Category Archives: Big Picture

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Posted on November 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

Picture by Franke James. Her artwork is fabulous; please visit her site to see more. Her arts funding was cut earlier this year by the Harper government because her work criticizes Canada's actions on climate change.

Hallowe’en is over; Christmas begins. Soon–much sooner than most of us are prepared to think–Canadians will be wrapped in blankets on the couch cradling cups of hot cocoa or eggnog, watching reruns of one of the many versions of A Christmas Carol. We will empathize with Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim (or at least I think so–have I been misreading it all along?), and drown in a pleasant soup of good feelings at Scrooge’s annual transformation.

I find it puzzling, then, that we are as a nation so determined to emulate Scrooge in every way.

Take, for instance, this recent Globe and Mail piece, In Harper’s Canada, Will We Give More of Ourselves to Get Lower Taxes?

Umm, what? Translation: In Harper’s Canada, will we give more so we don’t have to give so much? A more absurd question could hardly be posed. If we as Canadians insist on giving less, what are the chances we will use the extra money to give more? Have any previous tax reductions resulted in an increase in charitable giving? As the author of the piece himself acknowledges, no: previous tax breaks have shredded our social net and, if anything, decreased our charitable giving.

“As Stephen Harper moves toward rewriting this country’s social contract, he presents each of us with a moral question.

“If we want lower taxes, are we prepared to give more of ourselves to others?”

In fact, as the article later makes clear, we aren’t being presented with any sort of moral question; the social contract is being rewritten bit by bit without any input from Canadians on the entirely faulty assumption, which we already know is faulty, that private donations will pick up the slack.* But of course people give less when the social safety net disappears: if there is nothing there to catch you when you and your family fall, you will keep every bit of extra for yourself (or spend it on fancy toys while you can–consumer debt has skyrocketed in this same period). By slashing social programs, each one of us is made meaner through fear.

Oh, but it gets worse: “But in an era where fiscally restrained governments confront rising need created by economic turmoil, the private sector must do more. And the private sector is each of us.”

Excuse me? The government is fiscally restrained? Then why on earth is tax reduction even on the table? Which is it: are we being asked to give more so we can be rewarded with a pat on the head via tax break, or are we being asked to give more because the government is out of money? If the government is out of money, the last thing they should be contemplating is tax breaks. We need to raise taxes.

At the same time that Canada is rewriting the social contract (i.e. eliminating our supposedly-costly safety net) for citizens–the ones who vote for them–we continue to subsidize private industry to the tune of many billions of dollars annually. According to a 2008 Kairos study, the federal government gave $8 billion dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas industry alone between 1996 and 2002. That’s a million dollars a day, according to Kairos. Meanwhile, studies show that these subsidies create no jobs because the industry is so heavily mechanized–our tax money buys them machines so they don’t have to hire workers.

Isn’t this supposed to be a free market economy? Don’t companies survive or fail based on their merit? Why are our children’s educations and the health of our planet’s climate being sacrificed via slashing social programs to keep bad companies afloat?

Worse again? In 2011, the federal government cut $222 million from Environment Canada’s annual budget, mostly affecting climate science positions and programmes, although that funding creates jobs and costs less than one year’s worth of oil and gas subsidies.

Do we have a fiscal problem? No: we have a priority problem. Canadians pay taxes (moreso than corporations; corporate tax rates in Canada in 2000 were 28%, and as of January 1 2012 will be 15%. Yes, boys and girls, they’ve fallen by almost half) to the federal government, who distributes them to large international corporations while crying poor when it comes to supporting individual Canadians. We transfer money from the people saving the earth to the ones wrecking it. We transfer money from the budget for crayon for our kids’ kindergarten classes to Exxon’s budget for buying earth movers.

Between 1994 and 2007, Canada gave $203,000,000,000 to bail out corporations. Two hundred and three billion dollars!** Are we poor, or are we rolling in cash?

Canada used to be a socially progressive country with a healthy safety net; for the past 20 years we’ve coasted on this reputation, though no nations but our own fall for it any longer. We undermine international climate negotiations, push tar sands oil into as many countries as we can for our own gain and damn the consequences, slash social programs while raising corporate welfare–in effect forcing Canadians to subsidize private industry, block the Robin Hood tax, cut arts funding and funding to charitable organizations, eliminate public funding for political parties (thereby cutting off any parties without corporate sponsorship at the knees), and force students to carry an ever-larger load of their own education costs–turning them into debt slaves for decades. Oh, but we still have quasi-universal health care and some of our jurisdictions now allow gay marriage. That’s great, Canada. Very impressive.

Canada is well on its way to becoming Victorian London, complete with smog, extreme poverty, female subservience, eradication of job security & rights for workers, usurious interest and crippling debt, and a sentimental and totally ineffective reliance on private charity to provide for the needs of individuals and families fallen on hard times. I guess we’re still missing those prisons & workhouses….

