Margrethe Vestager is the Executive Vice-President of Europe Fit for the Digital Age. She describes DestinE as “a true game changer in our fight against climate change…It means that we can observe environmental challenges can help us predict future scenarios like we have never done before…Today, the future is literally at our fingertips.”
A digital twin is not a simulation. That’s because it will adapt over time to the changes occurring in the real world. Having written a posting last year where I described what it was like to fly the Lunar Excursion Module simulator at a museum in Neil Armstrong’s hometown, if allowed to work with DestinE the difference would be immediately noticeable. A digital twin constantly receives real-world inputs changing its responses and learning from humans providing inputs and operating it.
My simulator experience shows a distinct difference. When I flew the LEM simulator the programming didn’t adapt to me other than responding in a fixed way to my use of the controllers in the cockpit. Its logic never changed. It didn’t learn anything from me. Instead, I used trial and error to master the landing and failed every time.
In comparing digital twins to simulators, the former a 2021 European Union study concluded uses less horsepower to operate. DesinE will operate on one supercomputer with 20,000 graphic processors installed and consume 20 Megawatts of electricity. The computer is the EuroHPC supercomputer which is located in Finland where the energy it consumes will be supplied from renewable sources.
DestinE features a Digital Twin Engine, an innovative software architecture composed of a Core Service Platform and Data Lake. What is a data lake? It is a centralized repository for storing raw, unstructured, and semi-structured data in native formats. It is described as the single source of truth for all data, regardless of type or source.
DestinE will use artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning models and allow users to feed it data and questions to see the results on the digital twin. It will answer “what-if” questions at the macro and micro level. The priority is to tackle Weather-induced Extremes and Climate Change Adaptation (Climate DT) and determine scenario and policy impacts fed to it at a global, continental and local scale looking several decades ahead.
DestinE is the first supernational effort to operationalize a digital twin of Earth looking at multi-decadal climate projections and assessments down to areas the size of a few square kilometres where most impacts of climate change are observed. Hypothetical scenarios played out on it will help policymakers determine where to build wind and solar farms and what crops to plant as real climate changes occur. DestinE will help governments respond to natural disasters and assess potential socioeconomic and policy impacts before the real thing happens.
States Peter Bauer, co-initiator of Project Destination Earth, “If you are planning a two-metre high dike in The Netherlands, for example, I can run through the data in my digital twin and check whether the dike will in all likelihood still protect against expected extreme events in 2050.”
DestinE’s software is open-source and being co-developed by members of the European Union community. It is designed to adapt and evolve to address real-world changes. Although the project’s completion date is 2030, users will be able to begin working with parts of the digital twin Earth as early as 2027.
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CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG), about 80 times more climate influencing in the short-term than carbon dioxide (CO2). But now, because the European Union (EU) plans to slash GHGs by 55% by 2030, the way the 27-country bloc plans to do this is to pivot from coal first to natural gas combined with wind and solar renewables, and then eventually eliminate gas entirely. But during the pivot, the EU wants to define CH4 as low-carbon and subsidize the building of infrastructure and projects to use it for electricity and heating.
Today 25% of the electricity produced in the EU comes from burning CH4. CLose to 100% of the heating of buildings and homes in the EU is also done using CH4.
This week the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, is asking the European Parliament to vote to designate CH4 as a low-carbon fuel and to put in place subsidies and low-interest loans to support a buildout of the natural gas infrastructure beyond what already exists. It’s not likely that the Parliament will vote in favour.
The EU’s dilemma today is the fact that almost all CH4 it uses for electricity and heat comes from Russia. And unless you have been on a desert island for the last six months, it is pretty obvious why the EU doesn’t want to continue to be reliant on Russian CH4.
So the EU is faced with a series of dilemmas. It needs to wean itself off coal to lower GHG emissions. It needs to wean itself off Russian gas. It needs to deal with Germany’s poor decision-making around nuclear energy and that country committing itself to Russian gas in lieu of nuclear power. And then there is the dilemma of how much to invest to support a temporary new gas and energy infrastructure that may only last for a few decades as the EU meets its interim 2030 goal and net-zero 2050 one.
