Canadian Elections October 14th?

Byoliveridley

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will later this week ask Governor General Michaëlle Jean to set Oct. 14 as the date for the next federal election, senior government officials said Monday.Harper will visit Jean at Rideau Hall, her official residence in Ottawa, to establish the election date, the officials told the Canadian Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.

Harper to ask GG to set Oct. 14 as election date: sources

Just like most things Canadian, our elections will also be about 2 weeks before the American one, it’s Harper vs. Dion, also starring the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party. Climate Change will be front and centre, thanks to Dion and the Liberals’ Green Shift campaign:

Our plan is as powerful as it is simple. We will cut taxes on those things we all want more of such as income, investment and innovation, and we will shift those taxes to what we all want less of: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste.

Energy costs are soaring all over the world. While energy prices continue to rise, we need to encourage energy efficiency. We need to change wasteful habits. We need to discourage polluting activities.

In other words, a kind of Carbon Tax similar to the one the BC provincial government instituted this July. Of course, Harper called this a tax increase and has forecast gloom and doom for all Canadians if something like this happens. As such, his attacks have been successful and support seems to be dropping.

It’s going to be very interesting and very tight, with the Tories and Liberals both polling in the Mid 30s. Expect yet another coalition government. The Greens could affect results in certain ridings, always good to follow. I hope to learn a lot about Canadian politics from watching this election. The system is quite like India’s and as such, is easily understandable.

Also expect no soap operas, this is Canada, folks, if you were expecting the Jerry Springer feel to this weekend’s goings on South of the border!!

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    Vote Strategically for the Environment

    Byoliveridley

    via Vote For Environment / Voter Pour l’Environnement.

    This site wants you to vote strategically to avoid splitting the anti-conservative vote on the assumption that all things being equal, the conservatives are much worse for the environment than any of the other parties. This is not really how you want an election to be decided, but a party that represents the minority of Canadians should not get a parliamentary majority simply because of a flawed voting system.

    I would heartily endorse a preferential ballot system for us. How does this work?

    Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters have one vote and rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes redistributed to the voters’ next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term “instant runoff” is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election.

    Under this system, if you like the Green Party the best because of their environmental policies, but know they cannot win, you can still vote for them. Just have the liberals/NDP as the second choice. It is overwhelmingly likely that if you like the Green Party policies, you like the policies of the conservatives more than the policies of the liberals or the NDP. With our current system, that’s exactly what your vote will say. Your vote for a Green Party candidate in this election is essentially a vote for the Conservatives.

    In the absence of the preferential ballot, or instant runoff voting, using web 2.0 methods to vote strategically is the next best thing, and a great idea!

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    Split court rules against Bush on greenhouse gases – CNN.com

    Byoliveridley

    Interesting, see here for background…. So, the Supreme Court has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant, good for them.

    Split court rules against Bush on greenhouse gases – CNN.com

    The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.

    In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.

    Greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the landmark environmental law, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.

    The court’s four conservative justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — dissented.

    Kennedy, swung left on this one! I stand by my original asseesment, just regulating cars using the clean air act is inadequate, but the important matter resolved here is that CO2 is a pollutant, and this will, I hope, provide precedent in cases to come.

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    Republicans Block Renewable Energy Legislation

    Byoliveridley

    3 people stand between the US and a sensible energy policy, the radical notion that subsidies should support up and coming, good for the environment renewable energy instead of the oil industry.

    Wired News – AP News

    But Republicans complained that it was too harsh on the oil industry and could lead to oil companies reducing investments in new oil refineries and production. They also said that it could lead to higher prices for consumers.

    “When you put a tax on a business it gets passed on to consumers,” argued Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz. “Instead of reducing gasoline prices, this bill is going to add to the cost of gasoline.”

    Kyl had earlier sought to sidetrack the tax measure, but that effort failed.

    The bill’s supporters dismissed suggestions that the new taxes on an industry that has had record profits in recent years would cause either less oil production or lead to higher prices at the pump.

    Oil companies earned $111 billion in profits last year and at that rate stand to earn $1 trillion over the 10 years covered by the tax package, said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., rejecting suggestions that “this is an undue burden” on oil companies.