No, wait: Harper’s taking care of those, too.

~~~~~

*An American stat, just to complement the Canadian stat and show that this is not a uniquely Canadian phenomenon. Lower tax rates do not result in greater charitable giving. Period. Bury the idea, and move on.

**This lovely figure comes from a right-wing think tank, no less, and represents total corporate subsidies between all three levels of government.

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Ecology, Economy, and Ego

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

When spotted owls were threatened with extinction, we cried and passed laws. When whales were threatened with extinction, we screamed and wrote international treaties. Now, when polar bears are going extinct, we rage.*

But when bumblebees threaten extinction on us we panic.

Why?

Because what’s big, ultimately, is expendable. It’s what’s very very small that matters, ecologically speaking; our world belongs to the bugs, the worms, and mold. We are visitors only, and while we like to look down on the rest of the planet because it could never have been Shakespeare (as if you or I were ever capable of being Shakespeare either–but I digress), the fact is, Shakespeare could never have been, could never have breathed nor eaten nor grown, without the bacteria, decomposers, insects, and photosynthesizers that made it all possible. Not to mention all of the, you know, actors and set designers and stuff.

Polar bears are very cool, don’t get me wrong, I want to live in a world with polar bears. But if polar bears were to go extinct tomorrow, their ecosystems would hobble along until a new status quo establishes itself. Whereas if plankton disappear (and they might), every aquatic ecosystem on earth is toast.

I went down to Occupy Toronto at St. James Park last Saturday, just as they were setting up the tents and tarps. A sign reading “Abandon Greed, Kindness is Worthwhile” greeted me and stuck a goofy grin on my face that stayed all afternoon. People were smiling, friendly, laughing, playing guitars and singing in a rainy 10C. Two mics let people give short speeches to the crowds, and the diversity of speakers and opinions was heartening and lovely. Buy local! Find the love within! Let go of fear! Do God’s work and help the poor! Tax corporations! Remember we are already on occupied land; native rights are important too! Health care for all! Forgive student debts! Build wind and solar! Solve climate change! Stop pollution! Racism kills! Listen to my hip-hop song about the revolution! There’s flouride in the water! Stop buying crap!

Disorganized, yes, but my activist heart sings because all of these conversations ARE related and important and we’ve needed these disparate communities to sit down and talk to each other about how they’re related and how to fix it for at least fifty years. The same system that gives banks millions of dollars for depriving average folks of education and a home, while doing nothing to help those average people, is the same system that gives corporations inalienable rights to destroy the atmosphere and climate upon which human civilization depends. The same mechanisms that send some kids to Harvard and Yale send other kids to the army or jail. That 1% on top doesn’t just depend on corrupt government (but hey, it doesn’t hurt); it also depends on sexism, racism, environmental degradation and externalities, cheap foreign labour and globalization, debt slavery, fossil fuels, and, yes, the internalized terror that keeps most of us from doing more than making a largely futile x on a piece of paper every four or five years. (“Why don’t you just vote!” the columnists scold. “Has it occured to you that we’ve tried that and it hasn’t worked out particularly well!” we reply.) It’s all related. No meaningful solutions will come until all sides have come together and discussed the common sources of their problems.

Regardless:

As with ecology, so with the economy: the big need the small. The charismatic carnivores of the economic system–billionaires, millionaires, banks, and in a global sense much of the first world–intimately rely on and cannot function without the producers and decomposers–mothers, teachers, janitors, manufacturers of clothing, farmers, plumbers, etc. The charismatic carnivores have done a pretty good job of convincing the rest of us that we need them–their money, their ‘jobs,’ their ‘investments,’ their continued presence gracing our lucky countries–but nothing could be further from the truth. They need us.

If every CEO on earth vanished tomorrow, how would it affect your life? Now imagine a world tomorrow without waste collectors, truck drivers and electricians. Our society could not function. The 2009 garbage strike in Toronto brought the city to its knees.

Generally speaking, your contribution to society is in inverse relationhip to the size of your paycheque. If, as a mother, your paycheque is $0, congratulations: you are truly indispensable and will, as a partial reward, spend your lifetime hearing about how your personal choice should in no way affect anyone else’s tax share and, by the way, please keep the brats out of any restaurant where you order at a table from a menu.

Every so often, literal charismatic carnivores wipe out the underpinnings of their own species by devouring their prey to near extirpation. The prey population collapses, then the predator population collapses, then both rebound, and balance is restored. Again, as with ecology, so with the economy: every so often the charismatic carnivores devour the underpinnings of their prosperity by pushing the working class to the point of collapse; but human beings, being human, generally respond by fighting back and swiping a few fangs from the carnivores’ mouths. And you get slave revolts. Class warfare. The civil rights movement. Feminism. The anarchist rebellion in Spain. The Magna Carta. The American Revolution. The Arab Spring. You get Occupy Wall Street and its many, many derivatives. Whenever the very small (economically speaking) remember that the rich need us, but we don’t need them.**

Just like bears need bumblebees, but bumblebees could manage just fine without the bears.

~~~~~

* Please note that all of these species are still facing extinction. We’ve been enormously unsuccessful at rescuing our victims.

**Not a plea for the extinction of the rich, just for a little mutual perspective and humility.

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Thanksgiving

Posted on October 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

This has been a good couple of weeks to be a leftie, eh?

