Canada has an escalating price on carbon pollution and this week announced new tax credits to polluting industries to match those in the IRA. At the same time, Canada is vested in an oil pipeline to increase the capacity of oil sands operators to ship their products offshore and to the U.S.
Then there is Australia with the Labor Party now in power. It has reversed policies from the previous Liberal Party governments and committed to carbon emission reductions in 2030 by 43% compared to 2005 levels. At the same time, it is continuing to back natural gas projects, pipeline development and new coal mines.
All three governments are preaching from the same hymnal. They remain committed to fossil fuels because without them the impact on their countries’ current and near-future economies would be devastating. Their strategies emphasize an orderly transition with predictable outcomes that ensure the democratic nations of the world will be able to buy “democratic” oil, gas and coal. And at home, emission reductions would make each of their countries reduce emissions to achieve interim and 2050 net-zero targets.
None mention that the oil, gas, and coal that they export will end up being burned by their customers. The emissions and their contribution to global warming will not be coming from them.
Does this sound like greenwashing?
Originally, greenwashing was something businesses did to mislead investors and the public about their environmental credentials. But it sounds to me like we can add democratic governments to that definition. Expect more of it as COP27 begins next week in Egypt.
Holding this environmental gab session on the continent of Africa, the canary in the climate change coal mine should be an interesting affair. The promises of the Paris Climate Agreement to provide US $100 billion annually to Global South countries to help mitigate and adapt to climate change has yet to be fulfilled. And Africa more than any other continent is suffering the most because the money isn’t flowing, the projects to mitigate and adapt cannot get going, and the climate is changing.
Just look at Kenya in the last couple of years. The northern half of the country has hardly seen a drop of rain while the southern half is inundated with flooding. Or take Somalia which has experienced three years in a row of little to no rain. That’s three years of crop failures contributing to further political destabilization.
Our atmosphere is a shared commons. It doesn’t matter where emissions are produced. Political boundaries don’t stop greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming doesn’t stop at borders.
If you can encase your country in a glass bubble then you might be on to something. But you can’t. And although we will hear about the progress being made by the United States, Canada and Australia when their representatives speak at COP27, they are all acting like they are already living under glass bubbles.
]]>In almost every other country on the planet, there is regulation around access to firearms. Even in Canada, sitting on the edge of the US which makes us more susceptible to gun culture, to get one you have to apply for a firearms license, take a safety course, then fill out an application and wait to see if you get approved. Then you can go and shop for a handgun. To get an AR-15, the gun that seems to be the choice of mass killers in the US, however, you need to go through more rigorous screening processes.
Approximately 2.2 million Canadians out of a population of 37 million have a gun license. In Toronto, a city of 2.7 million, less than 40,000 have gun licenses. Fewer actually own a gun but of those many own more than one.
Even if you have a permit to own a gun, in Canada it is a crime to buy, sell, or own a growing list of banned weapons, and it is illegal to carry a loaded one for personal protection.
According to a global gun violence database kept by the University of Washington, the US doesn’t have the highest number of gun deaths per 100,000. But 2019 data shows a rate of 3.96 per 100,000. By comparison, Canada’s is 0.47, and the UK’s is 0.04. Where are gun death rates higher than in the US? Refer to the chart that follows.
The high rate of gun deaths in the Americas, as seen in the above chart, has much to do with the illicit drug trade with cartels working to control personal channels to markets in the US, the prime customer. These numbers dwarf most of the rest of the world. Not even countries wracked by armed conflict produce similar statistics to those found in the Americas and the US. Countries like El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico have soaring gun death rates. But go overseas and the numbers are far different. For example, Lebanon in 2019 recorded 1.35 gun deaths per 100,000, a third of the US number. Afghanistan was at 1.13, Syria at 1.00, and Yemen with an ongoing civil war, a mere 0.77.
