Tuesdays with Turtles – Hiatus Edition
Turtles were relaxing on Memorial day weekend, back next week…
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Canadian Federal Government GHG Mitigation – FAIL
Two central programs that the Conservative government has claimed will result in significant reductions in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are nearly impossible to verify, the federal environment commissioner says.
A tax credit intended to encourage public transit use, part of the maiden Tory budget in 2006, will “lead to negligible reductions” in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and the tools to measure its impact don't yet exist, Scott Vaughn's audit of the government's tools for cutting air emissions found.
And impressive claims that a $1.5-billion climate change trust fund would lead to an 80-megatonne cut in emissions by giving provinces money to go green appears to be based more on a best-case scenario that may be flawed, the audit found.
Not that the Conservative government is serious about its climate change mitigation strategies. Their programs were easily tagged as worse than useless. A transit tax credit is useless without increasing transit options, discouraging urban sprawl and increasing automobile fuel efficiency. I like the fact that I can get $10 off a monthly bus pass with this program, but in the end, most people will pay 10 bucks a month if it means getting to work in half an hour, instead of an hour and 15 minutes. When you use exclusively tax based solutions, everyone optimizes their short term gains and nothing happens in the long term.
Why land use is critically important for climate change
That’s the argument from a new paper published in Science today, written by Princeton University’s Tim Searchinger and others. The upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost, but that’s simply not accounted for in any of the prevailing climate-change programs. Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests.
In my long blog post earlier this morning, I briefly alluded to the fact that proposed Canadian climate change legislation explicitly excludes land use. Well, bad idea! I am surprised this is being trumpeted as a major new finding, hasn’t it been obvious for at least the last few years that biofuel carbon neutrality is very dependent on how land use patterns change?
British Columbia Introduces a Carbon Tax
Wow, I am already proud of my future destination, a carbon tax, no less. One that will start off at $10 per tonne of carbon (2.4c per litre of gasoline, or about 9c a gallon) and rise by a factor of three in a few years…
VICTORIA – Finance Minister Carole Taylor introduced an escalating carbon tax on most fossil fuels Tuesday, one she says recycles revenues back to taxpayers and businesses and is designed to ignite an environmental social movement in British Columbia and across Canada to fight climate change.And she’s handing every British Columbian $100 in June as seed money to get them thinking green.
The Canadian Press: BC introduces carbon tax, but off-sets increased fuel costs with tax cuts
The carbon tax advocacy center sets the required starter tax as 10c a gallon, BTW, so this measure by BC is no joke, it’s a serious effort to rein in CO2 emissions from the province. Carbon taxes are in general regressive as they are flat taxes, so the poor pay the same as the rich, but obviously will suffer more. So, what is the BC government doing to ensure that the poor don’t suffer?
The carbon tax revenue, estimated to hit $1.8 billion over three years, will be returned to taxpayers through personal income tax and business tax cuts, she said.The government will introduce legislation that requires it to table an annual plan that shows how the carbon tax revenue will be returned to taxpayers, Taylor said
Good words. But Taylor needs to realize that in the absence of well designed tax offsets, the people and businesses of BC will be at a temporary competitive disadvantage. It’s tricky to be an early adopter, but I am optimistic that BC will be the better for it.
Wonderful, now the rest of Canada (and the US) needs to follow suit. And, I look forward to blogging about Canada already, exciting!
Thanks of course to the grist for alerting me…
Update: An economist allays my regressivity and harm to business fears…
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Tags: BritishColumbia, Carbon Tax
Feds punt on Bisphenol A
By studiously ignoring all the subtle hormone disruption effects of bisphenol A and concentrating on easily observable neurological effects, the CERHR essentially does the industry’s bidding.
Some risk linked to plastic chemical – Los Angeles Times
A federal panel of scientists concluded Wednesday that an estrogen-like compound in plastic could be posing some risk to the brain development of babies and children.
Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found in low levels in virtually every human body. A component of polycarbonate plastic, it can leach from baby bottles and other hard plastic beverage containers, food can linings and other consumer products.
Culminating months of scientific debate, the decision by the 12 advisors of the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction — part of the National Institutes of Health — is the first official, government action related to the chemical. Their recommendation will be reviewed for a federal report that could lead to regulations restricting one of the most used chemicals.