Where will it go for CH4? It is looking to the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and Canada for its new “low-carbon” energy. Europe needs to build terminals to get natural gas stored as a liquid, (liquid natural gas or LNG) from most of these sources. It cannot rely on a pipeline infrastructure such as it has with Russia. (Recently a pipeline moving natural gas through Turkey to Europe was completed.) So that means terminals will need to be built at European ports with pipelines to connect to powerplants and industry. And it means pipelines and shipping terminals will need to be in place in North America and Africa, from where the CH4 will need to come.
Some European politicians are questioning why Germany is continuing with its disastrous nuclear policy. They are also arguing for a rapid expansion of renewables like offshore and inland wind, geothermal, large-scale battery storage, and utility and residential solar arrays. Money spent on renewables and storage will last well beyond the few decades that the temporary CH4 fix addresses.
Putting a low-carbon label on CH4 is a greenwashing ploy to meet a political need caused by poor policy decision-making in the past. It may seem palatable to those vested in maintaining fossil fuel energy, but it doesn’t change the outcome that burning more of it means increasing GHGs.
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African country’s agricultural policies are focused on increasing land under cultivation and crop yields. But the continent is facing the existential threat of climate change in ways far more severe than more temperate zones of the planet. African farmers are dealing with crop failures, drought, floods, locusts, armyworm invasions and other deprivations of a physical nature. What they don’t need is EU anti-GMO neo-colonial policies making things worse.
In the EU today, nineteen of its 27 member countries either partially or fully ban GMOs. The European Commission since 2010 has treated GMOs as new or novel foods that are subject to evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This deliberative body not only looks at GMO crops grown in Europe but also those grown elsewhere that get imported into EU member states.
The organic farming movement within the EU sees anything GMO as a danger. And the organic movement’s lobbyists have been effective. Government aid programs and non-government organizations (NGOs) offering grants to African farmers are also anti-GMO. What this means for African farmers who want to increase yields to not only meet local food demand but also to create bumper crops for export, face not just environmental challenges but also regulatory ones. That’s because many African countries, in order to conform to EU regulations around food, also put anti-GMO roadblocks in the way.
The GLP describes these phenomena as neo-colonial anti-technology practices hyped up by “utopian visions of peasant African farmers working in the fields.” And because the EU and Africa are in close proximity, the two continents are natural markets for what each produces. Hence, African food exports are more likely to find their way into European supply chains and onto European dining tables than crops from other parts of the planet. For African farmers to meet both domestic and export opportunities, therefore, requires them to embrace advanced scientific agricultural practices in which GMOs increasingly play a part.
Agroecology conferences in Africa, largely sponsored by big European companies and NGOs, however, are often dominated by anti-GMO rhetoric. At such events, European presenters blame GMO enhancements of food staples as potentially dangerous leading to increases in cancer, birth defects, HIV/AIDs and more.
For example, a Germany-funded NGO, the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI), sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, states that its aim is to promote innovative solutions to the problem of chronic food insecurity in Africa. In Kenya where it operates, RTFI literature and practices demonstrate both anti-pesticide and anti-GMO bias. RTFI has been instrumental in getting Kenya’s government to ban the use of 160 globally approved, safe agricultural pesticides. The results of RTFI’s influence can best be seen in the devastation caused by recent locust and armyworm infestations. And the same is occurring where African farmers have sought GMO drought-resistant and salt-tolerant crops. These too are being targeted by anti-GMO propagandists to the detriment of farmers trying to deal with deteriorating environmental conditions.
