Category Archives: conservative party

What They Knew Could Hurt Them

climate crisis, conservative party, economy

The line from the Conservatives is that taking enough action on the climate crisis to avert catastrophe would damage the economy (as if that’s a real choice). Then, two months ago, we found out that their own experts told them that the Green Party’s climate plan would have a negligible effect on the economy, and that they tried to keep that report secret. Today, we find out that their own experts were also telling them that their plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through tax rebates/feebates for new car purchases would be extremely inefficient with taxpayer dollars.

The Globe and Mail reports that a September 2006 report informed the government of the following:

The key findings from the working group are that the cost per tonne of GHGs reduced is high for all options; ranging from $150 per tonne for a permanent incentive that rewards very fuel-efficient vehicles without distinguishing between technology or class; to $2,350 per tonne, for example, for an incentive that differentiates between passenger vehicles and light trucks and expires after four years.

The second option–at a cost of $2,350 per tonne–is more or less what the government introduced in the last budget, and has since been a resounding failure. So, not only did they know that our plan (which, remember, is a tax shift of only $50 per tonne) would succeed in reducing emissions while not harming the economy, they also knew that their plan would be shockingly wasteful and produce mediocre results at best.

At first, I’m tempted to conclude that this government is trying to create economic damage with their climate inaction plan in order to prove themselves right, or even that they’re somewhat sociopathic. But then I’m reminded that I should never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Hummer vs. Prius, Regulation vs. Market Signals

climate crisis, conservative party, energy

The headline on the front page of today’s Globe, Ottawa can’t shift green rebates into gear, is regrettably predictable. In short, not a single buyer of a 2006 or 2007 eligible model has yet received the rebate they’re entitled to under the ecoAuto program. Further, no one knows what 2008 models are eligible for the rebate (it hasn’t been announced), causing confusion and inconsistency that’s creating a “customer nightmare” and adding “an element of risk to doing business in Canada” according to Honda and DaimlerChrysler, respectively.

What’s worse, these rebates never made sense in the first place. Vehicles were made eligible for rebates based on their class first, and their emissions second. In other words, if you buy an “efficient SUV” you’re eligible for a rebate not available to someone who buys an “inefficient” regular car, even though your SUV emits more carbon emissions.

Add to the mix this confusing column about a study that concluded a Hummer is greener than a Prius, and early-eco-adopters must be ready to throw up their hands in defeat. The study took into account the total “dust to dust” (I prefer “cradle to cradle,” but ok) energy and material inputs for each vehicle, and concluded that a Hummer’s life-time environmental impact is less than that of a Toyota Prius.

Did the study get it right? I doubt it. Others have already pointed out a number of flaws and question marks with the methodology. For example, the study authors arbitrarily assigned the Prius a lifetime of 100,000 miles and the Hummer 300,000 miles (artificially amortizing the embedded energy required for research and production over a much longer period), despite the fact that a Prius will last at least twice as long as that. Not to mention the fact that the study was conducted not by a scientific group, but by a marketing company whose client list includes Chevrolet, a brand of Hummer-manufacturer General Motors. (I’m yet to see that reported anywhere, by the way.)

Why has this report nonetheless garnered so much attention and so little scrutiny outside of the blogosphere? Well, if it were true, wouldn’t it be great to rub it in the face of that treehugging, smug, judgmental Prius-owning neighbour of yours? In some circles, “environmentalist” is still a tainted word, hearkening back to the arrogant, ignorant EPA official in Ghostbusters who almost destroys the whole world with rash actions motivated by his presumed superiority.

And what if, on the other hand, there is some truth to the report? It’s possible. Considering the full life-cycle environmental and energy impacts of everything we make is a very important thing to do, and the results will often surprise us. That’s why it’s sometimes difficult to tackle extremely complex problems through government regulation, and why it would be more effective in this case to harness market tools as well. A carbon tax applied early in the process would help to reveal and deter hidden energy bloat at every stage in the production process.

Government regulation can’t do that. Turns out they can’t even send out a simple cheque.

Cons Rooting For Bob?

conservative party, green party, liberal party

A commenter just tipped me off about this post on Garth Turner’s blog. (Yes, this is the first time I’ve mentioned his name since our emotional break-up last October. Never mind that.) Garth makes some very interesting–if non-specific–accusations about the Conservative campaign here in Toronto Centre. Namely, that it’s being sabotaged by the PMO:

Unable to hobble the new Liberal leader with its tidal wave of smear and innuendo, the Harper Party strategists are hoping Mr. Ignatieff and especially Mr. Rae still have the scent of power in their nostrils. The plan is to facilitate a Rae victory in Toronto Centre, get Bob Rae into the House and have Stephane Dion sitting smack in the middle of the two guys from whom he snatched victory. Then [Prime Minster Stephen Harper] will start bating them, ask rhetorically who is in charge, and again attack Dion, mocking his consensual style of leadership as being weak.

And it gets even more scandalous:

That explains the on-the-ground strategy in Toronto Centre. It explains what PMO political operations director Doug Finley is doing. It certainly clarifies the media blackout, the hobbling of the local campaign and the complete disregard for the hard work and honest efforts of Conservatives there. Mr. Harper is about to elect Mr. Rae.

Don’t believe me? Ask the poor candidate.

