Author Archives: Tristan

Join the Toxic Tour of Toronto!

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Tomorrow (June 23rd), as part of the build-up to the days of action against the G8/G20 meetings, there will be a toxic tour of Toronto’s principal polluters and climate criminals.The tour begins at 11am in Alexandra Park, Toronto and will visit the home offices of many firms currently engaged in the unsustainable extraction of resources, as well as crimes against workers, local populations, and indigenous groups. Participants are encourage to dress up – some ideas suggested are executives with blood on their hands, corporate zombies, people covered in Tar Sands bitumen, etc. Fake blood and bitumen will even be provided!

Citing from the event promotional materials, the toxic tour will concentrate on four main themes:

  1. The extractive industry is violating human rights and the rights of mother earth. The federal government supports these companies even as human rights workers are killed, local peoples poisoned, and entire communities displaced. From the tar sands in northern Alberta to gold mines in Papua New Guinea to copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Canadian companies are exploiting indigenous and poor communities alike, violating their right to self-determination, poisoning their lands, manipulating any leadership that they can access, and often supporting brutal military and security operations.
  2. The extractive industry is exacerbating the climate crisis. The tar sands gigaproject is the most destructive industrial project on earth and will be the leading contributor to climate change in Canada, making it impossible for our country to meet its international climate commitments. The climate crisis has been caused by the industrialization of developed countries like Canada, while disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples and the global south who are faced with sea-level rise, drought, permafrost melt, desertification, melting glaciers, and increased extreme weather events. These and other problems brought on by the climate crisis have destroyed the livelihoods of millions who are dying and being displaced from their homes.
  3. The education system is taken over by corporate interests. The University of Toronto, Canada´s largest academic institution, is taken over by corporations, many of which are linked to the extractive industry. This corporate influence stifles open, honest, and critical debate in our institutions of higher learning and demonstrates how a wealthy few can dominate and shape the way people think. As an academic institution that strives to create the ‘leaders of tomorrow,’ we must challenge the notion that corporate greed and exploitation has any place in our education system.
  4. The Canadian economy is dependent on exploiting marginalized peoples and the environment. Harper would not be at the G8 if it wasn’t for exploiting the resources and people of countries that the G8 is purposely shutting out of discussions. Solutions, however, are there — but the Harper government refuses to give people the ability to determine the future of their own lives and livelihoods.

Climate Action Camp – This August in Dunham, Quebec

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Readers in Eastern Canada might consider attending or visiting this Climate Action Camp which runs this August from the 7th to the 23rd (with the 18th to 22nd specified as “Convergence Days”). According to Wikipedia, Climate Action Camps are:

campaign gatherings (similar to peace camps) that take place to draw attention to, and act as a base for direct action against, major carbon emitters, as well as to develop ways to create a zero-carbon society. Camps are run on broadly anarchist principles – free to attend, supported by donations and with input from everyone in the community for the day-to-day operation of the camp.

This camp will concentrate on opposing the Trailbreaker project, an Enbridge pipeline which would carry Tar Sands bitumen between Alberta and the Eastern Seaboard.

Pipelines – the weak point of Oil Sands Expansion

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In order for the Albertan Oil Sands to fulfill a plan to expand to five times their current size, increased capacity for exporting Tar Sands oil must be secured. The primary way export capacity is to be increased is through the construction of pipelines. Pipelines, however, are (comparatively) easy to stop through community mobilizations because they harm communities immediately through leaks and produce few jobs, in addition to their role in the overall climate crisis.

The most important pipeline for Tar Sands expansion and its role in the perpetuation of an oil based economy is the Trailbreaker. This pipeline, which is actually a project to convert sections of existing pipeline and build additional pumping stations to allow for transportation of the oil sands product, will run from Alberta to Chicago, back into Canada through the Great Lakes region, over the island of Montreal, and finally down into Maine terminating at the port of Portland. From Portland, Maine, the product will be loaded onto ships bound for the Gulf of Mexico, specifically the coast of Texas. The reason for this is to exploit the excess capacity of refineries built near US offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico – capacity which is no longer in use due to decreased production from rigs in the Gulf.