Europe isn’t alone in contributing to the neo-colonial mindset when it comes to Africa. American-based NGOs and charities also are putting money into agricultural initiatives on the continent with anti-GMO strings attached. These “investors” in Africa’s agricultural viability include the Christensen Fund, Swift Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Schmidt Family Foundation, and others. All have little understanding of the challenges African farmers face without using advances in science and technology to help meet local food demand, let alone yield bumper crops for export. The GLP describes the investors as “crusading white-knights riding to save Africans they believe are incapable of judging the science and technologies of modern agriculture on their own.”
A 2020 McKinsey report states, “Agriculture is critical to Africa’s growth and development, but climate change could destabilize local markets, curb economic growth, and heighten risk.” The last point about heightened risk refers to investor risk. But that’s not the risk about which I am concerned. The real risk for African farming is the decline in the physical environment because of climate change. With as much as 20 to 30% of African countries’ GDP coming from agricultural production today, this is where Africa’s risk lies. Higher day and nighttime temperatures disrupt plant growth, changes in patterns of precipitation swing from droughts to floods, and pest infestations like armyworms and locusts are linked to climate change.
Meanwhile, a lack of access to affordable capital sources for small entrepreneurs (I invest in microloans to African entrepreneurs including small farms through Kiva.org) which pretty much categorizes the plight of many African farmers, creates a greater dependency on charitable foundations and their handouts like the ones mentioned above, with many of the latter coming with strings attached that feel very much like neo-colonialism.
]]>Farmers applying for the money need to demonstrate their ability to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in three specific areas:
Farmers need to show data to prove GHGs are being reduced and carbon is being sequestered.
The European Union (EU) is following Canada’s initiative closely recognizing the GHG contribution made by the agricultural sector needs to be addressed in combatting climate change. The EU established a Climate Target Plan for 2030 that includes carbon farming among its programs. But it has yet to figure out how to structure the money side of it to get farmers to adopt carbon-storing and GHG reduction strategies. The Canadian system of direct payments could prove to be the model the continent adopts, or not.
In April of this year, the European Commission published its technical guide for carbon farming. EU member states were invited to introduce common agricultural policies that included a rollout of carbon farming. The amount of financial opportunity for farmers the Commission estimated to be worth between €38 and 58 billion.
Among the EU community, Eire is looking at a hybrid model for carbon farming that mixes carbon credits and cash payouts. In a recent interview conducted by The Irish Examiner, Agriculture Minister, Charlie McConalogue stated his department was launching a pilot program for on-farm carbon trading using the National Soil Sampling Programme to collect data for a baseline to assess progress. McConalogue suggested that the existing Woodland Environment Fund in Eire which uses carbon credits could be an alternative to the Canadian cash payment model. The pilot project in Eire is just one of a number being instituted within the EU.
None of these programs and initiatives address the emissions elephant in the room: enteric fermentation, responsible for a significant amount of GHGs from farming. Beef cattle are the culprits and it is their “cow farts,” that release significant amounts of methane (CH4), a far more potent GHG than carbon dioxide (CO2).
How to address the meat issue in a world where there is a rising demand particularly in the Developing World is particularly challenging. Three approaches immediately come to mind.
It would be interesting to see if Canada and the EU in the near future consider livestock CH4 emission reduction strategies as part of agricultural climate solutions initiatives.
]]>Described as “the law of laws,” it is intended to create sweeping changes to climate policy in all of its member nations and be Europe’s contribution to limiting global temperature increases to no more than 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit) to avoid what is increasingly being seen as a catastrophic future for humanity and the planet.
The law requires the EU to establish an independent body of scientific experts to advise on climate policies and to establish greenhouse gas budgets for all member states. This is needed immediately since current EU policies were set to meet the previous 40% emissions reduction target by 2030.
Following up on the June announcement has come new mitigation and adaptation guidelines in the form of technical guidance for climate-proofing infrastructure projects which was published yesterday. The new 100-page guideline covers EU-funded projects planned for the next six years.
Technical guidance is aimed at climate proofing. What is that? In the publication’s executive summary, it states, “Climate proofing is a process that integrates climate change mitigation and adaptation measures into the development of infrastructure projects. It enables European institutional and private investors to make informed decisions on projects that qualify as compatible with the Paris Agreement.”
