Category Archives: Wildlife

Objections: cash, jobs, and taxes

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When you tell people that coal, the oil sands, and other unconventional oil and gas should be left underground, three objections come up most often:

  1. Look at how much revenue these industries produce!
  2. And so many jobs depend on them
  3. And they provide so much tax revenue

All this, they argue, means communities and governments should welcome, or at least tolerate, these industries.

I think there are four major responses to this.

1) What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

It is easy to tot up the revenues from oil sands producers or coal mining companies, the number of people they employ, and the taxes they pay. What is less obvious but equally real is the harm these entities produce, which is not compensated for. Air and water pollution sicken and kill people, as well as harming natural ecosystems. Mining tears up and poisons the land. Greenhouse gas emissions cause warming, extreme weather, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other ills.

Once all the damage caused by climate change is taken into account, it seems highly likely that these businesses actually destroy more wealth and human welfare than they create, because the indirect costs overwhelm the direct benefits.

2) What is the alternative?

We cannot keep using fossil fuels forever. We will either burn them until there are none that remain to be economically extracted, or we will stop sooner because we want to limit climate change.

Either way, the global economy is eventually going to need to rely on renewable forms of energy. All the infrastructure we are building now to support fossil fuel use will eventually be redundant and useless. At the same time, the sooner we get started on building the energy system of the future, the more time we have to work out which options are best and perfect them. A longer time horizon also means we need to invest less of our total wealth per year, in order to get the same final result.

There are big opportunities to be captured in moving to a sustainable energy system, as well. We can free ourselves from dependence on fossil fuel imports, with all the geopolitical and security implications that would have. We can free ourselves from the burden of illness and death caused by fossil fuel pollution. We can live cleaner, healthier, and safer lives.

3) The risks from climate change

I am not going to exhaustively re-explain the reasons why we should be fearful of climate change. In short, we should be worried because the warming projected just from staying on our present course of increasing emissions is on the order of 5°C. That would create a world as different from the present one as the present one is different from the depth of an ice age. The human consequences of that are impossible to fully appreciate, but certain to be highly significant.

Ken Caldiera expresses this idea very effectively:

If we already had energy and transportation systems that met our needs without using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our carbon- dioxide pollution, and I told you that you could be 2% richer, but all you had to do was acidify the oceans and risk killing off coral reefs and other marine ecosystems, risk melting the ice caps with rapid sea-level rise, shifting weather patterns so that food-growing regions might not be able to produce adequate amounts of food, and so on, would you take all of that environmental risk, just to be 2% richer?

Beyond that, the warming we are creating risks kicking off positive feedback effects, which themselves produce more warming. An especially important danger is causing the permafrost and methane clathrates to melt. The methane they contain could cause another huge dose of warming, on top of what human beings produced directly. They could even kick off runaway climate change, which could make the planet permanently inhospitable to life.

4) Ethics

To enrich yourself by causing certain harm to others, and by creating terrible risks, is surely not an ethical way to comport yourself. There is no reason why future generations deserve to inherit a wrecked and imperiled planet, and it would be preferable for them to inhabit a global economy that is already moving towards making itself sustainable.

As Henry Shue argues, climate change falls within the general moral category of the infliction of harm upon the defenceless. When we undertake activities that produce massive greenhouse gas emissions, we are playing a game of Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at the head of future generations. Even if climate change proves to be less of a problem than we legitimately fear, we are behaving unethically by forcing this risk upon them without their consent, and without them having any ability whatsoever to seek recourse from us.

The toll of fossil fuels on species

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One of the most compelling passages from James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren seeks to trace back responsibility for biodiversity lost to climate change to the facilities that caused the warming:

If we continue business-as-usual fossil fuel use, a conservative estimate is that by the end of the century we will have committed to extinction at least 20 percent of the Earth’s species, that is, about two million species. Based on the proportion of twenty-first-century carbon dioxide emissions provided by one large coal-fired power plant over its lifetime, I conclude that a single power plant could be assigned responsibility for exterminating about four hundred species, even though of course we cannot assign specific species to a specific power plant… Those coal trains are death trains. The railroad cars may as well be loaded with the species themselves, carrying them to their extermination.

This grim assessment is even worse when you think about how we have gone about cataloging species. The bigger and cuddlier something is, the more likely it is that humans will have investigated it and given it a taxonomical categorization. There are innumerable smaller creatures (most of them unicellular) that we haven’t gotten around to calling species, but which may play important or even critical roles in some ecosystems. Hansen is talking about the number of species we already know about that are in danger of being wiped out.

