Though news of Canada's selective emissions reporting drew little attention here at home, other countries took notice. From Post Media News:
OTTAWA — Foreign diplomats bombarded Canadian climate change negotiators with questions Thursday in Bonn, Germany, as they challenged the Harper government's transparency and policies to fight global warming.
In the wake of media coverage highlighting missing and conflicting information in an Environment Canada submission to the United Nations, officials from Australia, China, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the Philippines questioned government policies regarding fossil fuel subsidies and the Alberta "tarsands," a lack of investment in clean energy and the scientific evidence used to determine its greenhouse gas emissions target...
Representatives from other countries pounced on Canada after Michael Keenan, an assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada, delivered a presentation suggesting that the government was showing "significant ambition" in its proposal to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions.
But his presentation appeared to generate more questions than answers.
"I was also struck that the colleague from Canada didn't refer to the tarsands issue or at least only once in passing," said Peter Betts, the lead European Union negotiator and a director at the United Kingdom's Department of Energy and Climate Change, during the session. "This has been an issue featured much in the press, and I know there have been allegations from the press that the emissions from that sector have not been included in Canada's inventory (report submission to the UN)."
His remarks were followed by a delegate from Australia — traditionally a Canadian ally at climate negotiations — who questioned how Canada could increase its "level of ambition" when it was turning away from engaging international markets. Lebanon also jumped in, questioning the pace of a commitment to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, including the "tarsands," and raising doubts about Canada's intention to harmonize its policies with the U.S. without matching its partner's proportion of investments in clean energy.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Canada upsets other countries at climate negotiations
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Honesty in Canadian emissions reporting
For five years, Canadian government represnetatives have claimed they are meeting all the obligations under the Kyoto Protocol... except the emissions target. In other words, Canada has met the reporting deadlines but achieved little else. The claim has been subject of much ridicule, here and elsewhere. [it is, incidentally, a classic and well-documented problem with international policy; governments viewing success as filling out the paperwork, not achieving the goals of the actual policy]
It turns out, we are now aren't even filling out the paperwork properly:
OTTAWA — The federal government has acknowledged that it deliberately excluded data indicating a 20 per cent increase in annual pollution from Canada’s oilsands industry in 2009 from a recent 567-page report on climate change that it was required to submit to the United Nations...
The numbers, uncovered by Postmedia News, were left out of the report, a national inventory on Canada’s greenhouse gas pollution. It revealed a six per cent drop in annual emissions for the entire economy from 2008 to 2009, but does not directly show the extent of pollution from the oilsands production, which is greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of all the cars driven on Canadian roads.
... Environment Canada provided the oilsands numbers in response to questions from Postmedia News about why it had omitted the information from its report after publishing more detailed data in previous years. A department spokesman explained that “some” of the information was still available in the latest report, which still meets Canada’s reporting obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
“The information is presented in this way to be consistent with UNFCCC reporting requirements, which are divided into broad, international sectors,” wrote Mark Johnson in an email.
He was not immediately able to answer questions about who made the decision in government to exclude the numbers from the oilsands or provide a detailed explanation about changes in emissions.
To be fair, maybe this is a common problem this past year, and the reporting by other UNFCCC signatories was also limited or delayed.
Although the report was due in April, during the last election campaign, Canada was the last country to file its submission. Environment Canada even filed its submission after earthquake-stricken Japan, and was unable to explain in detail why its report was late.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Climate communication: Shaking things up
I've been advocating that scientists need to experiment with new ways of communicating with the public. Now I don't know whether this video will work as a communications strategy, or whether I even agree with what they are saying ("we're scientists, you're not" could come across asarrogant), let alone the language they use to say it. But let's not be too academic here. Regardless of what you think of the finished product, this group deserves props for at least trying something different:
Monday, April 18, 2011
An argument for a gas tax
Last Thursday I gave a talk at the annual American Association of Geographers meeting in Seattle. The AAG attracts throngs and throngs of academic geographers from around the world. Frankly, the meeting is so big you need to be a geographer to navigate your way to a chosen talk, the subject of which may very well be a Marxist analysis of neoliberal influence on the map of the conference centre (“the orientation places the economic geography presentation rooms at the top”).
