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.

Liberal leadership candidate George Abbott has proposed holding a referendum* on the carbon tax in conjunction with the initiative vote on the Harmonized Sales Tax (an “initiative vote” is indistinguishable from a “referendum” to everyone outside Elections BC). His proposed question is something like “should the carbon tax increase after 2012 or remain constant?” The public and media are jumping on Abbott as being “against” the carbon tax. However, as Les Leyne mentions in passing, the Carbon Tax Act only specifies the rate up till 2012, so remaining constant after that is the status quo!

Of course I’d like to see Abbott and the other candidates show some, you know, leadership and declare that they will raise the tax, no discussion. But I guess Abbott is torn: a lack of consultation on the HST forced Campbell out of office, but opposition to the carbon tax is what lost the NDP the 2009 election. I think holding a referendum gives the NDP’s new leader a chance to take the position they should have taken (and the irrelevant Greens did take) in 2009: the Liberals are wrong about the carbon tax because it’s not high enough!

There has been some talk that Vander Zalm’s BC Tea Party might be satisfied if the HST were lowered. Obviously with the budget in a deficit, some other tax would have to be raised to make up the difference. How about raising the carbon tax a corresponding amount? Less tax on things we do want (consumer spending?) and more tax on things we don’t.

The other climate change story is that BC is almost certainly not implementing cap & trade in 2012. North American cap & trade fell apart when Canada’s federal government said they’d do whatever the US federal government did and then Obama (who hates Mother Earth) failed to do anything at all. This interjurisdictional chicken & egg is one of the reasons why cap & trade is such a lousy alternative to a carbon tax.

* Oh George, please stop posting embedded PDFs: it makes you look clueless.

Kyla pointed me to George Monbiot’s summary of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a critique of the environmental argument for veganism: Outside industrial food production, livestock consume the waste products from agriculture and sustainable-grown feed, not fertilized feed crops grown on prime farmland. A lot of vegan math is based on the worst contemporary practices rather than the global average or Western practices with a reasonable amount of reforming. A general theme in Monbiot’s writing is that we should sacrifice those activities that cannot be made sustainable and reform those that can.

Vegans often disregard the quality of meat compared to other food. At the very least, it needs to be calculated as mass of carbon per calorie:

I don’t know about you, but my diet is calculated, so I would eat the same amount of protein if I became a vegan, not just brown gack. So ideally we’d calculate mass of carbon per essential amino acid. Measured that way, chicken meat and eggs come very close to vegetables, and are a pleasure to eat.

But not all meat is created equal. Shrimp, beef and lamb (grass-fed is worse) are significantly worse than their brethren. I never eat these three meats when alternatives are available and try to get most of my protein from eggs, milk and sustainable fish. If the environmental externalities were added to the price of beef, ground beef would be a luxury rather than the filler it currently is in North American diets.

I’ve been reading and meditating a lot about climate change lately. The issue is usually framed in a larger context of sustainability. The question is raised: how did our society become so unsustainable?

My generation is quick to blame our parents. Baby Boomers make easy scapegoats, because the ex-hippie Boomers that we personally know are quick to apologize that their generation sold out. It’s the right-wing, aggregated Boomers we don’t know that are holding up progress on fighting climate change.

This comment by Van Isle on a Tyee health-reform fantasy piece got me to thinking:

Being an older boomer I made a comment to 90+ year old woman last year about how us baby-boomers have screwed up this world (re; pollutian, world financing ponsi schemes, etc etc). Her come-back was that we were only partly resonsible; her generation too was responsible because they let us get away with it.

But the Boomers didn’t invent the suburbs and the car lifestyle. The Boomers didn’t dismantle the train and streetcar system. The Boomers didn’t start clearcutting the forests and developing every oilfield. Their parents did.

The Boomers produce so carelessly and consume so much only because they were raised that way. It’s the “Greatest Generation” who came back from WW2 with a sense of entitlement and decided to make prosperity happen, whatever the cost.