The scientists ranked their concerns about BPA, concluding they had “some concern” about neurological and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children, but “minimal” or “negligible” concern about reproductive effects. The findings put the panel roughly in the middle — between the chemical industry, which has long said there is no evidence of danger to humans, and the environmental activists and scientists who say it is probably harming people.
For a detailed look at how bisphenol research has been corrupted by industry sponsored “focused counter research” – where the goal is to show no effects and the experiment is tiled to ensure this goal, read this excellent article in the The Public Library of Science Biology Open Source Journal. Note, because it is Open Access, you can actually read it without selling a kidney! Some highlights…
The moment we published something on bisphenol A, the chemical industry went out and hired a number of corporate laboratories to replicate our research. What was stunning about what they did,” vom Saal says with a mix of outrage and bemused disbelief, “was they hired people who had no idea how to do the work. Each of the members of these groups came to me and said, ‘We don’t know how to do this, will you teach us?’”
More…
The HCRA report, commissioned before Schwartz’s tenure, concluded that “the weight of the evidence for low-dose effects is very weak” [15]. Industry groups hailed the report as a comprehensive review by independent experts and quickly disseminated its findings. Yet the “comprehensive” report reviewed just 19 of 47 studies available in April 2002, and when it was published more than two years later, three panelists asked not to be listed as authors.
What the hell, just read the whole article, especially the bit about the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and its well documented industry shillness.
The key to understanding bisphenol research is to realize that it is a hormone disruptor that works at low doses. At high doses, normal toxicological testing doses that is, it floods the hormone receptors and slows down the receptor pathways. So, the usual technique of testing in rats and mice at high doses and extrapolating will not work.
Climate Deniers Get Top Science Posts
Seriously, I’ve had enough of Bush North up here in Canada, he has to go and luckily, he’s only running a minority government, so it’s not 4 more years…
globeandmail.com: Global warming critics appointed to science boards
Top Canadian scientists are accusing the Harper government of politicizing science funding and jeopardizing climate research by naming global warming critics to key boards that fund science.
The government’s actions are “dreadful,” said Garry Clarke, a leading international glaciologist at the University of British Columbia, and undercut public pledges to tackle climate change.
“Their mouths are doing one thing and their hands are doing something different,” Prof. Clarke said.
Already alarmed over funding cuts to basic research, scientists say two appointments in particular are worrisome. Mark Mullins, the executive director of the conservative-leaning Fraser Institute – and a former adviser to the Canadian Alliance Party – was recently appointed to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), which funds university research projects that have included studies on climate change.
Desmogblog has more, including choice quotes from the economists and oil geologists that run this country’s science.
Mullins: “It strikes me that the science is not settled,” he said in a 2007
interview posted at BCbusinessonline. “‘Put caps on global emitters’ is
not the natural conclusion I would come to.”Weissenberger: “To those who doubt the scientific basis of global warming theory, we
say: Don’t let a cabal of government-funded scientists, environmental
activists and journalists convince us they’re the mainstream.” — April
28, 2006″These are the people who will be deciding who gets science money in Canada.
This has probably been the most unscientific administrations in Canada’s recent history.
I think it is time to throw the bums out, it’s time for another election!
Obama and Harper, saving a tree
Canada hopes to achieve a North American climate-change deal with U.S. president-elect Barack Obama and will begin working on the file within weeks, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Wednesday.Meantime, officials told The Canadian Press the Harper government has been waiting for the departure of President George W. Bush to work with his successor on an integrated carbon market.While states and provinces have been cobbling together a patchwork of approaches, federal officials said they have been eyeing a continent-wide solution for some time.
globeandmail.com: Canada to seek climate deal with Obama
Interesting and potentially promising news. I have thought for a while that Canada would have no choice but to start some kind of emissions cap/trade or carbon tax, given the way the wind was blowing down south. Harper, for all his reliance on Alberta’s oil votes, realises that with or without his say, the country’s leading trading partner is going to impose a carbon tax (a cap and trade is a price on carbon, or a tax, semantics aside) on Canadian-US trade.
It is also interesting that this statement came out right after Obama’s election, and the foreign minister went out of his way to say that they were waiting for Bush to get out of the way. Nice cozying up, Harper, making up for all your stupid previous statements about Obama. But do not worry, this new emperor is more gracious than the previous one!
We are going to be living in interesting times, good ones, finally.