The threat from methane in the North

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If catastrophic climate change is to be avoided, it is critical that the massive stock of greenhouse gas held in the Arctic permafrost and in undersea deposits called methane clathrates not be allowed to enter the atmosphere. The permafrost and clathrates contain methane: a gas that is about 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, when it comes to preventing infrared radiation from escaping into space, keeping it within the Earth system and warming the planet. As the planet heats up from human greenhouse gas emissions, the threat of all this methane getting released increases.

Right now, there is even more methane on Earth than there was before the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 56 million years ago when the methane bound up in the north got released over the course of several thousand years. Back then, those emissions made the planet’s temperature rise between 5°C and 9°C – far beyond the level which would be dangerous for human beings. And remember that this warming is on top of whatever warming arises directly from human emissions. According to the modeling conducted by the Met Office in the United Kingdom, if our emissions continue on a business-as-usual course, they will generate 5.5 – 6.1°C of warming by 2100. Just imagine what impact melting clathrates and permafrost could have in addition.

The PETM happened fairly slowly, but was nonetheless accompanied by the extinction of about half the planet’s marine life. Other species migrated hundreds or thousands of kilometres, as the climate in different regions changed. There were no ice sheets during the PETM, whereas Earth currently has enough ice in Greenland and Antarctica to raise sea levels by more than sixty metres. Human-induced climate change is happening far faster than what happened during the PETM. That makes it even harder for plants and animals to adapt. It also means there is less time for negative feedbacks (like increased weathering of rocks) to blunt the edge of the warming.

In addition to the vanishing multi-year sea ice, we are already seeing worrisome degradation of the Arctic permafrost. For instance, researchers in Quebec have found that the edge of where permafrost is found in one region has moved 130 km in just 50 years. The threat of kicking off a PETM-type event is one major reason why the warming caused by human beings must be limited. Because the amount of warming we produce is directly related to how many fossil fuels we burn, it is critical that humanity make the conscious choice to limit our fossil fuel usage. For the sake of protecting a planet that provides the foundation for human prosperity and survival, we need to leave fossil fuels underground and move to a clean and renewable global energy system that can keep operating forever.

What we’re up against in Canada

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You can argue all you like that exploiting the oil sands is against the long-term interests of Canadians, given the climatic risks it poses. What is much harder is to overcome the influence of so much short-term cash.

This year, for the first time ever, royalties from the oil sands will eclipse those from any other energy resource in Alberta:

Oil sands royalties will outstrip conventional crude royalties by a modest $35-million this year, the government forecast in the budget tabled yesterday. By 2010-2011, the province expects oil sands royalties to roar to $3.2-billion, a 75-per-cent hike that will see bitumen production provide 45 per cent of the province’s total oil and gas royalties.

By 2012-2013, the oil sands will form 53 per cent of Alberta’s royalty stream, which will represent a quarter of total provincial revenues.

In the face of that, it is easy to dismiss the risk of catastrophic or runaway climate change as distant and uncertain. Unfortunately, given the enormous size of the world’s reserves of unconventional oil and gas – including the tar sands – exploiting them is the single thing we can do that most increases the probability of a truly terrible outcome for humanity. In addition, there are all the air and water pollution consequences that accompany oil sands exploitation, as well as the destruction of natural habitat.

Given the fact that most of the fuels being manufactured from Albertan bitumen will eventually be used for vehicles, even cheap and affordable carbon capture and storage (CCS) will not make it safe to exploit these resources. This makes Alberta’s CCS-focused provincial climate change plan laughably inadequate.

Coal blocked in the Flathead Valley

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In an encouraging development, the government of British Columbia has killed a proposed coal mine that had been proposed in the Flathead Valley. This was done for environmental reasons, particularly in response to concerns from the state of Montana that pollution from the mine would flow south through the river. In addition to the largest population of grizzly bears in North America, the valley apparently “holds massive coal and gas reserves that Shell and other oil and gas companies have spent millions of dollars preparing to explore and develop.”

The cabinet order goes beyond blocking one proposed mine. Rather, it “prohibits any mineral, placer or coal mining” in the valley. For the sake of climatic concerns, in addition to water quality ones, this is a decision to applaud.