You can argue that the GI Generation didn’t know any better. They didn’t have climate change models. But it’s pretty obvious that if you cut down all the easily-loggable trees and don’t replant any more, as happened in BC during the 60s, future generations are going to have a hard time making due.

The Baby Boomers shouldn’t have just bought in to their parents’ lifestyles, but their sin is sloth rather than greed. The vote-rich generation still has an opportunity to redeem themselves. You can hate them if they don’t put things on the mend before they hand off power. But the people who got us into this mess in the first place are currently getting seniors discounts and taking a pension out of your pay cheque.

Lefty website AlterNet recently posted this list of tips for living without an air conditioner, aimed at residents of the Sun Belt. They forgot the most effective: move somewhere cooler. There’s a theory that one of the causes of the Sun Belt’s population boom since WW2 is the availability of air conditioners: you no longer had to be crazy to live there, so people did.

This reminds me of the criticism that BC’s carbon tax disproportionately costs rural residents, who have to drive everywhere. Well duh, if you want to live somewhere that will require a lot of resources* to survive in, you should have to pay for that. In BC’s case it turns out that commuters in the Lower Mainland use more gas than rural residents, which is not surprising because the whole point of sprawling suburbs is to trade travel distance for more living space.

Some of the AlterNet comments imply that alternate energy should let us crank our air conditioners to the max all summer long. But I think that if cheap energy giveth these lifestyles then it’s totally reasonable that climate change should taketh them away. Or, preferably, that the cost of lifestyle choices should include externalities and people can decide for themselves if living in places like Lousianna is worth it.

On the other hand, the appropriately-named Sun Belt could have a sufficient advantage in producing solar electricity to more than make up for the heat. A move away from electric air conditioning could lead to a boom in cities near bodies of water for deep water cooling. And although it’s easier to green heating than cooling (entropy’s not just a good idea – it’s the law), Canada may face a similar movement away from places that are particularly cold.

One of the big problems with the Kyoto Protocol is that it depends on all countries participating in a carbon market. The Protocol itself doesn’t contain a lot of teeth because it assumes that countries would rather cut their emissions than buy a bunch of carbon credits. It’s as if it never occurred to anyone that countries could just decide to do neither.

So carbon emissions are still a market failure externality. This leads to perversity even for countries that have embraced Kyoto. As George Monbiot writes in a recent series of articles, the UK has met its Kyoto targets by importing goods rather than manufacturing them locally. When a product is manufactured in China rather than Britain, the carbon emissions go on China’s balance sheet.

If there were a carbon market that covered the globe, China would have to buy carbon credits from Britain to cover their manufacturing emissions. The cost of those credits would be added to the Chinese goods and British consumers would end up paying. Manufacturing will tend toward countries with lower (or no) carbon pricing, just as it tends toward countries with lower taxes and weaker labor regulations.

The short-term nudge for this is mandatory carbon labeling. Consumers should at least be made aware that buying imported goods is just offshoring their emissions. The medium-term solution is global carbon pricing either through a market or a common rate of taxation. Long-term, this should cause us to stop consuming so much.

Airplane travel is incredibly damaging to the climate and should be costed accordingly, but it’d be nice if middle-class people could still travel. What are the options?

Passenger airships (blimps, etc.) have the potential to do intercontinental transport in days. One of the coolest designs I’ve heard of is for a helium-shielded hydrogen blimp to double as a tank for fuel-cell-powered propellers. But airships are a far-out idea: we need other plans.

Cruise ships have much higher emissions per kilometre than passanger planes, but that could be because there hasn’t been much pressure on cruise ships to decrease emissions. For example, the handful of nuclear-powered surface ships are all smaller than most major cruise ships.

Freighter travel is currently considered carbon neutral because the passangers are just hitching a ride with a freighter that’s already full of cargo. Mixed passenger-cargo ships would not be as environmentally friendly.