In an article entitled “We know what the problem is” appearing on May 26, 2022, in the journal Science, H. Holden Thorp writes, “The common thread in all of the country’s [US] revolting mass shootings is the absurdly easy access to guns. The science is clear: Restrictions work, and it’s likely that even more limitations would save thousands of lives. So why not take the laws much further…the alternative is painfully obvious—living with more and more senseless carnage, courtesy of the National Rifle Association and their well-funded political lackeys.”
The common defence by those who argue in favour of gun ownership is that shooters suffer from severe mental illness. the solution is better health care to identify violent-prone people before they become shooters. But the US doesn’t own more mentally ill people than any other country on the planet. And in those countries mass shootings are rare. That’s because the problem is access to guns.
Then there is Senator Ted Cruz, Republican, Texas, who blamed school policy for the mass shooting this week in an elementary school. If there was only one access door to the school with an armed guard always present, Cruz stated, there would have been no mass killing. So it’s not the access to guns, it’s the unlocked doors. I wonder if the Senator consulted with fire department regulators before making his revelation. It should be noted that Cruz has received more than a half-million dollars in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun lobbyists.
Another argument is that regulations won’t stop people from getting a gun. But here too, statistics from 2017 show that gun ownership prohibitions and restrictions on concealed carry permits reduce acts of gun violence.
Thorp writes about the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment as the covenant held up by the NRA and gun rights owners as sacred. The argument is you can’t change one word of the Constitution about guns but you can about making it illegal to own a slave, or ending voting prohibition for women. Thorp states “it needs to be decided that unfettered gun ownership by American citizens is not consistent with a flourishing country where people can worship, shop, and be educated without fear.”
Scientists that study public health issues and collect and analyze the data know that guns are the differentiator leading to mass shootings in the country. They know that restrictions on guns would make America safer. They know that mental illness is not the determining factor. Nor is school door policies. It’s guns.
]]>America was born of a revolution by colonies breaking away from Great Britain beginning with an independence declaration read to gathered Americans in towns and cities on July 4th, 1776. America’s revolution was one dominated by white males, largely of Christian faith, who were concerned about preserving their freedom to worship, to gain wealth, to obtain property, to be represented by peers in government, and to preserve slavery. Women, indigenous people, and, of course, the slaves had no say in the outcome.
Canada was born from a variety of disparate groups with a single thing in common. They did not want to be Americans. They were French Canadian. They were United Empire Loyalists who left revolutionary America to find a safe haven. They were Acadian survivors of British attempts to implement mass deportations in the 18th century. They were slaves brought to Canada from American they were freed black refugees looking to start anew after escaping America. And they were the indigenous people of the country who had signed treaties with the British Crown, and who had aspirations for a future of peace and opportunity guaranteed to them.
Those parts of the land where the colonists settled spread continent-wide from east to west skirting the U.S. border. They came together in Confederation on July 1st, 1867, to ensure their survival from a militarily aggressive post-Civil War America. It wasn’t about rebellion and individual rights. It was a search for a collective peace, order and good government, the words enshrined in the British North America Act which today form the basis of Canada’s constitution.
Left out of citizenship in this new country were women, slaves, freed blacks, indigenous people, and Metis (a French-Indigenous community). Canada’s citizenry and leadership were male, white, Christian, and the antithesis of Americans.
In 2021 on this July 1st the celebration of Confederation has been tainted by the revelation of mass indigenous graves found on the grounds of former residential schools, a program initiated by the post-Confederation government to “kill the Indian in the Indian” and turn indigenous Canadians into the equivalent of good white British citizens. It appears from these mass graves that the killing wasn’t limited to the spirit of the original human inhabitants of the Americas.
Was the Canadian government policy in the past egregious, racist, and genocidal? Absolutely. Was it much different than the policies of European, British and American governments? No.
The policies were the product of the time when European civilization saw its purpose as being the “white man’s burden.” It saw Europe seize much of Africa to civilize its native black population. And when Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection, it manipulated it into a Social Darwinist creed to define European civilization’s place in the human pecking order. White and Christian on top, and everyone else beneath.