What kind of infrastructure are we talking about? New builds including buildings, roads, water and wastewater, network infrastructure and more. All projects reviewed and considered for funding will be seen through a climate-resilient development lens. Guidance on infrastructure projects planned to have lifespans beyond 2050 also includes operational, maintenance, and decommissioning to ensure climate neutrality.
What I found interesting is the inclusion of two principles, one of which appears to have been adopted from the recent meeting of Nobel laureates that I virtually attended and wrote about in May. These principles are:
The European Climate Law described at the beginning of this posting is intended to bind all member states to achieve the 55% emission reduction target by 2030. The EU’s lending and funding bodies following the technical guidance include:
In addition, the EU expects the private sector within its jurisdiction to follow the same guidance when making infrastructure investments.
Technical guidance looks at builds from a climate-proofing perspective including project cycle management, environmental impact assessments, and strategic environmental assessments. Two principled pillars are neutrality and resilience. Climate neutrality focuses on projects from a mitigation perspective. Climate resilience looks at projects from an adaptation perspective. The illustration below provides a broad outline of what these two principles entail.
Today much of Europe’s infrastructure was designed and built years ago. Although the guidance isn’t meant to govern this legacy, it nevertheless will influence the operational, maintenance and decommissioning of such assets.
Climate vulnerability and risk will require every infrastructure project to go through a stress test looking at each from the perspective of the goals laid out under the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. And with COP26 in November in Glasgow, Scotland, and a United Nations’ climate change update due before that meeting, technical guidelines may further be enhanced.
]]>The federal-state experiment that first formed the United States was a confederation of thirteen separate colonial governments. The later Confederate States followed a similar constitutional structure during its short-lived existence. But the United States, Version 2.0, that emerged in 1789 was truly a federal state.
What’s the difference between confederation and a federation?
A confederation is a joining together of partner states in a mutually beneficial arrangement in which power is shared equally between the smaller jurisdictions with the central government.
A federation, on the other hand, places greater power in the hands of a central authority with the partner states having a diminished role. When the Confederate States attempted secession, the federal government in the United States began by passively resisting which ultimately lead to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.
The federal-state experiment that arose ninety years after the United States was borne, was a confederation of four British North American colonies. One had unique linguistic and cultural characteristics, Lower Canada known to today as Quebec. Only a confederation could make this union work and it came about because of the threat of conquest by the United States after the American Civil War.
The Dominion of Canada, a self-governing colony of the British Empire and a confederation may never have come about if there had never been a U.S. Civil War. By 1865, America had a battle-tested standing army fresh from the defeat of the Confederacy with the entire western hinterland open to it. In 1867, the same year as Canada’s Confederation, the United States acquired Alaska from Russia. British North America was now being squeezed from both the south and northwest. And Fenian sympathizing troops of the triumphant Union Army were staging raids into British North American territory.
The external threat was a great motivator for a union of four of the British colonies in North America followed by a fifth, sixth, and seventh joining shortly thereafter, and the acquisition of the lands of the Hudson Bay Company. Canada became a continent-wide confederation even larger than the United States. Within a few years, a transcontinental railway bound the confederation for good.
As I stated in a recent posting, one of the great failures of both federal systems was the unwillingness to recognize the land rights, languages, and cultures of native North Americans who were the original inhabitants of North America before European colonization. This remains an existing challenge to this day for both federal states.
Which is better in the 21st century? A confederation or a federation?
When Winston Churchill proposed a United States of Europe in 1946, did he have in mind a federation or confederation? In Europe, a union of its many cultures, legal systems, languages, and religions, seemed next to impossible. Years of war between nations and religions and left permanent scars. But after two World Wars in the 20th century, the idea of uniting Europeans into a single entity was seen as a way to end internecine strife for good.