Seattle is just close enough to Vancouver that someone who is busy, or who possesses an unrealistic and slightly delusional sense of what is possible in a fixed amount of time, or, in my case, both, could convince himself to go there and back in a day. I chose to take the bus, rather than drive, because doing so is more energy efficient and would give me the chance to do some work.
The return bus fare was $48 (that’s Canadian $ for those of you scoring at home). It was, I later discovered, a bit of a deal – return fares can run up to $72 or so. That morning, the price of gas at the station near our house was $1.33 per litre (L). At that price, in order for a single-occupant vehicle trip to be cheaper than the bus fare, the car would need to average less than 7.88 L per 100 km (or 30 mpg) on the 458 km return trip from our house to the conference centre*.
You are unlikely to get that fuel efficiency with anything other than a small vehicle or hybrid car, especially given the traffic you can expect to encounter. And that’s not including the cost of parking. If you add in $20 for parking, the car would have needed to average 4.6 km/100 L, or 51 mpg, which is probably only possible, if at all, with a carefully-driven Toyota Prius, a Chevy Volt, one of the older two-door Honda Insights, or maybe Nissan Leaf if you asked the polar bear in the backseat to hold a bunch of extra batteries on his or her lap. Even at the premium, book-at-the-last-minute bus fare of $72, a car would still need to average at least 11.8 L/100 km (~20 mpg) excluding parking costs, or 8.5 L/100 km (27 mpg) including parking costs, in order to best the bus costs. In other words, at today’s price, there is a clear and immediate financial benefit to leaving the car in the driveway and taking the bus**.
At low prices, gasoline is inelastic. The price won’t significantly influence our behaviour. But as prices move well upwards of $1 per L (towards $4 per gallon), the story may change. The last time gas prices reached beyond today’s level there was an increased demand for high-efficiency vehicles and public transit.
The problem, to remove my scientist hat and channel Thomas Friedman, is that the price signal is coming from the wrong place. Right now, gas is expensive because of the price of oil. The proceeds are going to the oil industry – some of that money stays here in Canada, but much of it goes overseas – and inspiring more exploration, which could conceivably lower prices, or maybe to things like CEO bonuses. If the price of gas were high because of a tax, especially one for which the revenue was invested in things like transit, improved automotive fuel efficiency, battery technology and charging stations, wouldn’t we all be better off? I’d guess that the only thing people hate more than paying a premium at the pump is paying that premium to oil companies.
*L per 100 km? What foreign tongue is this you ask? Canada and the metric world measures fuel efficiency as the gasoline required to go a distance, whereas the US and some other nations use the distance you can cover on some fixed quantity of gas. That difference is in itself rather fascinating, and probably the subject of someone’s cultural geography thesis.
** A full accounting would include the wear and tear on your car – with that, the bus wins hands down over any car on the market. I’ve ignored that here because I’m interested in what will most likely factor into the choice of bus vs. car. My sense is that people don’t consider the daily dribbling costs of wear and tear when making decisions. We moan when the mechanic says you need a new fan belt, but don’t think about the prorated cost when going on a subsequent trip. So we’re unlikely to make a decision based on the per km wear and tear. This is just a hunch; I could be wrong.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Geopolitics at Climate Dialogue
Over at Climate Dialogue, Gerald Singh writes about the geopolitics of climate change and the strengths of weaknesses of scenario analyis:
... This raises the interesting question of what is the value of scenario studies. The future is inherently unpredictable, and there are entire books dedicated to the failures of humanity’s best and brightest when it comes to predicting the future. The problem is further compounded by the idea that our own predictions influence how we act in the future. But where would that leave us? If we rid ourselves of the tools that scenario analysis gives us (regardless of how poor they might be), what can we do?
The post goeson to talk about a climate change and Mexican immigration study that caused some debate last year. Check it out!
Monday, April 11, 2011
REDD: Seeing the forest for the trees
The newest Climate Dialogue post looks at the pros and cons of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries Programme (REDD+):
At first glance, the REDD+ framework seems to hold great promise; upon closer inspection, however, the list of barriers to REDD’s success is long. Most criticisms of REDD+ are focused on the details of the Programme’s framework and challenges for its implementation...