Remember this was a time when phrenologists determined human superiority and intelligence based on head shape and bumps on the skull. This was a time when people were measured for their worth and standing by place of origin, skin colour, religion, and ethnicity, and not by what was between their ears.
But these times in Canada are gone for good. The legacy, however, remains to this day and reconciliation has become the chosen path for Canada to heal its historic failings. It is not easy to fess up to a tainted past and on Canada Day. Many are wearing orange and not Canada’s red and white colours today to remember the lost children and the genocidal policies of our country’s past.
South of the Canadian border, the United States’ celebration should be more muted with the ongoing story of a condominium apartment building’s collapse in the suburbs of Miami and the mounting death toll. This event should be a reminder to Americans about the crumbling state of infrastructure and that the nation’s sense of exceptionalism appears to have reached a limit. A country that could put humans on the Moon less than a decade after its first human spaceflight, appears to be unable to create a safe infrastructure for its citizens such that they die in their beds at night as the building they live in pancakes to the ground.
We don’t know as of yet why this building failed. One of President Biden’s cabinet members suggested anthropogenic climate change was a contributor. I would think probably not. Others speculate about lax standards in Florida’s building code and the laws governing building and maintenance requirements for condominiums including mandatory minimum contingency funds to be used to keep structures and the people living in them safely.
If this were a single instance of failure we might call it an exception. But in the last week a pedestrian bridge across an interstate in Washington, DC, collapsed with several people injured. This one bridge is symptomatic of a nationwide problem. More than 617,000 bridges cross America’s roads, rivers and ocean coasts today. Some are pedestrian, some are for cars and trucks, and some are for trains. Of these, 42% are more than 50 years old, with 46,000 of them deemed structurally deficient. On the latter, 178 million trips are taken daily by people, in cars, trucks and trains. Is it only a matter of time before the next one fails?
Part of America’s ethos has been the individual pursuit of property and wealth, rights not to be trivialized or inhibited by government getting in the way. Unfortunately, safety and good governance take a back step to rights such as these that let:
If Florida’s weak condominium laws turn out to be among the failings in this building collapse tragedy, it shouldn’t be surprising. It is a metaphor for the entire country’s failings as a nation that presumes to lead the world to a better place in the 21st century, a world that is facing an ongoing pandemic, and the growing threat of human-caused global warming.
These are sombre thoughts for Canada Day and for the week when America commemorates its Declaration of Independence.
]]>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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Where Canadian federalism was born in incremental, and largely peaceful stages out of its British parent, (not including the short-lived and unsuccessful 1837 rebellion,) U.S. federalism emerged after thirteen separate colonies united in revolt against the Mother Country in 1776 and in a protracted conflict won independence by 1783.
Nothing like these two entities existed on Earth before their emergence in the late 18th and mid-19th century, and both have become models for subsequent attempts to create federal states.
As political experiments, Canada and the United States are far from perfect. Why?
Today, both countries are continuing to pay for their original sins in the marginalizing of indigenous people, and the enslavement of Africans unwillingly brought to North America.
Canada, unlike the United States, was formed as a federation of two linguistic and culturally separate groups of European origin. The British conquest of French Canada in 1763 was unique in its aftermath. Whereas Britain in previous colonial wars with France after conquests expelled defeated colonists, in the case of Canada, accommodated both the French language, customs, and law codes for the conquered people.
The English-speaking parts of Canada largely came about during the American Revolution when loyalists abandoned their homes and moved to the remaining British-held territories in North America.
