s carbon pricing policy which currently sets a price for carbon pollution at $65 CDN (approximately $48 US) per ton, rising $15 per ton per year until 2030. So far, the Conservatives have no plan to replace carbon pricing, and no stated policy to reduce carbon emissions. They are an outlier when it comes to supporting the United Nations’ goal of a zero-emissions world by mid-century.
Not having a plan in the face of evidence that tipping points are getting nearer for the Earth’s climate, which is the current position of Canada’s federal Conservative Party, is negligence of the highest order and, in my book, a crime against both humanity and nature.
At COP28, a report released provides a scientific assessment by more than 200 researchers, 96 organizations and 26 countries, called Global Tipping Points. In its summary, it states
“Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity. Their triggering will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.”
What is the common denominator to set these tipping points off?
Exceeding a rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of atmospheric warming will mean that business as usual is over, that linear incremental change, favoured by governments today, no longer cuts it.
The tipping points report says“transformational change” is needed now. It acknowledges some of this is happening now through the growth of renewables and an increase in electric vehicles. The pace of change, however, is not fast enough to stop triggering five tipping points that are already lines that have been crossed. There are three more in the offing that likely will happen in the 2030s.
So what are the ones we have already set off?
Tree additional tipping points that may occur in the 2030s include:
Some of these tipping points are interlinked. For example:
Tipping points cross environmental thresholds. Humanity has not experienced anything quite like these since the end of the last Ice Age. Yes, there have been droughts. Remember the Dust Bowl of the Dirty 30s. But the retreat of ice beginning 12,000 years ago soon led to the start of the Holocene, coincident with the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. We owe our modern civilization’s roots to a tipping point in the climate at that time.
Are we prepared to cross thresholds that will lead to a cascade of tipping points with ecological and sociological consequences? Are we sufficiently ready to deal with tipping points that could lead to a wholesale breakdown of our economic, social and political systems?
The Global Tipping Points report wants us to have answers to these questions and acknowledges that we are doing some things right in the present. The rapid growth of renewables and the emergence of electric vehicles (EVs) may slow down climate change. But we need much more transformational change than what these two can provide.
What is so frustrating is that the solutions to stop tipping points are already known. The report lists them.
The scientists behind the report recognize that the term “tipping points” may become overused. If we call what will happen something else, however, it doesn’t change what the impact of atmospheric mean temperatures rising 2.5 to 4.0 Celsius (4 to 7.2 Fahrenheit) will be.
We know what science reveals about Earth’s past through the geological and fossil record which shows evidence of dramatic changes over hundreds of millions of years that altered our planet over time. We have put placeholder names on the timeline of the planet designating these momentous and dramatic changes: Cretaceous, Carboniferous, Jurassic, Triassic, etc. The difference today is that what geology recorded over hundreds of millions of years of changing climate is happening now in decades. If that isn’t disturbing, I don’t know what is.
Here in Canada, we could face our own tipping point if a future elected government ignores what well-supported scientific research and data collecting is revealing. Science and governance need to be on the same page.
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]]>The greatest challenge to representative democracies trying to address chronic or long-term problems is that they need to seek a mandate from their constituents every few years. In Canada’s case, the government is staying in power despite holding a minority of seats in the Parliament. It has an agreement with another party to keep it in office. Because Canada is a federation, the central government also needs to have cooperative agreements with the sub-jurisdictions which are provinces and territories within the nation.
Canada passed a law in 2018 putting a price on pollution. At the time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that pollution always has a cost and it should no longer be free for industry, utilities, and others to pollute anywhere in the country. The initial price per ton of carbon pollution set by the federal government was $20 CDN. Provinces could collect the pollution levy or develop their equivalent programs. Every year through 2022, the levy increased by $10. Some provinces challenged the law but lost when Canada’s Supreme Court sided with the federal government.
Because the government is a minority it can be forced to quit if it loses a confidence vote in Parliament. If it stays in power until 2025 which is the current expiry date for its rule, the government will have to keep its members happy. Right now, Liberal members from the Atlantic provinces have become antsy because their constituents are complaining about the carbon levy on oil with the bulk of furnaces in that part of the country using it to heat homes. Losing those seats in a future election would mean the Liberals would be out of office.
Even though the next election could be two years away, the federal government decided to remove the levy from home heating oil, thus hoping to quell the complaints from voters in the Atlantic provinces. At the same time, the government announced it would help homeowners using oil to convert to heat pumps offering to pay for them. Of course, the people of Atlantic Canada may have trouble acquiring heat pumps and installers to put them into homes.
So here we have a government that has wrapped itself in green, sustainable policies, that is committed to mitigating climate change, backtracking on carbon pricing to pander for votes. In choosing this path, the federal Liberal Party is no different than the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom which recently announced a rollback of progressive climate change policy focused on converting cars and trucks from petrol and diesel to electricity and hydrogen.
In both countries, it is retail politics that has trumped good environmental policy. What does that say about the future commitment to mitigating climate change? For carbon pricing, the Canadian government has driven the first nail into its coffin. Based on the most recent polls in both Canada and the United Kingdom as well, the shelf life of these two governments doesn’t look long in the offing.
Of course, for the ultimate distraction, you can always look to foreign policy initiatives as a way to deflect the public from acts of domestic incompetence.
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]]>Conspiracy theorists looking at the wildfires that have broken out across Canada raise suspicions about the timing of these outbreaks. They spout similar statements to those made by politicians like the two Premiers mentioned above.
Climatologists have a very different explanation. Much of Canada’s north this spring has experienced higher-than-normal temperatures. Warmer air with temperatures closer to what we see in mid to late summer leads to drier conditions. Drier conditions feed wildfires.
The link between climate change and wildfire outbreaks is well established. That’s why every summer we see headlines in Canada that describe fires burning tens of thousands of hectares of forest, threatening mostly adjacent remote and suburban communities. The fires that swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, a few years ago are a case in point.
Wildfires accelerate climate change when they release megatons of carbon into the atmosphere coming from burned trees, forest-floor tinder, and dried-out peat deposits. It is nature’s equivalent to our burning of fossil fuels and the amount entering the atmosphere this spring will endure for decades into the future. We are stuck with it.
Get used to the term described above. The Canadian Forest Service concluded after a recent study that “the future is smoky.” Fire seasons will get longer, start earlier, and contribute more to global warming than in the past. The combination of warmer weather, drier conditions, and tinder-dry forests represent a triple threat.
Smokier air is unhealthy air. Here in Eastern North America over the last few days, we have all been exposed to the reality of fire weather. In Toronto schools, outdoor activities have been curtailed. Children in daycare, rather than playing outside, are being confined indoors. When I went out yesterday to run errands, I wore a mask, something I seldom resorted to outdoors during the height of COVID-19’s spread. This is a bizarre reversal of behaviours and conditions during the pandemic of the last three-plus years.
Other studies by the Canadian Forest Service predict a 50% increase in fire weather conditions in Western Canada in the coming decades and a 200 to 300% increase in Eastern Canada. Fire weather is expected to burn twice the average area burned in recent years by the end of this century. For Canadians who have always been proud of our pristine natural landscapes, these predictions may come as a shock.
Unfortunately, the country is not alone in experiencing fire weather. Australia, the United States, Russia, and the European Union are all seeing warmer temperatures, both day and night, with drier summers which means an expanded fire weather season, already in the present, will be worse in the future.
What this all means is that mitigating climate change will be that much harder as nature adds to the human contributions responsible for global warming. As of a little more than a week ago, the latest measurement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached 424.64 parts per million, an increase of 50% over values obtained from samplings trapped in Antarctic ice cores dating back to pre-Industrial Age times.
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