There, in that last line, and again in the intro, Turner twice suggests that our Conservative candidate himself has been complaining of being sabotaged by his own party. He does not, however, offer any specific evidence or examples, nor does he give us any idea what kind of “political operations” and “hobbling of the local campaign” Conservative war room chief Doug Finley might be up to. I’m also left to wonder why the Conservatives would bother, since Rae is all but guaranteed to win anyway. Still, makes for some interesting speculation. Maybe one of our regular commenters can help clear this up.

Government’s Biofuel Policy Dangerous

climate crisis, conservative party, energy, food, green party, social justice

“My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come.” – George Monbiot

Just a few years ago, the biggest threat to our society’s survival was our willing blindness towards the crisis facing us. Now that we’re aware of that crisis, the biggest threat to our survival is our willingness to believe that there are easy answers; that we’re “on the right track;” that our political leaders are starting to “get it.” This is the threat of greenwash, intentional or otherwise, and it can’t be underestimated.

Last week, Canada’s New-ish-like GovernmentTM announced a $1.5 billion subsidy for biofuel production. You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like a positive, “step in the right direction.” In reality, it’s extremely dangerous and wrongheaded. In short, while some biofuel policies make sense, biofuels from crops like the ones targeted by Stephen Harper’s plan (corn, wheat, soy) lead to increasingly higher market prices for those crops, setting up a competition between cars and people for who gets to be fed by the Earth. Further, they’re likely to exacerbate, not mitigate, the climate crisis. And it’s happening already.

The fundamental idea behind biofuel is simple, as is its fundamental flaw. Fossil fuels comprise concentrated energy stored up by organic material (plants and animals) exposed to intense heat and pressure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Since our dependence on fossil fuel energy is now becoming problematic and unrealistic for at least two major reasons (climate change and peak oil), the thinking behind biofuel is that we should just cut out the middle man and convert organic matter into hydrocarbons ourselves. It should be obvious, however, that we can never hope to produce biofuel rapidly enough to match our consumption of fossil fuels, since they took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate and we’ve already used up about half of that supply in just the past century.

What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that more than simply inadequate, this strategy is actually destructive. The $1.5 billion proposed by the Conservatives is an attempt to meet their own requirement for 5% ethanol content in gasoline by 2010. Europe has a similar target of 5.75% of transport power by 2010 and 10% by 2020. The United States is looking to use 35 billion gallons of biofuel a year. Problem is, according to the International Herald Tribute these targets “far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70 percent of its farmland with fuel crops. The entire corn and soy harvest of the United States would need to be processed as ethanol and biodiesel.” Of course, no American president or European leader is going to allow that to happen. Therefore, if these targets were actually met, they would likely have to be met by destroying the food systems of the South. The poor would go hungry while the wealthy pumped diverted human food into their SUVs.

Think this sounds implausible? It’s happening now:

CBC News, May 22 2007 – The rising demand for corn as a source of ethanol-blended fuel is largely to blame for increasing food costs around the world, and Canada is not immune, say industry experts.

Food prices rose 10 per cent in 2006, “driven mainly by surging prices of corn, wheat and soybean oil in the second part of the year,” the International Monetary Fund said in a report.

“Looking ahead, rising demand for biofuels will likely cause the prices of corn and soybean oil to rise further,” the authors wrote in the report released last month.

What’s more, the degree to which biofuels can contribute to solving the climate crisis has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the wrong kind of biofuel policy could even make the climate crisis worse. According to the BBC, a recent United Nations report found that “demand for biofuels has accelerated the clearing of primary forest for palm plantations, particularly in southeast Asia. This destruction of ecosystems which remove carbon from the atmosphere can lead to a net increase in emissions.”

Even once the initial conversion of wilderness to farmland is complete, biofuels grown by current agribusiness methods require large inputs of fossil fuel energy, which defeats the purpose. As a result, the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is very weak. According to a U.S. government report, the EROEI for ethanol grown from corn is 1.34. In other words, it takes approximately three barrels of ethanol to produce four. And that’s the optimistic outlook. A study out of Cornell University found that the production of biofuels actually results in a net energy loss.

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:

  • corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
  • wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

  • soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
  • sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

Normally, you would expect the market to sort at least some of that out, since biofuels that actually lose energy would not be economically viable, right? Unless of course, the government subsidizes them to keep the price artificially low. (Oh wait…crap.)

Despite all this, I tend to think that most people pushing for biofuels are well-intentioned. George Monbiot, on the other hand, begins a column published recently in the Guardian titled A Lethal Solution by saying:

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

He goes on to point out that “a report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that…biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES [caps his] as much climate change as ordinary diesel.”

Now here’s where this gets really hard to follow: not all biofuels are bad. The same UN report cited above also concluded that “using biomass for combined heat and power (CHP), rather than for transport fuels or other uses, is the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade – and also one of the cheapest.” The Green Party of Canada also supports investments in cellulosic ethanol, since it doesn’t set up the same competition between people and cars for food (a competition which, as Monbiot points out, “people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation”). A good shorthand then, perhaps, is that we shouldn’t be making car-food out of people-food, and that we should focus our biomass efforts on CHP instead of as replacements for transport fuels like gasoline and diesel.

It may seem like asking a lot for us laypeople to be able to tell the difference. Even so, in a democracy it’s our responsibility to figure it out. We can’t get the right solutions out of government unless we know which governments (in waiting) are offering them up.