Today, Canada is no longer a nation divided by English and French-speaking citizens. It spans the northern half of the continent of North America and is populated by people from all over the world. The country is no longer European in flavour having brought millions of immigrants to its shores from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Finally, since 2015 the federal government has attempted to remedy the past with the nation’s indigenous inhabitants recognizing them as founding peoples before Confederation, and equal partners going forward. The effort, so far, only begins to address the inequities and injustices of the past, the land, and charter treaties dating back to British control, and claims. Land claims based on British crown treaties are still disputed. And more recently, concerns about the environment and sustainable resource management have led to conflicts between indigenous people and the descendants of the colonizers. There remains a great degree of reconciliation to be done to complete the federal experiment.
In the post-pandemic country, will it transition from a federation of provinces and territories to one that also recognizes indigenous people as equal members on an equal footing to Canada’s provinces completing the federal experiment?
The United States was the first to create a federal experiment. It built a nation for largely European colonists that provided them with religious and other freedoms not possible before its formation. The United States created the federal mould for others to follow.
The federal experiment’s biggest failing, however, was the institution of slavery which became embedded in its Constitution and governance. In the end, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 ended with emancipation of African Americans, but not equality. Reconstruction after 1865 did little to create equality, and Jim Crow laws that were put in place in the late 19th century produced a racialized underclass in permanent subservience.
The second failing of the United States was its marginalizing, displacement, and slaughter of indigenous peoples who mandated by government policy were driven from their ancestral lands.
How can you reconcile the forced immigration and employment of African Americans who played a significant role in the building of the country without compensation for their efforts? Are reparations owed to their descendants? Can America rid itself of the Constitutional baggage of the Electoral College, a legacy of its slave past? When will the United States address the failures of its historic policies towards its indigenous inhabitants giving them equal status within the federation?
We are currently being reminded of the failures in the federalist model of the United States in movements such as Black Lives Matter, and of legacies of indigenous injustice such as the slaughter of the Lakota tribe at Wounded Knee in December 1890.
Today’s federal states in addition to the ones above include Argentina Australia, Brazil, and India. The opposite of these is unitary states with some offering a level of local government. Russia describes itself as a federation, but in effect is a unitary state. China is a unitary state. Great Britain and Spain are unitary states where local autonomy has been granted to areas that have distinct linguistic or cultural differences. There are more unitary models than federal ones around the globe.
Emerging from the European experiment that began with the post-war economic community, is the European Union (EU), a very different federal experiment than either Canada or the United States. It remains whether by mid-century the EU will truly become a federation or dissolve into its national components.
And finally, very much in the mode of Europe and the economic community that preceded the EU, Africa has begun to form a continental free-trade zone that could lead to a new federation by the end of the century. Africa, like Europe, has to overcome language and cultural differences.
More on Europe, Africa, and federalism in a future blog posting. Watch for it.
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The use of technology in the wars of the first two decades of this century is not considered the paradigm for anticipated future conflicts. That’s because these have been wars largely fought on the ground and in the air in response to international interventions, quelling of intranational uprisings and civil wars, and land grabs.
We are talking about the continuing Afghanistan conflict now some 17 years old, the Iraq war of 2003 and the post-war fallout leading to the rise of ISIS and its African offshoots, the continuing Israel-Palestine neverendum, Russia’s incursions into Crimea and Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and the ongoing instability in Korea. All of these are extensions of 20th-century conflicts fought largely with 20th-century technologies.
The rise of cyber warfare fought from desks in offices and back rooms is a phenomenon engendered by a global-wide communications revolution of the late 20th century, the Internet. Today this is defined as a war of electrons and AI with algorithms battling for strategic advantage while ensuring no breaches occur in military or domestic infrastructure and operations including politics and elections.
And then there is the insertion of the military into the fields of biomedical engineering and biomedicine with improvements to prosthetic limbs (a development fueled by battlefield ground war injuries to thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq), development of exoskeletons to enhance soldier capability on the battlefield, brain implants connected to augmented reality, and DNA-altering technologies in pursuit of creating super-soldiers.