Today the European Parliament, Council, and Commission provide a semblance of political unity for its 27 sovereign member states. But they do not exert authority over individual countries that form the Union. The central authority binds the nation members together. National identities remain the principal way citizens identify themselves. European Union citizens are French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. Much of the power and decision-making of the Union are decentralized. Although citizens of the 27 member states vote to elect members to the European Parliament, voter turnout tends to be very low, and there appears within member states to be little interest in what happens there.
So Europe is more a confederation than a federation, less than Canada in terms of citizens identifying with the concept, and certainly far removed from the United States as a model of governance. Where Canada has a singular presence in dealing with other nations around the world, Europe’s 27 member states still deal individually with each other and with foreign countries.
Where the European Union has succeeded is in coming together with increasingly shared interests, continent-wide war has been prevented.
I give you two examples that you may think are unlikely. The first one may be the better bet. The second, however, could end a conflict that has been going on for more than seventy years.
The political divisions of Africa were largely determined by European colonizers and conquerors in the 19th century. They cut across tribal, religious, and ethnic lines, and served the European states’ desires to exploit African resources.
The independence of African states that began in earnest in the mid-1950s ending with South Africa emerging with the end of apartheid in the 1990s, has not led to an African renaissance as was hoped. Instead, the countries of Africa have struggled in their attempts to modernize infrastructure, raise the quality of governance, and the health and education of their citizens to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Africa, today, is the fastest-growing continent by population. But in all other measures, it trails the rest of the planet.
Would a confederation help? Some Africans believe so. Beginning with regional associations of different independent states, Africa is slowly moving towards a common economic market and free trade zone. This is exactly how the European Union began starting in the 1950s.
Within Africa today there are already federal states: Nigeria, and South Africa to name two. But for Africa to harness the continent’s potential, a confederation would make a great deal of sense. In recent years the countries of East Africa have explored on numerous occasions a loose confederation. Similar ideas have emerged in the past for West and Southern Africa. All, so far, have petered out in time. But the example of Canada remains.
The Canadian union formed because external threats imposed a sense of urgency to join together for safety. In Canada’s case the threat was military. In Africa’s case, climate change may be the decisive impetus for a future confederation.
There are several outcomes for the more than 70-year conflict over what was the British Palestine Mandate established after World War One. The first would see Israeli dominion over the entire territory in a unitarian state and likely future wars with Arab-state neighbours. The second would see Palestine assisted by other Middle Eastern states forcing the surrender of Israel to what would become a Palestinian unitarian state. Then there is the two-state solution that no longer seems feasible since the failure of the Oslo Accords and the off-and-on-again peace process with the intransigence of political leaders on both sides. And then there is a fourth, confederation or a federal state that recognizes the identity of the two disputing parties within their own statelets.
Canada formed a confederation between English and French entities cohabiting the same land. Can Israelis and Palestinians do the same?
A confederation would establish sovereignty for each while creating a central authority for the purpose of achieving common interests. As crazy as this sounds, Muammar Al Qadhafi, the former dictator of Libya, back in 2003 proposed such a federal union of the two which he called Isratine. He noted that the name was only a placeholder.
His notion was that Israel and Palestine would be intertwined demographically and geographically in a unitarian federation. Qadhafi concluded the two would be better off together than apart.
He didn’t envision a confederation, but rather a federal system with a strong central authority combined with regional governments for the founding members, Israelis, and Palestinians. He argued that such a state comprising Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Israelis, would never be threatened by Arab neighbours and the long conflict would finally come to an end.
As much as Qadhafi was a rogue actor in the Middle East and on the world stage, the idea he proposed with some adjustments to implement a confederation conjoined by a central government to serve and provide common defense, healthcare, and other essential services, had merit.
An even grander vision of a common market combining Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Jordanians could come about in time with goods and services crossing borders and reducing the levels of mistrust that continue in this, the current world’s most intractable conflict. The common market was the first step to the European Union we see today and perennial enemies, France, and Germany, today increasingly cooperate for a common purpose. If it could work in Europe, why not the Middle East?
