MentalPolyphonics

This is the third in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This third entry is in response to Rethinking Green: Save the environment: Don’t take transit: The Next Subtitle.

When the Toronto Transit Commission announced in November it would hike fares a 25¢ in the new year — a roughly 10% increase — it blamed the usual suspects: rising costs of fuel and wages.

[snip]

Consistently, the analysis found, TTC fares had risen faster than inflation, and far faster than the price of gas. Between 1980 and 2010, the cash fare, adjusted for inflation, soared more than 80% and token prices are up 50%. The price of a litre of unleaded gas? Up about 30%, without inflation. As for wage increases, Statistics Canada reported last year that the median full-time, full-year salary of average Canadians has hardly increased at all since 1980.

I don’t think the average wage of Canadians is what the TTC was talking about when it said fares were higher because wages were higher. They meant the wages of their own employees, and that’s due to union contracts. Of course, none of this has to do with the environmental benefits of transit.

As other major systems across the continent strain in similar circumstances, the strategy of public transit system boosters has been to promote the service as an environmental necessity. In the name of Mother Nature, North American transit systems have received billions in subsidies in recent years — even though they were never developed for environmental purposes in the first place.

If we restricted technologies to their original intent then the Internet would still be military-only.

“Subsidized transit is not sustainable by definition,” says Wendell Cox, a transport policy consultant in St. Louis, and former L.A. County Transportation commissioner. “The potential of public transit has been so overblown it’s almost scandalous.”

Is this article about subsidies or environmentalism? Anything subsidized isn’t economically sustainable, by definition, however subsidies have no bearing on environmental impact.

Last year, policy analyst Randal O’Toole ran the numbers for the CATO Institute, where he is a senior fellow, comparing mass transit vehicles to private vehicles, ranking each based on how much energy they consume and how much CO2 they emit. The average motorized city bus, he reports, burns 27% more energy per mile than a private car and emits 31% more pounds of CO2. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics confirms that the average city bus requires 20% more energy per passenger than the average car.

I’d use the modifier “only” on those figures. The average bus — so, one that hasn’t been environmentally retrofitted as they’re doing in Vancouver — only burns 20-27% more energy and only produces 31% more pounds of CO₂ than a car, all while carrying far and away more than 1,000% more passengers. In fact, as long as two people are riding the bus who would otherwise drive their own cars, these numbers make environmental sense.

Without buses to carry them from their neighbourhood to the train stations, even fewer citizens would ride the trains, making trains, in turn, less efficient per passenger. Already, when trains, subways and streetcars are combined, the average public transit system is still no more efficient that private cars, according to the CATO study. All transit together does emit less CO2 than passenger cars carrying the same number of people the same distance (about 13% less) but even that gap is disappearing — fast.

I accept your surrender!

The environmental case for public transit is falling just as fast, now that hybrid cars are achieving mass market status, with 65 models set to hit North American roads next year, Chevrolet planning to launch its electric Volt by 2011 and manufacturers rolling out super-high efficiency vehicles. In the next few years especially, the average energy consumption of passenger vehicles, and their emission levels, will only improve, with projections by the International Council on Clean Transportation showing the average auto could beat all public transit modes for efficiency and CO2 within the next five years.

Great! In five years we’ll re-evaluate and see if the car manufacturers have delivered. GM already scuttled the Volt a decade ago — fool me once, etc.

At this point Kevin’s argument becomes surreal to me: other green technologies are better for the environment than transit, so we should scuttle transit and use those. Again, it seems that he’s more out to attack funding for public transit than help the environment, but I actually agree with that assessment: if giving everyone a Prius is better than running a transit system then let the giveaway commence!

When the federal government, the B.C. government and BC Transit revealed plans to run 20 hydrogen-powered buses in Whistler, B.C., in February for the Olympics, even the hard-green David Suzuki Foundation balked at the preposterous $2-million-per-bus price tag — four times the price of a standard diesel — arguing that the money would have been better spent on traditional transit initiatives, which “are on life support as far as the financial needs go,” Ian Bruce, the group’s climate-change campaigner, said.

He’s surely right about the pointlessness of what will amount to a four-year, $90-million showpiece of technology not even remotely realistic for actual, financially strapped public transit systems.

Wait, so now Kevin’s arguing against using more efficient busses — because they cost more — and for giving that money to the traditional systems he thinks are polluting and inefficient? Weird. That idea sounds like a combination of bad faith, a disbelief in economies of scale in manufacturing, and a willful ignorance of government’s role in investing towards Canada’s leadership of green technology industries.