Occupy Wall Street just keeps growing–and I wish them much luck and the donation of several outdoor heaters, because I’m sure it’s getting cold in NYC at night. Watching the march and the protests online Wednesday evening (you really don’t need cable for anything important) was amazing.

I tried to explain to Frances what was going on, and why they were angry, and how it all happened (“Well, see, some people at the banks did some really bad things and it got the whole economy in trouble–the “economy” is all of the things that people buy and sell put together–so the banks were fine but regular people lost their homes and jobs and a lot of them in America don’t have the money for food and medicine any more. So they are all getting together so they can talk to the government about changing it, because they are very angry and very scared”). She stared at them for a while, and asked, “Why are they all yelling? It’s making a lot of noise,” and then sat down with her stuffed brown squirrel toy and tried to explain to him why some squirrels hate black squirrels, and why they shouldn’t.

“Squirrel racism,” I said. “Yes,” she replied.

“Did they talk to the government yet?” she asked me later. “Did they win?”

“Umm, not quite yet. They’ve been out there for a few weeks already and will probably be out there for a while longer.”

The green movements have signed on, the labour unions are joining in–this is good stuff. Rumours are going around that the White House may actually not allow the Keystone pipeline after all–this after Transcanada has already started mowing up endangered habitats in preparation, for which they are being sued.

You can just picture me madly waving my little green flag over in the corner, cheering.

Meanwhile, in Canada–the Tories aren’t getting the Ontario majority they’d banked on just six months ago. I’m writing this on Thursday, before any of the results are in, so I’m being cocky but:

Ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I’ve wanted to do work that would make the world a better place. Now, when I was five, I wanted to follow in the family tradition and be a missionary–this does not work as well when you’ve left the Church.

I went to University for Environment and Resource studies, never really expecting it to lead to a job that earned more than $20k/year (remember this was 1994), but I didn’t care. I was prepared to be broke pretty much forever if only I could make a difference on issues I cared about. That I graduated and found work that paid relatively well (not fabulous, but when your expectations are poverty-level it takes little to exceed them) surprised no one more than me–but the work itself was uninspiring. The whole system seemed set up to prevent the kind of meaningful changes we all knew needed to be made: environmental assessments focus on trivial projects over those with real impacts, so I spent my time writing screening reports for bridge repairs over drainage ditches or posting signs or building fences; government silos and committee culture mean it takes years to come to the slightest bit of agreement on anything, by which time there’s an election and a new government and you start over from scratch; too much consulting work is focused on how to mitigate a project rather than evaluate whether or not it should proceed. It’s disheartening.

A few years ago, I cracked into freelance journalism by writing articles about renewable energy–solar and wind. I dug deep into the academic literature, as I had access to academic libraries at the time; I interviewed the experts and activists on both sides; I read reports and checked their footnotes and references back through three or four levels to figure out exactly what was said by who when based on what evidence; and concluded that anti-renewable sentiment was based on a large steaming pile of crap. For the articles I wrote, I was paid the princely sum of $50. Freelance journalism does not pay well, at least not in Canada, not when you’re starting out–but it wasn’t about the money.

Then the Liberals passed the Green Energy Act, the FIT program started, and I saw a job posting for a management position working on renewable energy approvals–and I jumped at it, and here I am. Living in my lovely small town with my daughter who is as happy as I’ve ever seen her, doing work every day that makes the world better, cooler, safer for my daughter. I even get paid more than $20k/year to do it, though it was a pay cut from the government job. (Worth it, too.) Then the provincial Tories turned wind energy into a political football and we got kicked around for a year for votes, and wondered what would happen on October 7 if they cancelled the GEA and FIT program as promised with all those big leads they had in the polls….

But here we are. The program is safe, for now, and I get to keep working hard every day to make the world a meaningfully better place.

So thank you, Ontario. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will be spending this Thanksgiving weekend feeling very grateful indeed–because what I have, right now, is all I ever really wanted.

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Global Psychologists for Sane Policy

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

I'll bet you this housefly-sized frog knows better

Hello, and welcome to my new think tank.

On Monday, 117 people were arrested for standing on the wrong patch of a paved, public area in Ottawa, Ontario, after trying to access their democratically-elected government.

Meanwhile in Alberta, an undisclosed number of tar-sands executives furthered environmentally-destructive projects that will ultimately kill Canadians via smog and others globally via climate change, and furthered the collapse of Canada’s international reputation, and are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the accomplishment. (Information on salaries at the upper-levels is hard to come by, but a high-school grad working labour in the field makes $00,000-200,000/year. You’ve got to figure their bosses are earning a lot more.)

You know what? That’s just fucking nuts, and I don’t need to be a trained psychologist to say so.

And neither do you!

It got me to thinking–if the bad guys can do it, so can we, right? I mean, a mechanical engineer headed up the Global Climate Coalition; the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK is an anti-wind front group funded by wealthy landowners living close to proposed wind projects and staffed by non-experts with a long pedigree on anti-wind activism; the Greening Earth Society was a front of the Western Fuels Association–no bias there–with a bunch of coal industry expats on board; Fred Singer headed up the Science and Environmental Policy Project which had as its chair the very same Frederick Seitz who churned out the misleading “science” on the health effects of tobacco for a couple of decades, convincing millions that cigarrettes wouldn’t kill them.