Ships do intercontinental transport in weeks, so how do you do an intercontinental vacation when you only get 2 – 4 weeks off per year (I know people who have gone to Hawaii for a weekend)? Similarly, if you were to pay the full cost of airplane travel, you’d probably only be able to afford an intercontinential vacation every few years: how can you make it count?

The solution is obviously sabbaticals / career breaks. Apparently these are common in Australia because of the time it used to take to visit family in Britain by sailing ship. Essentially we will all go back to that rhythm of life.

If you have more time in a place, you don’t need to consume sexed-up, inauthentic exoticness. Tourists will become embedded in a culture by volunteering, working or studying. We need a cultural and legislative shift to support sabbaticals for all workers.

Can we reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing our standard of living? Apparently George Monbiot’s book Heat (which I haven’t read), details how technology can be used to green every activity in our civilization except one: airplanes. This is because keeping something heavier-than-air aloft cannot be made low-energy without violating the laws of physics.

For this reason, Monbiot never flies (except to scold Canada). But it seems that there is little chance the people of the developed world will willingly give up flying:

When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.

So short of massively reducing our emissions in every other area to pay for our flight addiction, we must force people to stop flying. This can be achieved with carbon pricing. We will return to a period when “air travel is too expensive to waste on your wife”, as in Mad Men. No more short, sunny vacations. No more zipping between Canadian cities (+$325 for Vancouver to Toronto).

Cheap air travel is one of the biggest advances in human history: one of our modern conveniences most like magic. Our generation could be the last to enjoy this power. But when I look at how much people love flight, I am skeptical that we will support the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. Although as Monbiot notes in Heat:

An 87% cut in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the aeroplanes flying today be grounded…These privations affect only a tiny proportion of the world’s people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you.

I’ve been catching up on Copenhagen postmortems. Despite our worst fears, no one is blaming Canada. Instead it’s either the US, China, Denmark, Africa or Tuvalu’s fault. (I’m kidding about Tuvalu.) What I haven’t seen much discussion of is what exactly people expected Copenhagen to accomplish.

As far as I can tell, the countries were to negotiate an acceptable rise in temperature. From that, climate models would spit out a global emission cap. The classes of countries would then negotiate how to divide that emissions cap between developed and developing countries.

The executive director of “an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries” wrote this nice piece pointing out that it’s only fair to look at nations’ total emissions throughout history. Since wealth is linked very closely with energy consumption, the poor must increase their share of global emissions to close the income gap. If every country capped their emissions at anything close to today’s levels, the poor will stay poor.

There was a side project, which I believe was basically successful, to get developed countries to link foreign aid to emissions reductions. It’s always hard to be sure whether these foreign aid promises are new money or just reallocation of existing funds, but it’s an interesting policy tool. It alleviates some of the problem with capping a developing country’s development.

Even if they could negotiate emissions targets like Kyoto, everyone would just go home to ratify the cap and achieve it their own way. But, as Canada conveniently demonstrated, Kyoto contained no enforcable penalties, so I don’t see how repeating it could be seen as a victory.

I wonder, when was this global cap & trade system supposed to get negotiated? Surely it will be so complicated that it will take decades.

Why can’t the huge markets of the US and the EU just implement a carbon tax and apply tarrifs to force the rest of the world in line? Why does there need to be any international negotiation at all? What’s the point of being a superpower and the world’s policeman if you can’t unilaterally save the planet?

This New Yorker book review of Superfreak-onomics implies that Levitt and Dubner show their true colours as right wingers, just like all economists, even renegades.* They downplay the seriousness of climate change and suggest geoengineering is a better solution than restricting carbon emissions. The review quotes Al Gore:

We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment. We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.

I agree with the criticism in the article right up until the end where she mentions that Freeman Dyson has proposed genetically engineering trees to grow on Mars. The value of running yet another planetary experiment on Earth is that we will learn how to terraform other planets!

I’ll trade a 20° Earth for a 28° Venus and a 7° Mars.

* Exception: Richard Thaler supports carbon taxes in Nudge.