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How do you restructure society to shift to a non-carbon energy future?
Does any government in existence today have the answers?
The editorial argues that it is time “to get serious about the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
The why has been answered in the latest data and reports from Copernicus, NOAA, and NASA, with reports that the land and oceans of our world are heating up at an accelerating rate.
The problem is that governments are trying to nuance the how with minimal impact on the existing economic and social model. Most are failing to get the transition underway as can be attested by the fact that carbon emissions continue to rise annually.
The leadership of the European Union (EU) has worked out the cost of the shift but not yet the intricacies of how to engage the public in achieving the transition.
How do you educate and inform citizens about what choices lie ahead?
Europe’s Green New Deal to be the first carbon-neutral area of the planet by mid-century has an initial ten-year price tag of one trillion Euros. How will it be divvied up? Half will come from the collective budget of the EU, a quarter from a new fund run by the European Investment Bank, and 100 billion Euros from national budgets. To help Eastern European countries, formerly a part of the Soviet Bloc, less will be asked of their national governments.
The EU sees the one trillion Euros as a down payment with 260 billion needed in new investment annually to achieve the current 40% carbon emission reduction target for 2030. A more ambitious target of between 50 and 55% may require a larger annual investment.
All EU governments are legally bound to achieve these targets. But the instruments of oversight have yet to be put in place including provision for both sticks and carrots to keep all EU members on the path to achieve the overall reduction goal.
There is no doubt there will be winners and losers throughout the EU as the transition works its way through all nations, a “tectonic shift” in the way European society is structured according to Frans Timmermans, Europe’s senior commissioner in charge of climate action.
Some industries will lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, while new industries will emerge to provide sources of employment.
Some EU countries will face much greater social challenges than others. One thing for sure, however, is that political leaders will have to come clean with citizens. Policymakers will have to be creative and sensitive to the disruptions a low-carbon economy will produce to help the public adapt to a new way of living. This will require a massive effort in information sharing and education.
If anyone is up for the challenge it is Europe, which has taken a global leadership role in fighting climate change.
Will the rest of the nations of the world follow?
The Financial Times article concludes that “it is not just the EU’s credibility that is on the line,” it’s the entire planet and our global and collective way of life.
Germany and France have a history of success in joining forces to tackle a growth industry. Airbus, the rival to Boeing today, was formed through a similar consortium.
The hope is to duplicate that success in four to five years.
The two countries have pledged 4 billion Euros ($4.5 billion US) coming from 35 automakers and energy groups which have indicated their intention to partner in the alliance. The European Union is adding 1.2 billion ($1.3 billion US) in the form of a public subsidy to support the new venture.
The first pilot factory will open in France in the next few months empllying 200. Additional production sites in France and Germany are planned for 2023 with each employing 1,500.
Today Europe produces 1% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. And yet the major automobile manufacturers in Europe have all announced aggressive strategies to laucnh a number of new EV models annually. Where will the batteries come from? Not Europe currently.
But if the consortium succeeds, the goal is to have Europe supply 30% of global demand by 2027.
Other European countries are interested in joining the consortium including Italy, Belgium, Poland, Austria, and Finland with the market for EV batteries expected to grow to 45 billion Euros (more than $50 billion US) by 2027.
Today it is Tesla and Panasonic that are number one ranked. But Chinese companies are quickly catching up. According to Benchmark Minerals, the growth in Chinese lithium-ion capacity is expected to produce batteries sufficient to rollout 15 million EVs annually by 2023, 18 million by 2025, and 23 million by 2028.
For Europe to achieve 30% of worldwide lithium-ion battery production will involve more than the current investment mentioned in today’s announcement.
The biggest constraint on EV growth is the availability of the raw materials to build batteries. EV batteries produced today consume 46% of the world’s annually produced cobalt, and 32% of the mined lithium. The average Nissan Leaf battery, for example contains 4 kilograms (9 pounds) of lithium. If every car on the planet were to be an EV, the current amount of raw materials, particularly lithium, would not meet the demand.