And yet they write up their tidy little press releases on attractive letterhead and sign it very officially, “So-and-So, Head, Made Up Front Group for Coal Lobby,” and the press, pressed for time and apparently none too skeptical these days, runs it. Without comment, without interpretation, without investigation, thus leading the public to believe that the Global Climate Coalition, for example, could correctly distinguish the climate from a kitchen grease-fire.

I have exactly the same credentials in psychology as they have in climate science: which is to say, I’ve read a bunch of pop psychology books, I know some psychologists, I have many excellent and wonderful friends who have been through the psychiatric wringer (irony: those who are actually nuts appear to be universally worth knowing, except for the psychopaths and narcissists; so when did the term become derogatory?). I have subscriptions to psychological magazines. No, I’m not a psychologist, but do you need to be a psychologist to know that it’s completely bananas that our society would rather drive our cars off a cliff than stop driving? That we won’t for the love of the holy trinity touch the sacred treasures of the super-rich for fear of the impacts on the Mighty God of the Economy, but we’ll gladly wrest bread from the mouths of hungry children without apparent reflection that their parents probably, you know, bought that bread, so reducing their ability to buy bread may also not be so great for the GDP? Do I need psychological training to know that there is something fundamentally broken in the brain of anyone who can state with a straight face that since it isn’t entirely politically expedient at this exact moment to ask people to pay the true cost of the things they buy since they’re so used to deep deep discounts that they might revolt, so the global carbon cycle’s just going to have to sit tight and wait until we feel like dealing with CO2?

I don’t think I do.

I think I can safely say that this is crazy.

For the love of Prozac, according to climate experts and scientists, western industrialized nations have until 2020-2025 to decarbonize. That’s not “stabilize carbon emissions” or “reduce carbon emissions by x% below 1990 levels,” that’s “STOP EMITTING ALL CARBON COMPLETELY, FOREVER.” That’s nine years, give or take, and that doesn’t save the climate, it just gives us 66% odds of avoiding complete catastrophe. And the government of Canada, god love ‘em, has approved a new coal plant to be commissioned in 2015.

That is fucking nuts.

Oh, but it is a marginally cleaner coal plant that will pollute about as a much as natural gas plant–and we fully expect the global climate, apparently, to pat us on the head, give us an A for effort, and let us off the hook.

So. Welcome to the Global Psychologists for Sane Policy. I am your Host and Head, Chief Diagnosticator of Official and Institutional Stupidity. Please join me. It’s not hard. All you have to do is hurl epithets at world leaders and corporate masterminds running the planet into the ground for a measly thirty pieces of silver, and you probably do this already. If you’d like I’ll give you a title and you can make it more official-sounding.

Because it’s all well and good to stick to the moral high ground, especially since if sea levels keep rising, the moral high ground may be all that’s above water. But ultimately 8 billion people aren’t going to fit on the mountain peaks, so let’s do our part to keep the moral low ground dry too, eh?

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New Year’s Resolution

Posted on January 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

And I make no apologies

Hey, I have an idea: this year, let’s save the world.

Oh I know, we’ve promised to before, but this time, let’s really do it.

Let’s get off our comfortable asses and decide to put real money and effort into climate change.

Let’s get that using  a tonne of metal and litres of gasoline to ferry one person and their shopping bags around for maximum personal convenience is a historical accident, not an inalienable human right. Let’s  start doing stuff ourselves again, like walking to the store, opening cans, sweeping floors, and shoveling snow. Let’s start using calories, not coal.

Let’s realize that a hundred years ago, people lived happy and fulfilling lives with three outfits, two pairs of shoes, no televisions or computers or cell phones, in a 1000-square foot house without a garage. The rest of this stuff we keep stuffing our lives with is fun and it triggers all kinds of happy chemicals in our heads, but those chemicals are fleeting and then we are left with the debt and the environmental burden. Let’s distinguish needs from wants, and learn how to say no to ourselves. We are not toddlers. We will not die from the  disappointment nor throw temper tantrums at the mall.

Let’s believe that a growth economy is not the only way to prosperity for all, that it doesn’t work on a finite planet and we may as well begin figuring out how to wind it down now, before it crashes into the twin walls of the Laws of Physics and biospheric collapse.

Let’s save the world! Let’s prioritize our health, our savings, our time, our happiness and, yes, our environment over the GDP and our personal acquisition scorecard.

Sound good? Who’s with me? For a New Year’s Resolution it’s hard to beat.

Excellent! Now that we’ve got that settled….

I only have one New Year’s Resolution for myself this year, and it’s goofy and saccharine and not specifically environmental, so you don’t get to read it here. But you could probably guess that I absolutely intend to get some wind energy projects built this year.

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Is it 2011 already?

