I believe that carbon emissions should be reduced just enough to stop environmental disaster. Most people are not explicit about this, but I think it’s a view almost everyone shares if they think about it: the climate can absorb some carbon without disruption, so there’s no problem in that amount of emissions. Besides, eliminating all emissions would require the end of civilization if not the end of mammals.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.

Dear Times Colonist Editor:
Re: Oilsands goes bananas, misses real issues

Bananas might be healthier than oil sands for Albertans (although they’re high in fructose), but they’re very unethical.

Getting ripe bananas to market in North America requires burning lots of oil, which is why Chiquita cares so much about where it’s coming from. Consumers demand cheap bananas, so people working in the banana industry are paid very little and the whole industry has been shut down in higher wage countries like Jamaica. Finally, bananas have been bred into a sweeter and fleshier disease-prone monoculture.

Bananas represent everything that’s wrong with globalized, industrial agriculture – we should all consider boycotting them.

BC has been experiencing record-breaking bad, unseasonable weather. On Saturday the Times Colonist ran a front-page story about the economic impact of bad weather in Victoria. Three years ago, the article would have been about the role of climate change in causing the weather, but it isn’t even mentioned – how times change.

It’s amazing how far climate change fell off everyone’s radar when the economy became the top concern. What would it take to make people care again? Apparently the end of summer is not enough.

I would like people to make the connection that their airplane and cruise ship vacations in the winter are the direct cause of the weather we’re suffering. One week on the beach in winter = 4 months holding an umbrella in summer.

There was a point back in 2007 when I thought slow travel might actually take off. (I’ve embraced slow travel since it makes me feel superior when I’m driving my friends to the airport.) But now it seems that people travel as much as they can afford; just like how the financial crisis dropped carbon emissions by overthrowing capitalism – remember that?

Greater Victoria (formally: the Capital Regional District) is running some kind of CO2-reducing pyramid scheme (formally: a Ponzi scheme) or multi-level marketing. The idea is to get people to make small steps to stop raping the climate. First, they just ran a bunch of workshops to create contagious meme-zombies. Second, you can get yourself brainwashed online. Third, you can take pledges – here are mine:

• I will drive my friends around in car-share co-op cars to show them how nice they are.
• I will use Google Maps Transit to make the bus even more awesome!
• I will convert my fixie to a free-wheel so it isn’t such a pain to stop.
• I will strut more when I walk near traffic so drivers get jealous.
• I will let my brother try to teach me how to longboard again.

I like that they recognized longboards as a sustainable transportation option – too bad the people writing the Greater Victoria bylaws don’t. Personally, I’d like to see the cops handing out a dozen idling tickets (have they ever handed out one?!) for every skateboarder or cyclist-without-a-helmet they harass.

Burning Man is quite environmentally-friendly on a local scale because it’s almost impossible to damage the Black Rock Desert and they really do leave no garbage (or water!) behind. But not surprisingly, a festival about getting far away from civilization and lighting shit on fire is incredibly bad for the climate.

Naively, the problem with Burning Man is the amount of electricity required to keep 45,000 people alive in the desert for a week. There has been a push to use biodiesel for generators and art vehicles in recent years. But analysis finds that participants emit ten times as much carbon getting to the festival as they do once there, for a total of 0.7 tons of carbon per person! (Although that analysis only includes direct emissions and not the indirect emissions caused by producing materials used at the festival.)

Back in 2007, when Americans could afford to care about the environment instead of the economy, the theme of Burning Man was “Green Man”. This article gives an excellent overview of the carbon footprint of the festival (including the tantilizing prospect of transportation by train). I can’t find any discussion online about the environmental impact since then.

One argument given in favour of the festival is that it is environmental-consciousness raising. But given that 0.7 tons per person is about half the sustainable global yearly output, at some point consciousness must get raised to the point when people stop going.

Another argument is that there is a carbon opportunity cost: if people didn’t drive to Burning Man, they’d take a plane on another holiday. That is true as long as carbon emissions are not priced. Once people can’t afford to go on any holiday that’s unreasonably far away, they’ll direct their efforts into more local gatherings. BC has two explicitly Burning-Man-themed festivals (Recompression and Burn in the Forest) and some other festivals that could be become cozier, more human-scale Burning Men.

The big advantage cap&trade has over a carbon tax is that a cap is easy to set compared to a taxation rate. That’s because international agreements are always negotiated in terms of emissions amounts. We’ll just assume that the negotiators are using climate models to determine what amounts to negotiate for.

Elasticity is the measure of how price-sensitive a good is relative to cost. The elasticity of demand is how much consumers will adjust their consumption if the cost goes up or down. Economists are aware that there are different elasticities based on time period: for example, it takes time to purchase a more fuel-efficient car.

With a carbon tax you need to know the elasticity of demand for fuel to figure out how much emissions will drop for a given taxation rate. I am having a very hard time finding estimates of a reasonable rate to achieve various emissions targets. Maybe this is why the public is lukewarm on carbon tax – would you vote yes to be taxed a completely unspecified amount?

Using a economic model I found on CarbonTax.org and the Canadian Ministry of Finance’s stats on elasticity of demand for air travel I calculated that the carbon tax would have to be $325/Imperial ton to cut airplane emissions to 50% of 2009 levels. Air travel has a much higher elasticity than gasoline*: CarbonTax.org estimates a tax rate of $370/ton would decrease emissions by a third.

In BC, a $325/ton tax would produce enough revenue to set corporate and income taxes to 0 and then produce a $5 billion surplus (which could be used as a $1250/person dividend, or something completely different).

* I’ll explain why I chose to model the relatively-insignificant air travel sector in a future post.