Back in March of last year, I wrote a posting entitled “The Battlefields of the Future: Robot Armies vs. Enhanced Humans.” I described the Mad Scientist Initiative, an alliance of the military, academics, and business, focused on future wars. Among Mad Scientist’s current key areas of interest are these three:
But the reach of the military into scientific discovery and technological invention is not limited to these areas. Consider the following:
And none of these military technological advancements are about missiles and nuclear weapons which remain deterrent weapons with delivery and destructive force capable of wiping out civilization and life over much of the planet. Even in these areas, a rethink is underway to make nuclear weapons smaller with lower yields to make them more battlefield friendly to deliver precision blows to small sites rather than wipe out an entire city. And successors to today’s cruise missiles are in the works as well with hypersonic replacements capable of traveling up to Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound). Russia recently announced a hypersonic cruise missile that could evade any state-of-the-art weapon detection systems.
Finally, there is the militarizing outer space. The Soviet Union and its successor Russia, China, and the United States have all been sending aloft military payloads to spy on each other’s ground, sea and air forces. But the most recent call by the President of the United States to create a separate military branch called the Space Force is something entirely new. Donald Trump in his space policy announcement directed the Department of Defense to ensure “American dominance in space.” In a recent interview on CNN, U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers stated, “the future of war will be fought in space.”
Russia, China, and the United States haven’t been shy about developing kinetic, laser, radio jamming and robotic weapons designed to target Earth-orbiting satellites. China even demonstrated a kinetic weapon on one of their own satellites in the last few years. If all that gets developed are counter-space capabilities to knock out enemy observation and infrastructure satellites, this will not amount to a space war. The idea of a Space Force where human or AI-operated gunships could fire from space on satellite and Earth targets would be a major escalation. Let’s hope this is not the direction that spacefaring countries like Russia, China, and the United States today choose to go.
A good example can be found in the latest action by Wyoming state legislators who have proposed a bill that mandates the government to get its electricity from non-renewable energy projects. Nine sponsors, two state senators and seven representatives, all from coal-mining districts within the state, proposed the bill last week at the opening of the 2017 legislative session. The bill mandates steep fines for utilities drawing their energy from wind and solar projects.
Wyoming isn’t the only state suffering from delusional climate change behaviour. Wisconsin‘s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) deleted references to climate on its home web page in December. New web content talks about change happening in the Earth’s long history and mentions ongoing debate and research on the subject. But for DNR change is only something related to managing the state’s natural resources. Previous wording acknowledged human activities producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) and global warming. But not anymore. So much for scientific evidence driving statecraft.
And then there’s Ohio whose representatives tried to pass a bill gutting existing renewable energy policies. When the Republican governor vetoed the bill in the lame duck session, the state representatives vowed to bring it back in the new session. Now they have a veto-proof majority to ensure passage.
Not all states are in climate change denial. California continues to lead with its cap and trade market that now includes Quebec and Ontario. In addition the state is working with its immediate neighbours to integrate the electrical grid and bring on more renewable energy capacity. The latest California initiative, introduced last week, requires new building construction to incorporate solar power generation as a mandatory, an extension of previous law requiring residential and commercial buildings to be roof-ready for solar. Joining California, and its western neighbours, are the New England states who have recently announced joint plans to increase clean energy capacity.
But 27 states currently have law suits launched against the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Power Plan, an initiative that is a cornerstone of U.S. policy to help the country meet 30% target reductions of GHGs by 2030 from 2005 levels. If the courts rule in their favour, the national American commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement will lie in ruins.
In the dying days of Barack Obama’s presidency, there is resistance. For example, the Energy Department (DOE) announced a scientific integrity policy, allowing scientists to do their work without political interference. This is in light of Donald Trump’s many climate denial statements, his appointments to Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and to Secretary of State, all individuals who have demonstrated opposition to climate change initiatives. When the Trump transition team requested Energy Department staff fill in a questionnaire that asked if they attended meetings where climate change was discussed, Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, saw this as an infringement against scientific free speech. His enactment of scientific integrity included these statements: “All scientists, engineers, or others supported by DOE are free and encouraged to share their scientific findings and views…..under no circumstance may anyone, including a public affairs officer, ask or direct any researcher to alter the record of scientific findings or conclusions.”