Posted on January 11, 2011 | 2 Comments

Light in the distance

It is. If the calendar tells the truth, it is about 2.5% of the way through 2011, no less, and I’m just getting around to saying hello. (Hello, 2011!)

2010 was a great year for me and my family, and an interesting year for the environment in Ontario. My daughter and I moved to a lovely little town where I got a great job doing exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do, and if anyone ever tells you that your job is unrelated to your happiness and you can learn to be happy with any old job if you only have the right attitude, don’t believe them. Then, punch them in the nose. Yes, some people can, but some people can walk tightropes slung between hundred-story office towers, and we’re not all expected to follow in those footsteps, are we?

My daughter is going to a lovely school with a teacher she adores and has a bunch of wonderful friends who live on her street, which is pretty much seven-year-old nirvana. We have a two-minute walk to her school and I have a fifteen-minute walk to my office, and getting rid of the commute has made a huge difference, too. Plus, I walk to work through a park.

You’re jealous, and that’s ok. Did I mention the little grocery store that sells local, organic food, or the local, organic butcher, both a five-minute walk from my office? No? I’ll stop. 2010 was a really good year for us.

It was more of a mixed blessing for the environment in Ontario, at least from the perspective of this project manager in wind energy. Plus: We have a Green Energy Act and there are proposed wind projects all over the province! Minus: if Tim Hudak’s conservatives are elected this fall, they may stay “proposed” indefinitely if he fills a pre-election promise to can FIT and put a moratorium on wind.* Plus: The GEA’s regulations are getting better and the process is coming into focus. Minus: That didn’t happen until late fall 2010, which isn’t so great for planning field work and getting the process complete in time for the Commercial Operation Date deadlines. Plus: David Miller in Toronto put a $0.05 fee on plastic bags, which had a dramatic impact on their consumption. Minus: Rob Ford was elected, and he’s promising to scrap it. Plus: Ontario actually shut down four coal generators–the first jurisdiction in North America and one of the first in the world to be able to do so, partially as a result of new green energy construction.

Apparently Ontario’s coal shut-down is the largest climate-change mitigation project in North America. Eat your heart out, California.

More narrowly for wind energy, 2010 was a year of tremendous growth as the Ontario Power Authority approved 1530 contracts under the Feet-In Tariff program.** If they all go ahead, that would make 1530 MW of new wind generation, equivalent to >3 of Ontario’s coal generating stations. It thrills me to be involved in that.

More in line with the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” is 2011′s election and its potential to change, upset, or derail all of those wind projects. Here’s hoping Hudak is just pandering for votes with a promise he has no intention of delivering on–I’m not sure how he could, anyway–or even better, that he loses. The end of the world, Dear Readers, is no time to be aiming for the Lowest Common Denominator and promising negligible tax breaks in exchange for a future of ecological and economic ruin.

Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before. See: Easter Island.

Working in the environmental field does not often give one grounds for cheery optimism. Most often, one is trying to squeeze lemonade from rotting limes: “Hey, so Copenhagen didn’t work out. We still have a few years left to mitigate climate change to the point where only millions people will die this century from climate change. We can do it!” This year–though we are still very much in rotting-limes-t0-lemonade territory–I felt optimistic about environmental progress and my role in it for the first time in many, many years. We are actually building enough renewable energy to shut down coal. It can be done. And I can help do it.