For more, check Climate Dialogue!
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Faster sailing across the Central Pacific: Wind speeds and El Nino
The new paper by Young et al. about increasing wind speeds and wave heights over the past twenty years created a bit of a buzz in the climate science world, not to mention the sailing world. Finally some good news, the windsurfer in me first upon seeing the paper.
The paper itself does not speculate about whether human-caused climate change is the driver of the global trend in wind speeds. That may have been a wise choise, as it would be difficult, statistically or dynamically, to attribute the rend in the reasonably short time series (~23 years) to any single forcing factor.
The spatial pattern, however, is quite striking:
If there were no labels on this figure, I'd have guessed it was the trend in sea surface temperatures over the same time period. The steepest trend is in the Central Pacific, including the waters around the Gilbert and Phoenix Islands of Kiribati.
In a map of temperature trends over the past two to three decades, the Central Pacific should jump out because of the increasing frequency of "Central Pacific" El Nino events, also known as El Nino Modoki. The more freuqent occurences of the "CP" El Nino is a subject of much research, and has been attributed by some authors to climate warming. The CP El Nino is responsible for a number of mass coral bleaching events, including 2002-3 in the Phoenix Islands, 2004-5 in the Gilbert Islands, and 2009-10 across the whole region.
It is not surprising to find a similar -- at least visually, take this with a grain of salt, I've not done the statistics -- spatial pattern in the surface wind speeds across the Pacific. More frequent Central Pacific warm events likely means larger pressure gradients, more convergence, and higher winds across the region (my paper in the Atoll Research Bulletin describesa CP El Nino event in relatively lay terms). More analysis will need to be done, but at first glance, the wind speed trends over the Pacific appear to be driven by temperature trends and the status of climate oscillations, which themselves may be driven in part by climate change.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Let’s Get the Lipstick off the Pig (at Climate Dialogue)
"Climate change is not being effectively addressed through the UNFCCC process, which has instead evolved into a sterile talk shop, unable to overcome the resistance of those who would block meaningful action on climate change."
For more, read the latest post by the student team at Climate Dialogue!
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Adaptation, Fairness and Finance at Climate Dialogue
Here's a teaser:
We face an extremely difficult, complex challenge in responding adequately to mitigate and adapt to climate change. One particularly thorny aspect of this challenge is how best the West can fulfil their ethical obligation to help developing countries build capacity and fund the level of response required to successfully adapt to climate change.
Head to Climate Dialogue to read the rest!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Food prices and the ongoing biofuel debate
People worldwide are being affected by a rise in the price of food. The causes are complex and interacting: last summer's drought in Russia, the price of oil, speculative trading in commodities, economic instability, political unrest on the Middle East, you name it. As Tamino mentions, some people sceptical of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blame the increase in food prices on those efforts, namely the cultivation of biofuels like corn ethanol. Though I think Tamino's post misses the point of this debate.
The impact of corn ethanol, or an individual drought, or any other individual factor, on the price of a global commodity is very hard to quantify. The diversion of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production over the past decade has undoubtedly affected food prices, despite U.S. government claims to the contrary. The various factors have interacting, nonlinear effects on the price of each commodity, and the commodity prices each affect the others, so it is hard to work out, say, a coefficient for each driving variable. But that's not the problem.
The real problem with any "climate change mitigation = more corn ethanol = higher food prices" argument is the first part: the claim that producing corn ethanol is addressing climate change.
In reality, the use of ethanol from corn as a fuel might actually result in greater greenhouse gas emissions than the use of gasoline, because of the land and energy required to grow the corn, harvest the corn, and convert the corn to ethanol. As such, the primary motivation for the expansion of corn ethanol production in the US is not climate change. Ethanol production is about appeasing regional interests, maintaining of the agricultural subsidy system and reducing reliance on imported fuels, probably in that order.
The only reason that corn ethanol gets promoted by politicians in the U.S. as a solution to climate change is that in the current political atmosphere, very few actual climate change mitigation proposals can pass, and because of some effective lobbying and the power of the Presidential primary process, expanding corn ethanol production looks like climate change mitigation to the public.
Throw out the word biofuels and people might think action is being taken to address climate change. Look at the acutal conversion efficiencies and total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of the current feedstocks in the U.S. and you find a different story.