The Trailbreaker project is currently shelved, however, due to the world economic downturn and difficulties with the construction of a pumping station in Dunham, Quebec. In 2009, Dunham elected a mayor who ran on a campaign opposing the pipeline. It is surprisingly easy for communities to band together and oppose the construction of oil pipelines – all pipelines leak (the question is when and how often), and when they leak they cause local environmental catastrophes. Unlike home grown opposition to windfarms, this is a NIMBY-ism which conforms with the interests of the species. Folks from Vancouver might remember the 2007 spill in Burnaby, B.C. – that was from a pipeline shipping 350 barrels per day. Burnaby, B.C. is therefore a good region in which to mobilize support against the proposed Northern Gateway Expansion which would increase that flow to 700,000 barrels per day.

Cochabambma – a People’s Process to address the Climate Crisis

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After the failure at Copenhagen to breach the gap between scientific necessity and political will, more than 35 thousand people gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to develop a civil-society based consensus on how to deal with the climate crisis. Seventeen working groups dealt with topics such as “Structural Causes”, “Adaptation” and “Climate Debt“. The final result of the conference was the “Cochabamba People’s Agreement”, which differs considerably in content and character from climate agreements made between states.

The People’s Agreement calls for (among other things):

  • “The protection and recognition of the rights and needs of forced climate migrants.”
  • “The promotion of the establishment of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.”
  • “The consideration of a World Referendum on Climate Change that allows the people to decide what will be done about this issue, which is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.”
  • “A 50% reduction of domestic greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries for the period 2013-2017 under the Kyoto Protocol, domestically and without reliance on market mechanisms.”

One good thing about the Cochabamba proposal is the stress on what action is immediately required, or at least on action required in the near future. In the long term both developed and under developed nations must transition to Carbon Neutrality – but it certainly makes moral and pragmatic sense to cut emissions in the first world now, and allow the under developed world to transition to carbon neutrality over a longer period. It’s also relevant to start talking about the rights of climate migrants – the sooner we do this, the better change we have of avoiding a future which too much resembles Children of Men.

However, I think the single most important thing included in the Cochabamba proposal which is often missing from the mainstream discourse on climate change is the rights of indigenous peoples:

“The implementation of measures for recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples must be secured in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and applicable universal human rights instruments and agreements. This includes respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples; their rights to lands, territories and resources, and their full and effective participation, with their free, prior and informed consent.”

It’s difficult to over-stress the importance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If Canada were to sign this declaration, this would make it much more difficult to expand oil sands production – both because companies would be forced to respect Aboriginal title to the land under which which the oil sands are extracted, and also because it would allow many nations to block the pipelines required for Oil Sands expansion.

What I like most about the Cochabamba proposal is the emphasis on the importance of civil society rather than current failing political structures. This is manifested in their recommendation of a world referendum:

“The consideration of a World Referendum on Climate Change that allows the people to decide what will be done about this issue, which is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.”

Such a referendum is certainly “politically impossible”. However, even it’s recommendation for consideration stresses the divide between the interest of the people of the world, and the interests on which world leaders currently act on. The recognition of this difference is recognition of the hypocrisy of the current system of national and international governance – a hypocrisy we likely can no longer afford.

Our Capitalism, short-term interests, and the failure of Adaptation

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The National Post is reporting that the economic fallout of the BP oil spill will be minimal. Any reduction in GDP along America’s Gulf Coast resulting from oil shortages will be offset by the increased local spending associated with cleanup efforts. They go as far as to say that:

the economic fallout from the disaster is likely to relatively benign to the global recovery and may even end up benefiting Canada’s resource-rich economy, economists say.

The failure of thought here is obvious – a distinction is being drawn not only between monetizable and non-monetizable costs (in fact, the environmental cost can be monetized), but between those costs immediately felt by capitalism, and those which have no immediate bearing on shareholder value. This is the same failure of Capitalism to respond to environmental crisis as prevents adaptation to respond to the threat of dangerous global warming.

What we should take from this is the failure of capitalism to be adaptive, to respond to incentives, to anticipate profitable futures. Rather, in its current structures it responds only, or at least principally, to short term incentives and ignores as best it can long term disaster. Capitalism, therefore, is a weak system – a system which is not for us adequate to the challenges posed by the fore-knowledge of long term environmental crises. It must be tamed (i.e. more highly regulated), or eliminated, if we desire to not go under as a result of environmental crises.