Lithium recycling capacity may make it possible to reuse existing lithium from batteries for second use. Experts estimate that for every 20 tons of used lithium, 1 ton can be harvested for use in new batteries.
Potential shortages may be further alleviated by new lithium and cobalt sources such as the ones going into production in Western Australia.
And at the same time, new battery technologies may displace lithium and cobalt as the primary materials for EV batteries.
But lately, carbon allowances have hit 18.28 Euros a ton which is going to raise wholesale energy prices across the continent as European utilities pass the cost of purchasing these allowances on to consumers. In 2019 it is expected that nearly 22 million tons of carbon allowances will be purchased in Europe with the investment banks predicting a rise in price to 25 Euros in 2019 and 30 in 2020. At 30 Euros per ton of carbon, we may begin to see an impact on consumption by industry and consumers, the whole point of putting a price on carbon.
In truth, a much higher levy needs to be in place if we are to use market forces exclusively to drive down global carbon emissions in an effort to stabilize climate change. Even at 50 Euros, the impact will be marginal at best. The fear, of course, is that a significant rise in carbon pricing will seriously damage Europe’s economy.
The United States, on the other hand, has not at a national level, bought into the argument that climate change is human caused or even real. This has made it far more difficult for U.S. trading partners such as Canada to consider a price on carbon since the cost to the economy could lead to enormous market disadvantages. Nevertheless, the federal government in Canada has committed to an incremental carbon pricing strategy that pegged the price at $10 CDN per ton for this year, escalating by $10 per year until 2022 when it will hit $50. Some Canadian industrial emitters, industries, and utilities have been given license to emit carbon to a percentage limit of current levels before having to pay the carbon charge. But this emission percentage will decline over time if the policy rolls out as planned.
In Canada, the federal government faces what is likely unique where the constitution of the country recognizes the provinces and territories as environmental stewards. This has meant the federal government has had to negotiate with each sub-jurisdiction across the country to ensure there will be agreement and compliance with a federal carbon pricing policy.
This is where Canada’s Conservative Parties are pushing back. The provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, are all presently led by conservative-leaning governments which have expressed opposition to putting a price on carbon. Saskatchewan states it doesn’t need carbon pricing because projects like Boundary Dam demonstrate that it can sequester much of the carbon its energy utilities, farms, and industries produce. This is a flawed argument but nonetheless, the province is challenging the federal government’s right to impose a national carbon price.
Manitoba wants to set its own carbon price at a slower pace of escalation than that scheduled by the federal policy.
And then there is Ontario, with a newly elected Conservative government. It has scrapped an existing carbon cap-and-trade system implemented by the previous Liberal government and has left companies and utilities holding worthless carbon allowances which they purchased for more than $2 billion. The Conservatives in Ontario state they will address climate change by other means, not by a “carbon tax” but during the election and since have offered no plan or policy.
Saskatchewan and Ontario are in the process of taking the federal government to Canada’s Supreme Court, challenging the latter’s authority to impose a national price on carbon. Manitoba has chosen not to participate and constitutional experts state that the two provinces will likely lose their case and have carbon pricing imposed on them.
It is unfortunate that a policy designed to be market driven and modeled after the successful Montreal Protocol to reduce hydrofluorocarbons in the atmosphere that endangered the ozone layer has met with such resistance. It would seem that some governments have failed to understand the direct connection between carbon emissions in the atmosphere and global warming, and have further failed to understand the economic and environmental impact that these emissions are having today, and will have in the coming decades.
Conservative values and principles should hold environmental conservation as an important tenet and yet it seems the meaning of their party labels is lost on them. Even Preston Manning, founder of Canada’s Reform Party in the 1980s, an outgrowth of western conservative alienation, has recently argued that pricing pollution is a conservative issue. Manning has stated that being a Conservative means living within your means and that this applies to the environment as well.
Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Senator who ran for the presidency of the United States against Lyndon Johnson in 1964, wrote in a 1970 book, The Conscience of a Majority, a chapter called “Saving the Earth” in which he stated “we are in trouble on this Earth in our continuing efforts to survive.”
Russell Kirk who authored The Conservative Mind, a month after the first Earth Day in 1970, wrote “nothing is more conservative than conservation,” and “only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution.”
With populist and conservative governments emerging in the European Union, the resurgence of conservatism in Canadian provinces and the current United States federal administration, one hopes that conservative leaders educate themselves to the “conservative = conservation” paradigm. Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, Preston Manning, and other past Conservative leaders and philosophers should provide them the guidance to make responsible environmental policy decisions that address and mitigate the threat we humans have imposed on the planet.
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June 10, 2018 – In its latest predictions on artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact over the next five years, Gartner, Inc., a leading U.S. based research, and business advisory company, predicts “by 2022, most people in mature economies will consume more false information than true.” This is number 7 in the 10 predictions Gartner believes will come to pass because of the growing use of AI by business, government, and non-state actors.
Today, it has become simple to exploit AI to alter what is being said in an Internet-posted video. Think about how this could impact a business announcement or political discourse. To describe this as nothing more than mischief-making when first demonstrated was an understatement. This type of manipulation could have dire consequences. Worse yet, AI could end up writing and distributing lies.
If the American election of 2016, and the Brexit campaign, haven’t taught us anything about the dissemination of “fake news,” then we are in for a doozy of a ride over the next few years as AI gets used by bad actors to shape opinion and “knowledge.” And with the current American President declaiming “fake news” each time a reporter asks a question he doesn’t like, it seems that we are stuck with having to discern truth from lies every day. So we don’t need AI muddying up the information news cycle. But we may need it to help us distinguish lies from truth.
It is so easy to lie online today. Discerning opinion from fact is nearly impossible unless you apply due diligence when receiving information of interest to you. For example, when I read the science or technology reports I receive in my inbox each day, I flag those I consider important and then check the source. I then seek additional corroborating sources, a minimum of three, before I consider writing a blog. Even then due diligence can fail with a lie being perpetuated by many sources making it appear to be the truth. Is that where an AI truth-discerning algorithm can help?
At the moment the world isn’t looking at AI solutions to solve the growing “fake news” epidemic. Instead, some governments are considering regulation. One concern is if you shut down lying will you also end a fundamental democratic principle, free speech and along with it freedom of the press?
The European Union (EU) has been looking at ways to combat online lying disseminated as “fake news.” This April it published a strategy paper to address the problem using a variety of strategies and regulations:
States EU Security Commissioner Julian King, the action is not about “targeting partisan journalism, freedom of speech, freedom to disagree, freedom to be, in some cases, a bit disagreeable.” It is specifically aimed at those who perpetuate online lies or what we call today, “fake news.”
Europe isn’t alone. Malaysia recently passed an anti-fake news law that includes fines of up to $123,000 US for perpetrators. Malaysia’s law governs digital news outlets including audio and video, and social media platforms. India, too, is considering regulations that would give the government the right to take away accreditation from journalists who publish “fake news.”
Members of the media argue that any regulation of news is a slippery slope towards ending freedom of speech. The onus to discern what is true and what is a lie, therefore, in the media’s opinion, lies in the hands of the reader. After all, there have been tabloid “newspapers” around for years telling us that Jennifer Aniston has been pregnant umpteen times. No one has shut these “fake news” sources down.
For those who encounter what could be fake there are a growing number of tools to help separate fact from fiction. You the reader have to make the initial assessment. If something sounds fishy when you read it you can find out if you are being lied to by going to a number of sites including:
This burgeoning new industry is trying to address those who cry “fake news” and those who originate and disseminate it. None of the sites mentioned above claim to be using AI algorithms to spot deception. They remain human intensive in the effort to ferret out liars.