There is definitely reason to be concerned about the market effects of diverting so much of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production. The real key to the story, the one to to look for in the coming months, is the price of meat. The majority of cereals and oils, the commodities for which the price has spiked the most, are used to generate animal feed. If you look back to 2008, you’ll see that the price of meat is likely to spike next.
This dynamic demonstrates the real battle we face in the future. It’s not food vs. fuel, it is feed vs. fuel. If the world wants to keep using the most productive croplands to provide biofuel feedstocks, we had better be prepared to eat less or much more expensive meat.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Climate change hits the big time
I received this "important" notice from "Desmond Tutu" today. You know an issue is important when it is being abused for email scams!
Perhaps the scam could also be seen as a unintentional bit of social commentary, on the fact that a lot of aid funding for climate change adaptation or awareness generally goes on international consultants rather than to people in developing nations.
Attention: Sir/Madam,
This is to inform you that the NELSON MANDELA FOUNDATION and WILLIAM J. CLINTON FOUNDATION in Collaboration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has held an Internet Raffle Draw, and your Email Address was among the 2010 Email Addresses that was
picked through the computer ballot system. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change/Nelson Mandela Foundation and William J. Clinton Foundation were conceived with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development, and to create awareness to the dangers posed on our planet by climate change.
To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change /Nelson Mandela Foundation and William J. Clinton Foundation in conjunction with the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) is giving out a yearly donation of $ 900,000.00 (Nine Hundred Thousand United States Dollars Only) to 18 lucky recipients. These specific Donations will be awarded to 18 lucky international recipients worldwide in different categories for their personal business development and enhancement of their educational plans and to create awareness in their community on the dangers posed on our planet by climate change as a Result of pollution. Recipients are only eligible to be awarded this donation once. We therefore with great pleasure notify you that your email address happened to be among the eighteen email addresses selected for this Donation. BELLOW ARE YOUR WINNING DETAILS...
Please note that these donations/Grants are strictly administered by the UN. You are by all means hereby advised
to keep this whole information confidential until you have been able to collect your donation, as there have been cases of
double and unqualified claim, due to beneficiaries informing third parties about his/her donation. Finally, all funds should
be claimed by their respective beneficiaries, not later than 14 days after notification.
On behalf of the Board kindly, accept our warmest regards.
Regards.
Rev. Dr. Desmond Tutu
Foundation officer.
PLEASE HELP PROTECT/SAVE OUR PLANET.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Julie Bishop and Australian Opposition parties need to do better research about climate policy
The Australian Prime Minister, who heads a minority coalition in Parliament, has proposed carbon pricing scheme that will begin in 2012. The opposition parties are lobbying hard against the scheme, or any scheme that puts a price on carbon. In her regular blog for the Sydney Morning Herald, Deputy Leader of the Opposition Julie Bishop uses an argument that will sound familiar to argues that will sound familiar to Canadians and Americans: in essence, why should "we" take action if China is not?
One of the principal arguments of the Julia Gillard - Bob Brown government to justify imposing a carbon tax on Australia is that the international effort on climate change will leave us behind and that even China is taking dramatic action to reduce its carbon emissions.
This is deeply misleading. What the government doesn't tell you is that even if the Chinese government met its stated targets of cutting carbon emissions "per unit of GDP", there will in fact be a massive increase in emissions from China for the foreseeable future.
And here is the evidence:
University of British Columbia Professor in Geography Simon Donner calculates in an article titled "China's emissions pledge depends entirely on economic growth" that the Chinese emissions "intensity" targets would still result in substantial emissions increases.He says: "If China keeps up the planned 8 per cent/year growth, emissions in 2020 will be 74-90 per cent higher than 2005 levels".
When I heard about this "citation" yesterday, I was puzzled. What article is she talking about? I'm fairly certainly I'd remember if I'd published an article about Chinese climate policy. It turns out she is referring to a brief Maribo post from two years ago in which I pointed out that the China's new emissions target is based on emissions intensity, and thus represents less of a decrease than it might sound. This brings up all sorts of interesting questions about appeals to authority, blog posts vs. published research, etc., which I'd be happy to discuss.