Evental Turning Points in History: The Flotilla, and What it Might Mean for Climate Activism

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One thing environmentalist advocates have hoped for is that some environmental catastrophe might be interpreted as a call to action against climate change. It’s not a bad idea, but it suffers from a problem. While global warming does increase the frequency of catastrophic events, no particular event can be specifically linked with that increase in frequency – and therefore no particular environmental disaster can easily stand as a call to action.

Up until recently, the plight of the Palestinians has suffered from a similar problem – while the increasing violence and oppression of the state of Gaza might be recognized as a fact by Palestine’s supporters, those who wish to reserve judgment on the issue could look at any particular instance of violence and interpret it as justified in its particularity by Israel’s precarious situation in the middle east. That is, until recently – the murder of ten unarmed humanitarian NGO workers on a vessel carrying goods currently being barred entry into Gaza by an illegal blockade is not easily interpretable as justified by Israel’s “threatened” status. As The Globe and Mail put it:

Israel’s claim this week that its soldiers killed nine civilians in self-defence on an aid-to-Gaza flotilla it had boarded is at best tone deaf. It strains credibility. You attack unarmed ships at sea and when people resist, shoot them and then blame them. It’s beyond Orwellian.

More significant than the Globe’s analysis, is the fact Israel is being criticized in the mainstream press at all. This novel event signals the importance of the event reported – in it, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people has exceeded the ability of western business interests (represented in and by The Globe and Mail) to continue to stand by and mouth approval. In this event, the value of opposing barbarism exceeds the value of maintaining the status quo, no matter how profitable the current situation.

The importance of Margaret Atwood’s change of feeling with respect to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can not be underestimated either. As Canadian cultural figures go, they do not come much bigger than Atwood. And in her position as Canada’s preeminent writer, her introduction of the notion of “Israel’s shadow” is not likely to fade away after this first mention – it will likely become an enduring term in the political imaginary.

“The Shadow is not the Palestinians” but “Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.” It seems to me this is the key to what has changed and poses a new problem for Israel. The core for anyone examining the situation with a fresh eye, isn’t what “they” – Palestinians – are doing to Israelis; it’s what Israel is doing to them.

But what does this event have to do with burying coal? Precisely this: that in an era where disaster, not reason, is the event of politics, the purposeful production of disaster towards one’s own ends is the preeminent form of political change. This does mean “make a disaster – make change”, because the grounds, the conditions for the disaster must be adequately laid, and the disaster must be produced in such a way that it can not be re-adapted, re-interpreted back into the dominant narrative.

But isn’t there an obvious contradiction here – while it is feasible enough to provoke a state into killing you, isn’t it illogical, impossible, to provoke such a crisis that would relate to global warming and the need for drastic reductions in carbon emissions? I think this contradiction appears only if our notion of disaster remains needlessly narrow – politics is after all not about the disaster itself, but how it is produced, displayed, re-produced etc…. And, climate change mitigation is not only about the environment, but about humans living in the environment, and the moral demand to produce a future where humans can continue to live in their environment. The violent actors, therefore, under the optics of climate change, are emitters – but more importantly, those emitters which are not “policy takers”, but rather who have more power than governments, whose influence produces climate change denial, and who are not simply people with bad consciences, but structures which disallow people from acting on conscience at all (i.e. shareholder capitalism).

We can thus think backwards to the kind of event one would need to produce, from the evental transformation we need such an event to produce. Perhaps most essentially, we need to reconsider why we are at home with living in a society so deeply hypocritical, and why we are unwilling to change the structures that reproduce that hypocrisy. The event can not be violent – both because of the hypocrisy inherent in violent action acting against violence, and because of the trivial ease of trivializing violence. And yet the event can not be merely peaceful – because hypocrisy always wears the face of peace – it is essential that the flotilla met the IDF and not an Israeli public relations team. The event must be, above all, provocative – both in the sense that it should provoke an unjustifiable response, and in the sense that the unjustifiability of that response should be provocative of a change in attitude towards the political situation that made such a response normal. Ideally, the provocation would require the Globe and Mail to respond with a critique of our Prime Minister like the recent one:

And in this situation, who is a real “friend of Israel” – as they say. Is it Margaret Atwood, who raises questions and doubts, or Stephen Harper, who encourages Israel along the same perilous route that brought it to this point?

What events could shift the public imaginary with respect to climate change policy? The BP oil spill is perhaps an example of an immediate tragedy as part of oil extraction whose true disaster is long term. Perhaps police oppression of climate justice activists at the coming G8/G20 could be a political event to show up the hypocrisy of the current systems. The key, I think, is to allow the reception of an event in such a way that the long term catastrophe can be seen reflected in a particular happening – this may be the key to real political transformation surrounding carbon emissions and their unimaginable impact on our future.