And so can you, by knowing enough not to be duped by cynical politicians who will tell you that it can’t.

~~~

*Note: Those bulldozed municipalities were, in the main, quite happy for the province to take over that decision-making function when they passed the GEA because the municipalities wanted to approve the wind farms but politically it was too difficult. They may be making a lot of noise now about how unfair it is, mostly to appease their constituents, but I’m not sure they actually want the authority back.

** 58 of which are for wind, and 10 of which I am managing under REA. Good god.

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Six Months In to the Green Energy Act and Ontario Regulation 359/09

Posted on November 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

An excellent vantage point, but not much of a view.

The most exciting part of working under a new piece of legislation is that no one, and that includes the people who wrote it, knows what it means yet.

So far what it means is a whole lot more work under a process that was meant to streamline things–but never mind. The learning curve is so steep we’re using grappling hooks and pulleys to climb it.

Ontario, you may remember, had that horrendous summer blackout in 2003, along with most of the northeastern United States. That blackout resulted in part from decades of mismanagement of Ontario’s electricity system: no new construction to keep pace with the exponential growth in population or demand, or to replace aging and fragile generation or interconnection infrastructure. You know how your cell phone can burn out in about six months? And a toaster or a kettle will work for a couple of years, maybe a decade? Our electricity infrastructure also has a shelf life, and in order to keep the cost of Ontario’s electricity to consumers artificially low, for decades, successive governments did absolutely nothing about it.*

We import electricity from elsewhere, which would be fine if the transmission system were up to date and functioning well, but it isn’t. A lot of the electricity we import is coal-generation, and while Ontario has an abundance of hydro power thanks to our large rivers, it is tapped out. Moreover, old-style hydro generation has enormous environmental costs. If you’ve ever had any concerns about the impacts of wind turbines on birds, consider that fish cannot swim around water turbines.

Anyway. Basically, despite our huge hydro capacity, we depend on coal generation transmitted through an ageing and faltering system, leaving us vulnerable to blackouts and problems with supply and killing hundreds of Ontarians each year** from air pollution. Conservation is huge. It has by far the greatest potential contribution to our energy woes. We should absolutely conserve as much as we can, and due to our conservation efforts (plus the recession) Ontario’s electricity demand was the lowest in 2009 since 1997.

BUT.

But.

Conservation alone will not allow us to turn those coal plants off.

And we need to turn the coal plants off, because they’re killing people. Not to mention destroying the environment via global climate change.

In order to turn the coal plants off, we need new, non-polluting electricity generation. We need it NOW. Actually, we need it fifteen years ago. But it didn’t happen fifteen years ago, in part because a) renewable electricity doesn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile to build, and b) the Environmental Assessments required to get permission to build it took too long and were too expensive.*** The Green Energy Act attempted to fix the former by establishing Feed-In Tariffs, or fixed rates for electricity produced by various renewable means (for large-scale wind, the price is $0.135/kwh), over 20 year contracts. Ontario Regulation 359/09 attempted to fix the latter by creating the Renewable Energy Approval process, meant to streamline and simplify Environmental Assessments. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way, but that’s a post for another day.

If you read the newspapers, and in particular the National Post and Toronto Sun, which seem to make careers out of taking potshots at anything anybody else does without ever proposing solutions of their own, you’ll read–frequently, and perhaps daily–about how we can’t afford the FIT rates for electricity. In fact, we can’t afford not to. This is counter-intuitive, I know–why is $0.056/kwh for coal too expensive, and $0.135/kwh for wind dirt cheap?

Because coal doesn’t cost $0.056/kwh.

(And nuclear doesn’t cost $0.086/kwh–this one easily dismissed, since that lovely stranded debt charge that shows up every month on your hydro statement relates directly to the substantial cost over-runs of Ontario’s current nuclear fleet. In fact last year when the Ontario government tried to commission new private nuclear investment, they found that no company was willing to undertake it for close to what the government planned to pay.)

Because coal kills workers. Thousands of people die every year from mining, transporting, refining and burning coal at power plants–69 in 2007 in the United States alone. You don’t pay for that. Meanwhile China is bragging that “only” 2,631 people died in their coal mines in 2009. I could not uncover a global statistic, but you can believe the total number of people who die just from the coal mining–not including black lung disease, not including injuries, not including refining, processing, transporting and burning–is substantial. And, for you, the end consumer, free!

Because coal sickens and kills Ontarians. We pay billions of dollars every year in health care costs for people with asthma–doctor and hospital visits, prescription drugs, lost days at work and school. And hundreds of those people will die, many of them children. A 2004 study by Daniel Kammen & Sergio Pacca, published in the Annual Review of Environmental Resources, found that when deaths and illnesses were factored in to the price of coal-fired generation, the price per kilowatt hour was fifty cents. That is ten times what you pay. Again–forty-five cents worth per kilowatt hour of injury, illness, disease and mortality is, for you, the end consumer, free.**** (Or so you think.)

Air pollution doesn’t just trigger asthma, it causes asthma. A recent well-publicized study shows that decreased smoking in Canada over the past few decades has led to a decrease in asthma among Canada’s children. Smoking is not the only form of air pollution that causes asthma. Outdoor athletes are far more likely to suffer from asthma than indoor couch potatoes, contrary to what you might assume, because they are far more exposed to air pollution.

Coal mining, refining and burning destroys the environment. The tops of mountains are blasted off. Rivers are filled with toxic sludge. Entire forests disappear. You don’t pay for any of that on your hydro bill–but you should.

You do not pay for the carbon output of coal on your hydro bill. Your kids get to pay that one, in the form of a dangerous climate.

The price of coal-fired electricity on your hydro bill reflects only a tiny percentage of the actual cost. It is heavily, absurdly subsidized by all levels of government, in order to placate consumers. You pay for coal-fired electricity in your hydro bill, and also in your tax support to Health Canada, the Ministry of Health, Environment Canada, to the Ministry of Environment, to the Ministry of Natural Resources, to your local Public Health Unit, and on and on. You just don’t know how much.

At $0.0135/kwh for wind, you are paying for everything. That cost reflects the total, as it factors in the environmental assessment and any requried post-construction mitigation for impacts to wildlife. There is no mining, no processing, no transporting, and no burning.  No one dies in a Wind Mine accident. No explosions. No blasted mountaintops, no ruined rivers. No kids in the hospital with asthma. No deaths. No hospital visits. No smog advisories. No kids kept inside on beautiful sunny days because the air will hurt them. And no ruined climate jeapordizing the future of human civilization.

All of that is included in the 13.5c/kwh for wind projects in Ontario under the FIT program.

It’s a bargain.

~~~~~

*This is like keeping your housing costs down by refusing to fix the leaky roof; in the long term, you won’t just need to replace the roof, but the walls, the floors, and all your stuff, from water damage. The motivation is clear enough: Ontario and nearby provinces and states were manufacturing powerhouses; keeping electricity prices low was a way to compete for factories and jobs. This has backfired and needs to be addressed–not least because it didn’t work, and caused Ontario to lag behind jurisdictions with higher electricity prices in both standard of living and productivity.