Now had the Deputy Leader or her staff or whomever writes the posts in her name contacted me or, say, done more than typed "china's emissions pledge" into Google (the post comes up #3, at least from here), she may have learned that many international policy experts think it is reasonable to allow nations with developing economies to set targets based on emissions intensity. I've written numerous posts arguing just that. In fact, that point was touched on in the previous paragraph in the post though only fully fleshed out in other posts:
It is, however, a reasonably fair way to bring a reluctant developing nation like China into an international emissions control framework.
The moral here is not what I wrote. The moral here is that Australians should be just horrified that by the lack of research and analysis being done by the opposition parties on the carbon tax proposal. They should not be citing a two-year old blog post written by a Canadian university professor for which the data is now out of date. I'd guess it took me about 20 minutes to do the analysis and write that post. Certainly that's not too much time to spend working on your position on a critical policy proposal.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Climate change and the oceans; UCAR Magazine
The UCAR Magazine has a good short review of recent research into the ocean's response to climate change. Bob Henson manages to summarize some of the new thinking about coral bleaching, plankton productivity, ocean acidification, and ocean "deoxygenation" all in one article. It's worth a read.
Climate Dialogue: Counting carbon
A new post about carbon accounting schemes is up on Climate Dialogue. Check it out!
The previous post looked at the logic behind temperature targets.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Phew, must be that global warming
Perhaps the climate change communications MVP should go to the funniest individual or organization. Humour is probably more effective than either aggression or humility.
Friday, March 11, 2011
The MVP of climate change communication
The Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason is giving out the third Climate Change Communicator of the Year award. Voting is open until April 15th.
The award raises a question that comes up around award time in the sporting world. Is the most valuable player the one who produces the most - say, hits the most home runs - regardless of the success of their team? Or is the most valuable player the one who captained or contributed the most to a successful team?
If you believe the former, then the communicator of the year is the one who racked up the most statistics, be it blog posts, policy briefings, public talks, op-eds, etc. Given the rough state of public and political discourse on climate change, maybe this is like voting for the slugger on the last place team. One could argue that the most valuable communicators may not score well using the standard individual metrics, but doing more to advance the "cause".
That raises a second question: for what should we award a climate change communicator? Advancing public understanding of the science? Or influencing public or political opinion on climate change policy or solutions? These are two very different goals. The most valuable communicators might in fact be ones who best help audiences differentiate between science and judgments made based on science. In that view, the most valuable communicator will not be the strongest advocate for action.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Coverage of today's congressional hearing on climate science
The U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing about climate science this morning, as a part of the deliberations on a bill that would challenge the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. These congressional hearings can seem like a circus, with a set of climate scientists countered by people with nice sounding credentials making arguments by analogy or just wholly baseless claims about climate science (case in point: just read or watch Donald Roberts' testimony).
This time the real circus may have been the coverage. After my morning class, I clicked on Science Magazine's (by then complete) live blog of the hearing with Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate in hopes of getting a feel for what had come to pass in the halls of Congress. Unfortunately, this legimate attempt at science coverage by a news organization with the aide of an expert from the field became more of a circus than most congressional hearings thanks to the commenters. I think commenter Roger Pielke Jr. posted more than Schmidt and blog host Eli Kintisch combined.
But that's the whole challenge, isn't it? Climate communication, like climate change, is a signal to noise problem.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Banning the trade of shark fins
I took the picture at left just a couple weeks back in a market on the Pacific Coast of Central America. Frankly, it the photo could be from the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean or the western Pacific, I've seen the same thing on the coasts of all the tropical oceans.
You'll notice the fin-less sharks in the bin are all small: the larger sharks are dumped at sea after being "finned". The fin is worth so much more than the meat that there's no value in bringing a big heavy dead shark back ashore, even though it is obviously a potential food source. In Kiribati, people do catch sharks and sell the fins, but at least they also take the shark home to eat.
You don't have to be the least bit interested in marine conservation or the dwindling global shark population to see the practice as finning and leaving the shark behind as ridiculously wasteful. Perhaps a ban of shark fishing may be politically or logistically impossible in today's world, I don't know. I can say that if we are going to continue to catch sharks for human consumption, let's at least catch the whole shark.