The End of China’s Steam Railroads, or Coal and International Prestige in the 21st Century

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While the phasing out of steam engines from North American railroads was virtually complete by 1960, other regions saw a much slower decline. Due in part to the high costs of the war on Europe, U.K. mainlines were not completely dieselized until 1968, and in Finland and France the process took until the mid 70s. While there are other examples of steam power remaining in service in the 80s and 90s, such as South Africa, India and Russia, the only major power to continue to use steam into the 21st century is China. The continuation of coal-fire steam in China into the 21st century, and it’s eventual phase out in favour of more conventional diesel motive power, serves as an example for understanding importance of economic conditions as well as branding and prestige in state-level transportation planning. More specifically, it might serve as an example of how the international recognition of global warming helped pressure a nation to cease its use of the dirtiest carbon fuel (coal), and therefore possibly prefigure the role of international prestige in future phase outs of coal-electric plants and non-traditional sources of fuel oil.

To understand why Chinese mainline freight and passenger railway service was largely steam powered in the year 2000, it’s important to recognize that diesel trains were introduced far later in China than in most of the rest of the world. Whereas the United States, Russia, and the U.K had their first diesel locomotive engines in the 1920s, the first diesel was not  in service in China until 1959 – at which point dieselization in the USA was almost complete. And China’s transition, although starting in the 50s, did not “pick up steam” until the 80s and 90s – the last mainline steam loco was built in 1999 , and very powerful QJ engines continued to pull coal trains on the Jitong railway until 2005.

Some of the reasons for China’s late use of motive steam power are simple – cheap, easily available labour meant much smaller savings would be acquired by switching to the small crews which diesel operation allows. Also, with huge reserves of coal mined by disposable, non-unionized wage labour, steam trains remained isolated from international oil prices. Russia acted on this principle as well – keeping a full thousand steam locomotives on standby in case of national emergency up until 1989. Other reasons are more complex – military industrial complex funding in the U.S. meant there was money to translate advances in tank engine design into locomotive design. Moreover, diesel operation has many benefits that go beyond simple economics which are highly valued in first world countries, such as cleanliness, simplicity of operation, but most important they are perceived as (or were in the 50s and 60s) “modern”. Capitalist, desire-based economies emphasize the new – there is always some new feature, or function, or things are getting faster, or smoother. Command economies (like the military-industrial complex, incidentally) are needs-based: if steam locomotives are fulfilling the needs of industry and transportation, there is no need to replace them with expensive modern equipment until the upgrade makes simple economic sense – and in a land of very inexpensive labour, this was perhaps never going to happen.

So, what happened – why did China ever switch to diesel and electric operation if steam fared so well for them – if they continued to construct large and powerful locomotives into the 1990s to pull coal trains on the Jitong line through Inner Mongolia until 2005, what was the final reason for switching over to diesel? I’m sure some would like you to believe that Chinese labour conditions are improving, and as a result there are greater savings from reducing the amount of labour required to run the Jitong line. But I think it’s far more likely that the dieselization of the Jitong line has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with international prestige. In 2005, just prior to the end Jitong steam, the International Herald Tribute reported:

There is no sense of regret in the Chinese government, which is anxious to crush all memory of something as old-fashioned as steam just a few years before the 2008 Olympics reach Beijing.

If we want to know why steam was phased out in Mongolia, or why coal fired steam is phased out anywhere it still makes economic sense, the only answer is political prestige. In his book “The Weather Makers”, Tim Flannery makes the point that North America too still runs on coal:

“Some power plants burn through 500 tonnes of coal per hour, and so inefficient are they that around two-thirds of the energy created is wasted. And to what purpose do they operate? Simply to boil water, which generates steam that moves the colossal turbines to create electricity that power our homes and factories. Like the great aerial ocean itself, these Dickensian machines are invisible to most of us, who have no idea that this nineteenth-century technology makes twenty-first-century gadgets whirr.” (The Weather Makers, p. 30)

The continuance of coal fires steam power plants in North America to this day demonstrates quite clearly that the “Age of Steam” never ended – it ended only in public perception. In reality, many ipods, laptops, electric trains, even coffee makers are powered by coal-fired steam. And, there is no reason to think that our age of steam will end for any reason other than the one that motivated the demise of the Jitong railway – public perception, and political prestige. If sites like this one contribute to making coal perceived as a fuel of the past, and for the right reasons (the science), then we can rightly be said to be contributing to the conditions under which Stephen Harper finds it politically useful to institute the phase-out of coal-fired electricity.