**249 in Ontario in 2009, despite our coal electricity generation being at the lowest level since 1945

***Ask anyone in the business of renewable energy how they feel about needing to conduct expensive, multi-year environmental assessments to build solar- or wind-farms to SAVE the planet when private developers can slap up a subdivision or an office tower without so much as a by-your-leave, when office towers are the leading cause of human-related death for migratory birds and both represent colossal wastes of energy and resources.

**** Their study found that the total price of wind was less than ten cents/kwh with human health costs factored in.

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Posted in Big Picture, Lake Erie Lowlands

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Good Stories, Damned Good Stories, and Statistics

Posted on October 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

I dated three Michaels in highschool. The first, a really sweet boy, moved to Las Vegas on three days’ notice when his parents illegally backed out of a real estate contract. The second, whom I barely remember, went to Hong Kong for the summer and never came back. And the third, another sweet boy who may or may not have been a criminal but that’s another story, either died or went to jail or disappeared, but in any case all his contact information broke one day and I never heard from him again. From this, I reasonably concluded that I am a Michael Curse, and regardless of what happens in my personal life, there is one thing I know for sure: I will never date a Michael again.*

In which I’ve done everything I criticize climate skeptics and anti-wind activists of doing, although with drastically less negative impact: I connected a series of factual events into a plausible narrative, thus making one hell of a story, and came to a wholly ridiculous conclusion.

~~~

Fact: 2009 was a colder-than-average year in Ontario
Fact: Some climate scientists at a well-known university don’t like each other, and discuss this on email.
Fact: In the 1970s, a minority of climatologists thought that the greenhouse effect might trigger an Ice Age–though this was never a common viewpoint, it got a whole lot of press.

Plausible Narrative: Climatologists are incompetent, bumbling idiots determined to repress The Truth, which is that global warming isn’t happening, or it would always be warmer everywhere.

Ridiculous Conclusion: Climate change isn’t happening. Or, if you prefer your Ridiculous Conclusions flavoured with a dash of Conspiracy Theory, it’s a plot of the UN to force a worldwide socialist government on us all, and it is up to all freedom-loving citizens to resist!

~~~

Fact: Wind energy generators under the new GEA may earn 13.5 c/kwh for their electricity.
Fact: Birds and bats often fatally collide with wind turbines.
Fact: Residential energy consumers in Ontario currently pay approximately 5.6 c/kwh for their electricity.

Plausible Narrative: It’s all a bunch of furriners coming into our wonderful province to jack up electricity prices so they can make a killing, while our democractically elected provincial government colludes with them by dragging our hard-earned coins directly from our pockets, and it’s all a scam because it doesn’t help the environment anyway!

Ridiculous Conclusion: Rise Up!

~~~

It’s possible that you don’t see the problem with the above two examples. Human minds are pattern-seeking missiles, after all, and if those facts are all you know, then the obvious pattern might seem like an inescapable conclusion. So here’s a less technical example:

Fact: Many species of birds fly south from Canada to Central or South America in the late summer or early fall of every year.
Fact: At the end of October, Canadian children dress up in terrifying costumes and go door-to-door demanding candy.

Plausible Narrative: Migratory songbirds are scared of witches.

In order for your pattern-seeking missile to explode so completely at the wrong target, you have to believe that you already know everything–that there are no further facts that might explain the situation in another way. That everything to be learned is available for free on the internet. That there is no value to the expertise gained in specialized education or work experience. I’m tempted to say that you need to be dull and incurious, never asking “why” after having leapt once to the wrong conclusion, and satisfied entirely by stories that paint those who disagree with you as villains, crooks, liars, and worse.

You may be asking yourself why I’m so convinced that my pattern-seeking missile is better at finding the target than yours, and that’s an excellent question. The answer is, it’s not, except that in my areas of expertise I’ve learned enough to correct course more efficiently, and have been wrong often enough to know that before you detonate, you have to ask yourself one not-so-simple question:

If you run your Plausible Narrative through the Scientific Method, does it come out looking more like stainless steel or hamburger?

~~~~~

*There may be reasons other than the Michael Curse why this is so.

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Plus ca change

Posted on September 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

It took me forever to get out to the woods today. I missed Frances, and I missed the boyfriend. And, I came to realize, I missed my old pond, near my old house in North York. I wanted deeply to just put on my shoes and head out the door for a long walk in a natural setting without needing to drive or bike first, and I wanted to end up at a pond and putter around it for an hour or so, looking at frogs and wildflowers and herons and ducks. I wanted to sit at the bend of the Don, on the big boulders, where the current continually tosses up one perfect cowlick of froth. I wanted to hear the water thundering over the stones, and then go into the woods and stare at the trunks where generations of woodpeckers had hollowed out a dozen homes for other small creatures.

old-style sacred grove

And because I couldn’t have it, I nearly didn’t go out at all. But then forced myself into the car and down to Webster’s Falls, a favourite of mine, where you can clamber out right onto the stones where the river rushes over the edge, and it feels ludicrously dangerous and safe as houses, both at once. It was packed today. Two weddings and at least a hundred other people besides, on the waterfall, the bridge, and the trail down below. Not quite the thing when you want to sulk, you know.

