One of the reasons why humanity ought to move beyond coal as a source of energy is because coal mining is such a dangerous and unpleasant undertaking. Large numbers of people die every year from accidents and from lung disease, and many more experience serious but non-fatal health consequences.
This photo series from Boston.com does an excellent job of showing what coal mining does on a human scale.
This video from NASA shows temperature data from 1880 to 2011:
NASA has determined that 2011 was the 9th hottest year on record, and that 9 out of the 10 hottest years have happened since 2000.
This post provides more information.
This is encouraging: U.S. CO2 emissions to stay below 2005 levels as coal use shrinks
Yesterday’s State of the Union address was disappointing.
Obama went on and on about the potential of shale gas – ignoring the way in which burning it contributes to cumulative emissions and therefore to climate change. He only mentioned ‘climate change’ to say that he doesn’t think Congress will do anything about it.
Obama is forgetting that if the world does experience dangerous, abrupt, or runaway climate change, he will be remembered as a failure, along with the other leaders from this era. They will be remembered as the people who totally failed to understand the biggest problem of the era, and who did nothing useful about it.
The volume is probably tiny compared to the amount of pollution produced from the oil being mined, but it is interesting to note that oil sands companies in Alberta are now transporting so many people by air:
Call it Air Oil Sands. Industry giant Suncor Energy Inc. alone moves enough people that it would rank somewhere between Canada’s `10th- and 12th-largest airline. Several oil sands companies operate fully functional airports, complete with baggage handlers, and have filled out employment rosters with pilots and mechanics. One airplane charter outfit engaged in oil sands work is bringing in new airplanes so fast it doesn’t have time to paint them before they start flying workers.
The article says that it costs $42,000 to air-commute one person to the oil sands – arguably another demonstration of the boomtown logic at work in Fort McMurray today.
By all indications, the choices we are making about climate change and energy now have the effect of selling out the interests of future generations, in exchange for greater wealth during the next few years. This connects to the central conflict of interest created by climate change: the disjoint between the interests of those who burn fossil fuels and those who suffer from the pollution that behaviour creates. All indications from the political system suggest that people will continue to undermine the interests of their own children and grandchildren, where doing so is personally financially beneficial to them.
Earlier, I brought up a radical proposal to align the interests of the elite with those of future generations. Unfortunately, no such proposal has any chance of success, because elites are highly influential and members of future generations are nothing but powerless victims.
Perhaps one way reduce the strength of the intergenerational conflict of interest is to adjust the voting system so that those who will experience more of the consequences of climate change have more of an ability to vote. Specifically, votes could be weighted so that those of younger people count for a bit more while those of older people count for less.
Each person could start with one guaranteed vote. Younger people could then be credited with additional partial votes, to represent their greater personal interest in the choices being made today. If we assume that people in Canada live to be about 80, that means someone who is 50 today is likely to live until about 2042. Somebody who is 20 today, by contrast, is likely to live until 2072. The amount of climate change experienced by the 20-year-old is likely to be substantially greater. They will also live longer with the consequences of all the other related choices we made: from designing electricity and transport infrastructure to managing conflict internationally.
One way to implement this idea would be to give everyone 1 vote, plus an additional 1/100th of a vote for every year they are likely to live (based on the simplification that everyone will live to be about 80). Someone who is 20 would therefore get their 1 vote, plus 0.6 additional votes to represent how long they will be on the planet. Someone who is 70 would only get 1 vote plus 0.1 additional votes.
Usually, the older someone gets, the worse the alignment is between their interests and the interests of society as a whole. (This is obvious in areas like health care, where those who are dying have every interest in unlimited public funding being devoted to keeping them alive.) Actually, this is a more general problem. An employee who knows he will be quitting in two weeks has little or no interest in the long-term health of the company. A tourist who is leaving a country in a couple of days has little interest in its long term health. Those who have little time left on the planet have every personal reason to support the pillage of the natural world, if it means their remaining time will be more prosperous and comfortable.
The young, by contrast, will be forced to live with the choices we make, right or wrong. If we do too little about climate change, they will suffer from all of the effects of that choice. Similarly, if we actually end up doing too much about climate change – scrapping too much fossil fuel infrastructure and building too much renewable energy capacity – it is the young people of today who will live poorer lives because of it.
The idea of weighing votes by age, even if it is philosophically and ethically defensible, is probably politically impossible. Older people are richer and more involved in the political process. They seriously outgun young people who are struggling to develop personal financial security and who are largely uninterested in voting. It may also be faulty to assume that young people will vote with their own long-term interests in mind. They may prove just as narrowly self-interested as older people have been. Instead of seeing policies developed that will encourage the emergence of a decent world for everyone in 2050 or 2100, they may just support policies that make the world of 2012 a little bit better for them personally.
The Obama administration has officially rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline! That is the pipeline that prompted me to travel to Washington D.C. this summer to volunteer at the protests.
The rejection of the pipeline is good news for many reasons.
By rejecting pipelines, the jurisdictions around Alberta can slow the development of the oil sands and reduce the total quantity of fossil fuels that will be burned. These pipelines are also a major investment in an inappropriate technology. Canada needs to be working on developing a decarbonized economy, not encouraging unlimited growth in the unsustainable business of extracting fuels from the oil sands.
President Obama will probably lose a few votes over this decision, particularly from people who think oil is still the future of energy and who do not care about climate change. At the same time, I am sure he will gain some votes too for finally doing the right thing on this. The choice offered to us by the oil sands is to either profit today in a way that harms future generations or to leave the oil in the ground and invest in safer sources of energy.
In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice Portia describes how the quality of mercy is twice blessed: “[i]t blesseth him that gives and him that takes”.
The oil sands are like the moral opposite of mercy – it is unethical to produce them, and unethical to consume them. It is unethical for the oil companies to dig up and sell such fuels, given what we know about climate change, and it is unethical for the buyers to purchase the fuels, largely for the same reason. Both buyers and sellers are complicit in a pattern of action that sells out future generations, in exchange for profits and cheaper fuels today. They are all knowingly imposing harm upon people all over the world, either in exchange for profits or in exchange for the benefit of using cheap fossil fuels.
In time, the oil sands industry may come to be seen as much like the asbestos industry: companies that push what they know to be a dangerous and harmful product, just because it is in their self interest to do so. Even worse, the companies do everything in their power to keep their industry unregulated. They fund phoney ‘grassroots’ groups that argue that the oil sands are wonderful, they run misleading advertising campaigns, they make campaign contributions to politicians, they make misleading claims about jobs, etc.