Notes on Krugman’s “Building a Green Economy”

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Paul Krugman is an economist, and a decent one. His recent piece in the New York Times entitled “Building a Green Economy”, however, reveals he has not recovered from the brainwashing that is neo-classical economics training. He continues to reproduce the discourse of market solutions even where the market is perverted specifically to avoid the solution it might have provided. What’s worse is he remains an apologist for the current American political situation even at the point where its inadequacy becomes obvious. His failings can largely be understood as a product of his decision to embrace the alienation offered by economics, whereby your individual actions become meaningless, and the only thing important is system. At this point, the question of changing the system disappears because it is something “you” would have to do. In the end, for Krugman, the question of saving the world for our grandchildren is not a moral question at all, but an empirical statement about preferences, desire satisfaction, and the discount rate.

Krugman’s article begins with a discussion of Pigovian taxes. Pigovian taxes are based on the assumption that an economic interaction which has negative externalities could still be beneficial overall, so rather than banning it the appropriate thing to do is to put a price on the negative externality. This is already morally dubious, because there is no strict indication that the price will be returned to those hurt by the negative side effects of the initial transaction. The alternative approach, regulation, is rejected by Pigou and Pigouvians because (and I’m simplifying), the free market approach is the most efficient, so if we just put a price on everything, the best solution will naturally come to pass. The example of a potential Pigovian tax Krugman gives concerns the cost differential between local and imported fruits and vegetables:

“When shoppers go to the grocery store, for example, they will find that fruits and vegetables from farther away have higher prices than local produce, reflecting in part the cost of emission licenses or taxes paid to ship that produce.”

There is some truth to this. I am all for carbon taxes. However, the downside of using a price to reduce the amount of carbon emitted by the production of fruits and vegetables is the sheer number of deciding factors involved in deciding which food gets eaten where by the “free market”. For one, the trucking industry is massively subsidized by the state through the construction of roads. Even if diesel fuel has a carbon tax applied, there is still an undue competitive advantage given to firms far away by the state construction of highways. I’m not saying we should get rid of highways – rather that trucks should pay road tax per kilometer based on their weight capacity, as this is a good indicator of the damage they do to roads. Another issue is the labour costs – the  farmers who treat their workers the worst, i.e. imports effective slaves from across the country and the americas, will likely be able to supply Dominion with cheaper tomatoes than a local farm which obeys Canadian Labour standards. Similarly, provinces which still ban the formation of farm labour unions have a competitive advantage over provinces which have decided that this ban “substantially impairs their right to freedom of association under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Furthermore, supermarket chains like Loblaws sign contracts with California growers which specify that in exchange for access to California fruits and vegetables in the winter months, they must purchase Californian fruit and vegetables in the summer months as well. This means local food is kept out of major city markets even when it is cheaper.

Ignoring the complexity of market solutions is one thing – but what’s much worse is Krugman’s stagnant and placid attitude towards the current political “reality”. For example, when discussing the merits of cap-and-trade, he states:

“Politically speaking, doling out licenses to industry isn’t entirely bad, because it offers a way to partly compensate some of the groups whose interests would suffer if a serious climate-change policy were adopted.”

The presumption here is that there is a duty to compensate groups whose interests would suffer if mitigation policies were adopted – but is this a good presumption? In a morally neutral world, perhaps, but in the real world firms which profit from carbon heavy processes are not just metaphorically, but actually stealing from our future. No one has a right to steal or to harm others, not even according to Libertarians like John Stuart Mill. The problem is then, how to make a political situation where such basic principles of liberty would be respected? This would be the genuine liberal dream. Krugman makes the same mistake of engaging in nasty political apologetics when he compares cap-and-trade to a carbon tax system:

“The question is whether the emissions tax that could actually be put in place is better than cap-and-trade. There is no reason to believe that it would be — indeed, there is no reason to believe that a broad-based emissions tax would make it through Congress.”