Ridesharing applications for smart phones — users enter their location and desired destination and a cost-conscious carpooler responds — are already in wide use, Mr. Rubin says. Self-sustaining, small-scale private jitney systems have successfully operated for years in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico (all North America’s early public transit systems were privately operated until they were nationalized).

Oh, here we get to the point: let’s privatize transit! I’d rather not trust my scheduling to an adhocracy, and if private entities could compete on price why aren’t they doing so already? I know of at least two companies that are trying. It’s exceptionally difficult. Private companies will also free-ride on environmental externalities with absolutely zero incentive to invest in green technologies — because it’s cheaper (more shareholder-efficient).

But again, none of this has a direct bearing on environmental sustainability. It’s clear that Kevin is talking about financial, which doesn’t account for environmental free riding at all.

This is the second in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This second entry is in response to Feed the world: grow fish in Alberta’s badlands.

Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he’s recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated.

[snip]

While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.

That fish-land system in the first paragraph seems pretty organic. I’m not incredulous towards natural fertilizers and controlled water tables — I’m incredulous towards inefficient, chemical nitrogen delivery systems in the Mississippi watershed that lead to giant dead-zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.

But what if we tried 21st century organic farms like the one described in the quoted paragraph above? Why is the discussion limited to organic technologies from the 60s?

An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov’s laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He’s just getting started. When he’s fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly — a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. “We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists,” Mr. Tremblay says. “If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere.”

[snip]

While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What’s astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.

Groups complaining about fish farms, to my knowledge, aren’t complaining about land-tank based systems as Kevin implies with this line of reasoning. The problematic fish farms, as I understand the issue, are open-net farms in the ocean which generate considerable environmental and epidemiological externalities. The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, for example, aren’t against fish farms but rather want closed-tank over open-net operations.

“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.

I had coffee with a nutritionist recently. One of the reasons people are removing wheat from their diets in favor of spelt and Canadian Red Wheat is that the monoculture we’re currently producing is undigestible for a surprising number of adults. It’s been engineered for grain size, pest and disease resistance, growth speed, etc., but not nutrition. People are getting sick.

Claiming that there haven’t been any environmental catastrophes is just wrong — it’s a belief predicated on the idea that we’re not currently in the middle of an environment catastrophe (again, like hypoxic dead zones).

This is the first in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This first entry is in response to Blue Bin Blues. Please help with my analysis, pro or con, as my environmental-fu is not strong.

Unfortunately, recycling plastic often doesn’t make much more sense. Germany has stockpiled millions of tonnes of recyclable plastics in rural fields, like above-ground dumps. “These cheap plastic bottles, it depends on the price of oil, but the market is not worth much,” says Daniel Benjamin, an economist at South Carolina’s Clemson University who studies recycling.

This degenerates into a peak oil argument. The tar sands, for example, occasionally become economically inviable for the same reason: when the price of oil is high, alternative forms are more attractive. As we run out of oil alternative sources of plastic will become economically viable.

Similarly, the argument that recycling programs are inefficient relies on the idea that they will never become efficient. Arguing against economies of scope and scale is an odd position for the National Post to take, especially given the later posts in this series where Kevin argues for economies of scale and scope in food production.

That’s why curbside recycling requires, wherever it’s implemented, millions of tax dollars to stay afloat: the inputs required are greater than the savings. Even in New York City, where area land is some of the most expensive on the continent, it costs $240 to deal with a ton of recyclables, compared to the $130 a ton of landfills, says Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at Washington’s Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This is why I like it when environmentalists try to put a price on the environment itself. The numbers Kevin cites ignore externalities — they’re based entirely on a failed market, one where landfill operators (in this case) free ride on future generations’ economic valuation of the environment. The $130 figure likely ignores an extra $110 in environmental costs, assuming the $240 figure is for neutral eco-cost recycling (which I doubt — $240 is probably low as well).

Often the effects of aggressive residential recycling programs harm environmental goals. Citywide blue box programs typically mean a whole new fleet of trucks: Calgary now has 64 more diesel-burning rigs retracing the same tracks its garbage trucks did just a few days earlier, roughly doubling carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.

Agreed — it’s too bad GM killed the electric car. If they hadn’t sabotaged science and their own markets to prop up the oil companies then we’d have low-emission trucks (and the money from bailing them out). Still, let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Electric trucks will come.

In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it.

Agreed — centralized recycling is preferable to blue-box programs.

First, cities should drop the ridiculously high targets to recycle 70, 80 or 90% of waste. And instead, have homeowners bundle their paper, cardboard and aluminum — the worthwhile stuff — into special coloured bags alongside their regular trash pickup. Those bags can then be separated at the landfill, and the rest trashed.

Or, you know, we could use all these handy blue bins everyone has lying around…