In confirmation hearings, the best of the worst, the new nominated Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, told the U.S. Senate that he recognized the science of the anthropogenic global warming and the need for the world to address it. He just didn’t believe the United States should take the lead role in tackling the problem even though the country is the world’s second largest GHG emitter. It is hard to take his opinion at face value since this is the same man who buried research done by his company confirming that human activity was the primary agent for changes to global climate.
A weakened Democratic Party at the national and state level seems to be adrift in developing a strategy to counter the climate change skepticism of the new administration. But online in public forums environmental activists are organizing. The environmental movement thought that President Obama wasn’t doing enough to combat global warming. Now they face an executive, Congress and the majority of state legislatures all in the anti-climate change movement. Back in October I wrote about an escalating war by environmental activists against fossil fuel companies. I described these environmental groups as forerunners of an all out war to save the planet. Well now the enemy for these activists is no longer coal, oil and gas companies. It is government in a state of climate-change denial. I predict that through social media, the environmental movement will grow to an army of young and old alike who will move the conversation from the Internet to the streets in opposition to blind leadership.
Xi Jinping, President of China, exhorted other countries to ratify the deal before year end. He declared that China will “adhere to the green low-carbon development cycle….saving resources and protecting the environment.” He further stated that China will “promote green development, but also…take the initiative to address climate change and overcapacity.”
For COP21 to go into effect 55 of the 195 nations who signed on have to ratify it. And those 55 nations must represent 55% of global emissions. So far 24 have done so. Until the United States and China came on board the previous 23 countries represented just 3% of global emissions. With China and the United States on board the total is now up to 41%.
China has committed to cutting carbon emission intensity based on units of GDP to the tune of 50-65% by 2030 from 2005 levels. It is also committed to creating 20% of its energy requirement from non-fossil fuel sources by that date. It also commits itself to reforestation to increase tree volume by 4.5 billion cubic meters from 2005 levels. Emission intensity, however, is by no means emission reduction. It is the same argument that oil sands companies in Canada have used in pledging their efforts to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. The only difference is the oil companies track it by intensity per barrel of oil produced.
China should have no trouble meeting its pledge because as an effort to tackle global warming it comes up exceedingly short. Based on intensity China’s overall emissions will grow well past the 2030 deadline it has set before we see an overall decline. The hope is the country will revise these targets to be more aggressive in the next round of COP negotiations.
The United States committed at COP21 to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. This is a real reduction target as opposed to China and if current policy persists beyond the next presidential election, the United States should easily meet its goal within the timeframe. But this plan too is not ambitious enough to lessen the pace of warming and keeping average global temperatures from rising 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) degrees or more by the end of the century.
For the latest on how all countries who were signatories to COP21 are doing visit Climate Action Tracker, a website that provides an assessment of every nation’s plan. You may find the analysis of climate change commitments by G20 countries currently meeting in China most interesting.
He talked about the melting of Canada’s Athabasca Glacier, permafrost in the Arctic, Alaskan villages sliding into the sea. He said, “This is not a conspiracy….not a hoax.” He talked about rising sea levels impacting nations like Bangladesh and the Pacific islands. And he confronted naysayers and skeptics in challenging them on their opinions that tackling climate change or growing the economy could not be done together. He pointed to sustained economic growth in the United States in the last decade despite a drop in net carbon emissions over the same period and remarked if “the United States can do it, the whole world can unleash economic growth and protect our planet.” Most telling was his last comment on the issue: “This is the only planet we’ve got. And this may be the last shot we’ve got to save it.”