Sure, that is a question you could ask, but it is not all clear that it is “the” question. If the reality is that it isn’t clear that we could pass a meaningful, just and fair climate change bill through Congress – then the question isn’t “how do we pass a barely minimal one which benefits existing polluters disproportionately to the damage they have caused and continue to cause”, but how do we make a Congress which could pass a bill that would be genuinely in the interest of the American population? It’s a question for social organizers, democratic activists, and educators.

Sometimes, I find it genuinely strange that Krugman does not advocate for democratic reform for two reasons. For one, he is swayed by James Hansen’s moral argument against cap-and-trade, and secondly, he is keenly aware that the middle class in the U.S. was created directly as a result of a period where socialist organizers were very strong, and the “new deal” was imposed to ward off the red scare. However, the problem is not so complicated – we can see Krugman’s basic misunderstanding of democratic politics in his critique of Hansen:

“What Hansen draws attention to is the fact that in a cap-and-trade world, acts of individual virtue do not contribute to social goals. If you choose to drive a hybrid car or buy a house with a small carbon footprint, all you are doing is freeing up emissions permits for someone else, which means that you have done nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. He has a point. But altruism cannot effectively deal with climate change. Any serious solution must rely mainly on creating a system that gives everyone a self-interested reason to produce fewer emissions. It’s a shame, but climate altruism must take a back seat to the task of getting such a system in place.”

Krugman’s point seems to be: we can’t be worried that acts of individual carbon virtue might be counter productive, what matters is the overall system. Now, I’m with him that the overall system matters, even matters more than individual decisions. But, I’m not willing to throw out individual decisions altogether, and here’s why: a rational state is a state where people see their personal interests as something in common with others, or at least in harmony with others. It’s crucial in civil society for people to be able to recognize when their individual actions contradict the general interest, so that they can try to build lives where contributing to their own happiness contributes to the happiness of others as well. This is just part of being a complete human being. It’s often cited that Adam Smith argues this happens by accident, but, for one, this isn’t really true – Smith demands conditions of “perfect liberty” which no “capitalist” society comes close to meeting (the point of the advertising industry is to make sure that nothing like “perfect information” is ever dispensed). For another thing, Smith is just wrong: he ignores the basic nature of humans as social, as needing to get along with/fit into a general group, and understand the interest of that group as something they could be with or against.

It bothers me that Krugman’s political insight is so poor, because he is a good economist that has decent moral bearings. He advocates for protectionist carbon tariffs, for outright banning of coal power, and stresses the long term importance of dealing with climate change:

“if we don’t take action, global warming won’t stop in 2100: temperatures, and losses, will continue to rise. So if you place a significant weight on the really, really distant future, the case for action is stronger than even the 2100 estimates suggest.”

Of course, the problem here is the “if you place a significant weight…” – why is it up to you? Why do we think it is our choice whether or not give our grandchildren a decent world to live in? Theradical subjectivity of ethics has reached the point where saving the world is no longer a “duty” but a “preference”, a thing we might desire which might have some weight, but since it’s far off in the future we can discount it in favour of an extra 2 or 5% growth.

When Slavery is Bad for the Planet – Rightless Migrant Workers in Alberta’s Tar Sands

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Perhaps the one good thing one can say about the tar sands is that the cost of extraction is high. It takes a lot of energy to get the oil out of the sand, and it takes a lot of workers.

Fortunately for oil sands investors, however, the “worker” problem is being solved by Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program. Roughly speaking, the program allows foreign workers to skip the immigration process and come to Canada to work for a company which has sponsored them. The company finds them housing, trains them, and employs them. The workers technically are protected under the same workers legislation which protects Canadian workers. However, unlike Canadian workers, they are deported if fired, so there is a very high incentive against reporting on the job abuse or workplace safety violations. (Actually, this has been changed, and now migrant workers can pursue other jobs. However, before they can apply for a second job during their period here certain paperwork must be filled out which takes up to five months – the effect is fired workers either work under the table, or go home).

I’m not bringing this up to be a throw-it-all-in-a-bucket leftist, this importing of low-rights foreign labour has a direct environmental effect – by lowering the price of labour (unions can’t demand high wages because they can be threatened to be replaced by foreign slave labour) tar sands firms can speed up development of new reserves. Furthermore, since the supply of foreign labour is virtually inexhaustible, development is no longer constrained by Canada’s ability to provide workers and can therefore grow their workforces much faster.