The trail down to the bottom of the waterfall (packed) led to a trail beside the river (not packed); I followed it for the first time. Not quite as civilized, in the best way: no rails, no stairs, no paving. Lots of dirt. Lots of clambering over fallen trees and up or down root-stairs, on wet rocks, or through small trickling creeks. Lots of measured steps where the earth fell away on one side, and the path sloped towards it. An hour and a half or so along this river, thinking, thank god I got myself out of the house today.

new-style sacred grove

It was in every way better than the old river. Waterfalls every twenty or thirty feet. Boulders at the water’s edge one can lie on–and not gabion baskets or erosion boulders but “natural” boulders likely dragged there by glaciers millennia ago. Forests stretching away on either side up the escarpment, lovely old trees spaciously filtering the sunlight through leaves showing the first traces of fall colour. Trunks straight and slim as temple columns. And thinking, every so often as I stopped to take in the view–slopes covered with spread-out tree trunks, the light streaking in high above through the leaves, the palpable hush–that there might be something biological to the calm and reverence those views inspire.

I especially like the way the branches meet in a nicely arched canopy.

Because it’s the same view seen in temple and cathedral architecture worldwide: columns, spaces, high ceilings, filtered light. I wondered if, for thousands of years, we haven’t been building our sacred architecture as highly stylized stone forests with glass leaves.

At first I thought that must be why a walk through the woods always makes me feel better–peaceful, aware, stronger, more alive. But then I thought, no, that’s backwards.

That’s why people always feel better in churches. Because they look like forests.

~~~~~

Absolutely none of these photos are mine. I take no credit for them. They are lovely, though, aren’t they?

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Posted in Big Picture, Prose & Poetry

Tagged , , ,

“Flowers”

Posted on June 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

apple blossoms

When I can’t sleep, I sew.

I don’t necessarily sew well, mind, since the type of exhaustion that being sleepless at 3:00 am brings is typically not conducive to straight, even stitches and the proper use of scissors. But there’s something meditative, quiet and not-electronic about midnight sewing that makes insomnia more bearable, so when I can’t sleep, I sew.

Last night, before I finally fell asleep around 5:30, I worked on a small coin purse I’m putting together out of denim from an old pair of jeans and various fabric scraps, appliqued on in the shape of flowers. Or, I should say, in the five-blobbed round that we typically think of as flower-shaped, though off the top of my head last night/early this morning I couldn’t think of a single flower shaped that way.

buttercups

Dandelions? No. Daisies? No. Tulips, daffodills, irises? No, no, no. Geraniums, marigolds, lilacs, Queen Anne’s Lace, trilliums, thistles, clover, snapdragons, apple blossoms, columbines, jack-in-the-pulpits, coneflowers, sunflowers, roses, lilies? No.

At 3:00, and then at 4:00 and 5:00, I wondered if there were any North American flowers shaped like a five-blob round. I couldn’t think of a single one. And I wondered, is that what we think flowers look like because we never see actual flowers anymore? Do we reduce every visual scribble or doodle of Flower to this one shape because we don’t know any better? Have our mental representations of flowers become so notional through disuse that, when we think “flower,” we think “kindergarten drawing, supported by a green stick with a narrow, veined green leaf”?

forget-me-nots

How depressing.

After two insufficient hours of sleep I did manage to think of a few: apple blossoms, buttercups, forget-me-nots, and others among them; though the colours, clusters, textures and so on still show both more variety and specificity than our portrayals of them.

A hundred years ago, built human spaces must have been such a relief for most people. Outside all day every day you were surrounded by the not-human, by spaces we didn’t make, species we didn’t control, in landscapes we didn’t form. Imagine to come into a human-built house at the end of such a day, the sense of openness it must have brought. But now? We spend almost our entire lives in human-built and human-controlled environments, trying desperately to eradicate those last little bits of non-human nature that poke through–we call them “weeds” and “pests.” Now it is the human environments that cause us stress, that burn us out and break us down and send us out to spaces we don’t (yet, totally) control for a sense of freedom and escape. Now that we’ve lost all meaningful contact with non-human nature, to the point where when we think of flowers our first thought is not of the actual flowers that evolved and beautified this space for millennia before we got here, but of the artless lopsided blob shapes we drew in kindergarten.

knapweed? wild bergamot? I don't know, but it's not a five-blobbed round

It’s not that the coin purse I’m making is bad. It’s not. It’s colourful, it’s cute, it’s a good use of leftover materials, it’s fun to put together. It’s just that it’s kind of hobbled and impoverished, too. It says “nature” through such hackneyed images that they have lost all context or connection with the nature they’re trying to represent.

I thought, I can do better.

I will, too. I have an idea. After the coin purse, and probably after the move.

I think you can do better too.

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Posted in Big Picture