    Kyl claims that the point of energy legislation is to reduce the cost of gasoline to consumers. Really? I thought the point was to come up with a coherent policy that maximizes the efficiency of energy use and minimizes its impacts.

  • Weaver and the Tarsands: What the media missed.

    Byoliveridley

    It appears that Canada (or the part I follow) is all a twitter about an interesting analysis ($$$) by prominent climate scientist Andrew Weaver and his colleague Neil Swart that counts up all fossil fuel reserves, then converts them into global temperature increases based solely on their combustion CO2 emissions potential. It turns out that oilsand reserves are dwarfed by the available coal and natural gas reserves and overall tarsands contribution to temperature increase is modest.

    If the entire Alberta oil-sand resource (that is, oil-in-place) were to be used, the associated carbon dioxide emissions would induce a global mean temperature change of roughly 0.36 °C (0.24–0.50 °C)  However, considering only the economically viable reserve of 170 billion barrels reduces this potential for warming by about tenfold (to 0.02–0.05 °C), and if only the reserve currently under active development were combusted, the warming would be almost undetectable at our significance level.

    The Canadian media has chosen to play up just the fact that on a global scale, the project will result in a small increase in global temperature, so the oilsands are okay to exploit.

    Climate expert says coal not oilsands real threat – CBC

    Other articles pretty much say the same thing,  Prof. Weaver’s quoted comments don’t help either:

    “The conventional and unconventional oil is not the problem with global warming,”  “The problem is coal and unconventional natural gas.” “One might argue that the best strategy one might take is to use our oil reserves wisely, but at the same time use them in a way that weans us of our dependence on coal and natural gas”

    Weaver’s comments to the media posit this as an either-or, coal and natural gas = bad, oil = okay. Knowing him to be a very intelligent person, I suspect this is some selective quoting. Also, oil is primarily used to fuel transportation, coal and natural gas are used for electricity generation, so I am curious as to what Prof. Weaver is suggesting here as far as using oil reserves to wean us off coal use? Would the plan be to use all the money that we get from exploiting the tarsands to develop an electricity infrastructure that puts efficiency, reduced electricity use, 100% renewables first? I wish! I don’t see that happening. Alberta is currently powered mostly by coal, and if the Federal government is serious in its stated goal to phase new coal out (which is fantastic), then Alberta would switch to natural gas to fuel its tarsands exploitation, and that would not be okay either! Also, these infrastructures are all linked. A lot of BC’s natural gas and proposed big damaging dams like Site C are designed to fuel the tarsands. A province and by extension, country that makes most of its money by taking the resources it was provided for free, and selling them at great profit is not likely to want to transition away from that.

    It was interesting that a few weeks back, Mark Jaccard, yet another prominent BC climate scientist (we are blessed) looked at the same issue and came to the following conclusion.

    Canadian tarsands must contract as part of a global effort to prevent a 4 degree increase in temperatures and catastrophic climate change.

    Vancouver Sun – January 26, 2012

    So, is this Jaccard vs. Weaver?

    Not really.

    Is the Swart and Weaver message that simple? Are they actually saying that it is okay to exploit away because it makes no difference?

    The media should start by reading the byline:

    The claimed economic benefits of exploiting the vast Alberta oil-sand deposits need to be weighed against the need to limit global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

    That’s how the paper starts. It then calculates global warming potentials based on reserves, current production, total “in place” (present, but not always exploitable) and shows that coal and natural gas are by far the greatest potential contributors. This is of course simply because we have much greater reserves of coal and natural gas, so their global warming potential is going to be huge. The paper makes no mention of rate of use, or whether it is humanly possible to use all that coal and natural gas, and what kind of population growth, and per-capita consumption that would entail.

    Here’s a very important calculation from the paper that will be lost in the details. To limit temperature rise to 2 °C or less, the allowed, cumulative per person future carbon consumption is 85 tons of carbon. The per-capita carbon potential of the tarsands alone to US and Canada is 65 tons of carbon. So, by itself, the proven reserves (10% of what’s there) of the tarsands can eat up 75% of our allowed carbon budget, not so small, is it.