This is an instance of strategic alliance between labour and environmentalist interests – it is in both groups best interest for the cost of labour in tar sands to be high, and some of the best ways of driving up the costs of labour are letting the market respond to the labour shortage with higher wages, as well as to make sure that costly safety measures are respected. This isn’t to say the alliance is perfect – labour (qua labour) has an interest in the continued growth of the tar sands since it means jobs, whereas the correct and universal interest is for them to shut down, regardless of the apparent cost.

Furthermore, when it comes to the construction of sustainable energy production and infrastructure, environmentalists might find themselves at odd with labour advocates, simply because it would be a lot easier and quicker to rebuild Canada’s energy with cheap, right-less foreign labour than with Canadian union labour. However, it’s probably a mistake to dwell too much on possible future disagreements – what we need to do now is work on shutting down the tar sands, and decreasing its profitability by demanding that humans have rights is, at least currently, a way we can push for that to happen.

Coal as Metaphor: Expanding our understanding of “non-renewable”

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There’s a reason this site is called “burycoal” (and it has nothing to do with how silly the word “bury” looks written down) – it’s easy to grasp that if climate has to do with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, digging up all the carbon which the earth has buried over billions of years into solid black stuff might not be the best recipe for human survival. It’s immediately comprehensible that while burning down a tree while another is growing does not add to the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere, digging a tree’s worth of coal out from underground and burning it does – or rather, perhaps we could say that the coal carbon-neutrality cycle is as long as the coal’s “renewable” cycle, which is qualitatively longer than that of trees.

However, there are limits to this over-simplifying way of thinking. For one, when you burn a tree you don’t just give off pure carbon dioxide but also soot, “black carbon” – and this has its own set of effects on climate. So your wood stove is not neutral (and you should replace it with an EPA certified unit, which are designed for cleaner combustion). For another, humans engage in all sorts of practices which turn chemicals into other chemicals, and this poorly thought out alchemy (with respect to the ecosystem at least) is a major contributor to global warming even if the processes are run using carbon-neutral energy.

The production of animal food products for human consumption, for instance, according to a UN Food and Agriculture report, contributes “37 percent of all human-induced methane.” Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times as potent as CO2, but it is actually a mistake to simply equivocate it, 1 unit of methane to 23 units of CO2. It is also qualitatively different in that this major contributor of it is not a source of energy. We need energy to produce it, but its production itself, abstracted from the energy inputs, is a major source of methane. Animals are effectively global warming machines – they ingest carbon based food, and they output a global warming agent far more potent than went in. They re-assemble what was already in the climate (i.e. from whence their food? Out of the air!) into something which has a very different effect on the climate (23 times worse!).

In fact, according to the FAO report,

“the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.”

More than transport. Think about this for a minute – all those trains, ships, trucks, automobiles, all that coal fired electricity running city trolleys and subways, all those airliners too.

Now, I’m not saying that shutting down meat production will be easy. But it seems naive to think that it would be more difficult (technically, politically) to shut down all meat production than to switch to carbon neutral transportation solutions. Now, of course I’m not making a exclusionary disjunctive claim here – we obviously need to do both. Heck, even Glenn Beck agrees with me on this one.

The point I want to make here, however, is not that you should go vegan (although I think everyone should seriously limit their meat intake – not one less meat meal per week, more like reduce meat meals per week to one, and reduce your consumption of dairy while you do more research and learn what you’re actually involving yourself in when you consume these things – ignorance is not a serious excuse). Rather, taking the environment seriously with respect to global warming means treating our ability to release greenhouse gases as a non-renewable resource. Think of it as a finite garbage dump, and when it overflows, we go Venus (this is a misleading analogy, since actual landfill space is not a world historical environmental problem). The production of animals is, in this frame, the same as coal – because it involves the consumption of a non-renewable resource. That non-renewable resource is not a “thing”, but rather the sensitivity of the climate, up to the point where we catastrophically steal from future generations.

So, the sense in which I want to say “coal” can be a metaphor for understanding our climate predicament is that there is a finite amount which we can modify and still sustain flourishing life. This modification can come from digging up the black stuff, or it can come from re-assembling the stuff the air into stuff that acts differently in the air – and this is what we do when we raise livestock. The non-renewability of a resource is not only in the fact it can not continue to be extracted, but also in the fact it can not continue to be emitted. The connection of these two thoughts is necessary to think rationally about the way in which humans interact and shift their eco-situation.