The speech concluded a meeting of North America’s three elected leaders, Canada’s Justin Trudeau,d Mexico’s Enrique Pena Nieto and the U.S. President. The three agreed to a North American Climate, Energy, and Environment Partnership with a coordinated action plan that includes:
As long as this list is it is not fully reflective of the full text of the partnership. Other than the European Union’s climate change action plans no other continent-wide strategy existed until yesterday. And with the United States the second largest global emitter of greenhouse gas emissions it is important that North America is now setting a standard on tackling climate change. Now two powerful international blocs can work together in meeting the commitments made at COP21 in Paris. It all makes sense since the atmosphere knows no borders, neither do extreme weather events, and no country acting alone can save the planet.
In a study appearing in Energy & Environmental Science this last spring, researchers at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, analyzed how the country could convert energy production, transportation and industry to 80% renewable power by 2030 and 100% by 2050. In the transition net energy demand would be reduced nearly 40% through efficiency built into the distribution of electricity.
The study states that the energy capacity mix needed for 2050 would come from the following sources:
There would be a significant increase in storage capacity to ensure peak demand and power grid stability. Storage would be integrated within renewable energy facilities.
The conversion from a predominantly fossil-fuel energy mix would produce 3.9 million 40-year construction jobs, and 2 million 40-year operations jobs, outweighing the 3.9 million jobs eliminated by the closing of fossil-fuel and other current energy power plants.
There is no reference in the study to the continued use of nuclear power, or thermal coal with carbon capture, natural gas, and solid biomass. The exclusion of nuclear is interesting because the development of fusion and hybrid fission-fusion power is ongoing in the United States and China, as is the development of thorium-fueled fission reactors. The exclusion of thermal coal, natural gas and biomass, however, does makes sense because the combustion processes in these types of energy sources would still contribute air pollution and life-cycle carbon emissions from them would be highly uncertain.
The conversion to 100% renewable energy will eliminate an average 62,000 premature deaths today that occur annually and are linked to air pollution.
In terms of global warming costs, the elimination of U.S. emissions would mean an overall savings in mitigation and adaptation of approximately $3.3 trillion per year by 2050.
The average American by 2050 will save $260 per year in energy costs and $1,500 per year in health and global climate costs.
The study comes with a road map on how to get to the 100% renewable target for all 50 U.S. states. The roadmaps are based on current ones developed by the states of New York and California.
Extensive tables calculate the energy capacity for all renewable sources state-by-state. For example, the total calculation of wind onshore and offshore capacity before transmission, distribution and energy losses equals 67.8% of anticipated total U.S. energy requirements in 2050. That’s 17.8% higher than the calculated wind-turbine power forecasted as doable by 2050.
In calculating solar power the report studies sun angle, day-night distribution, and cloud coverage across all 50 states projecting residential rooftop capacity alone to equal 660 Gigawatts. By 2050 based on this study only 57% of the total solar potential would be installed.
Some interesting numbers to compare solar capacity with current sources of electricity production. In 2010 conventional hydroelectric capacity amounted to 78 Gigawatts not including power imported from foreign sources (Canada).
Tidal and wave energy generation by 2050 is projected to equal approximately 56.6 Gigawatts. That represents less than half the total capacity which has been calculated at 135.8 Gigawatts just for wave energy alone.
Necessary to make this all work is a revamping of the power grid and the development of a range of storage technologies from battery to pumped storage (air and water) and the use of soil and water as heat sinks.
Achieving 100% energy from renewables biggest benefit will be the health of the population of the country. The estimated cost savings will equal 3.6% of the 2014 U.S. gross domestic product. The investment payback from the conversion in air pollution costs alone is calculated at 20 years.
In calculating the social costs of carbon dioxide from power generation the study uses data on projected global warming damage including these specific categories:
The timetable for the conversion begins with the following:
During the transition the study recognizes that conventional fossil fuels will remain in use.
The study includes policy options including incentive structures to cover in priority sequence:
Every state governor and legislature can derive guidance within this paper’s 132 pages. The big question is will they?
And what applies to the United States can be a good starting point for other countries in converting to a zero-carbon future within the 2050 time frame.