    Here’s what Swart and Weaver have to say about trajectory:

    The eventual construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would signify a North American commitment to using the Alberta oilsand reserve, which carries with it a corresponding carbon footprint

    Here’s the last paragraph from the paper, another big trajectory argument.

    If North American and international policymakers wish to limit global warming to less than 2 °C they will clearly need to put in place measures that ensure a rapid transition of global energy systems to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting sources, while avoiding commitments to new infrastructure supporting dependence on fossil fuels

    Absolutely, 100% agreed, but this is not what the media message is at all, interesting.

    So Swart and Weaver point out that we need to avoid commitments to new infrastructure promoting fossil fuel dependence, and that building projects like Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway signal a serious commitment to using the entire tarsands. The message in the paper is much more nuanced, and more measured than what’s in the media, not surprising.

    I have long since come to the conclusion that this is not about counting of individual carbon atoms and their non-measurable global warming contributions, of course any single project will not tip us over one way or the other. It is about trajectory. To use two smoking analogies, the argument against smoking is not that the next cigarette will kill you, it is that smoking will kill many people in a population over a lifetime. More aptly in this case, the argument is that  Grand River Enterprises, a small Canadian cigarette concern, doesn’t contribute as much to smoking deaths as does Imperial Tobacco, so it is somehow different and okay.

    Every major fossil fuel commitment we make is a commitment we do not make to reducing consumption, or increasing renewable use. Every foreign policy/domestic policy decision we take to keep our dollar high to get maximum revenue from the tarsands to shareholders (not the population) is a commitment to not building renewable infrastructure, or spending money on energy efficiency. So, trajectories count, and that is the underlying message from Swart and Weaver.

    To finish it off, here’s the PhD Comics Science News Cycle, which is very apropos.

    PS: Is Weaver and the Tarsands a good band name?

    Update:

    Joe Romm of climate progress responds to the paper here, thanks @softgrasswalker

    And from comments, looks like Prof Weaver was on the CBC this morning, reprising his usual climate hawk self, will listen when they put the audio up.

    Here’s Prof. Weaver in the Huffington Post commenting on the study. More about this when I don’t have work to do.

    References:

    Swart, Neil C., and Andrew J. Weaver. “The Alberta oil sands and climate.” Nature Clim. Change advance online publication (February 19, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1421.

  • Obama seeks U.S. carbon emissions cap

    Byoliveridley

    President Barack Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to send him legislation that places a market-based cap on U.S. carbon polluting emissions and pushes the production of more renewable energy.

    In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama said that “to truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.

    Good, Canada will have to harmonize. Stephen Harper was last seen pretending that his “intensity based”” approach was just a “different” way of measuring emissions. You can say that speed and distance are just two ways of measuring travel!

    It is still early and we will see what the US congress can come up with, and what egregious exemptions and offsets it will provide for. Lobbying is already fast and furious. But the news emanating from Obama is promising on the climate change front.

  • U.S Plans new nuclear weapons

    Byoliveridley

    So, who’s going to bring this up at the security council? Will the U.S threaten itself? Are contingency plans being drawn for an attack? Will the U.S nuke Livermore? (that would take out Berkeley, that America hating bastion of communism as well!)

    Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – DOE Plans new Nuclear Bomb

    The Departments of Energy and Defense have selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to move ahead on a design for the nation’s first new nuclear warhead in almost two decades. Called the reliable replacement warhead (RRW), it is intended to replace or add to the current nuclear stockpile.

    The design will utilize technology not available during the Cold War, says Thomas D’Agostino, acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the part of DOE responsible for nuclear weapons. “This will permit significant upgrades in safety and security features in the replacement warhead that will keep the same explosive yields and other military characteristics as the current weapons,” he continues.

    Ah, the wonderful hypocrisy that is nuclear policy these days, lovely.

    Update: Iran may have Halted Nuclear Program (temporarily)

    VIENNA, Austria -Iran seems to have at least temporarily halted the uranium-enrichment program at the heart of its standoff with the U.N. Security Council, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday. The pause could represent an attempt to de-escalate Iran’s conflict with the Security Council, which is deliberating a new set of harsher sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

    Up is down, good is bad, right is wrong.