Both these stories are from @YuleHeibel.

“Sobering thought: all that oil from the spill would have ended up in our environment anyway, burnt into the very air we breathe.” – @ToriKlassen

As Tori Klassen notes, the Deepwater Horizon’s oil wasn’t just going to sit in the ground: it was going to end up in the environment one way or another. I haven’t seen any comparative analysis on whether the climate or the ocean is better able to handle that oil. (Obviously burning it to clean up the spill is the worst of both.) The ocean’s ecosystems are collapsing, but that’s partially due to climate change. Both the ocean and the climate are reasonably good at dealing with waste and maintaining homeostasis – otherwise we’d already be dead.

The Gulf of Mexico is a big, messy, visible place to have a spill, but Nigeria has groundwater, wetland and coast spills all the time. Like all natural disasters, people only pay attention when it’s sudden instead of gradual and in somewhere other than Africa. But maybe it takes a loud wakeup call like Deepwater Horizon to get people to move toward renewable energy, which will result in lower demand for Nigerian oil.

We need to get better at assessing environmental impact besides looking at how much map changes color. Is offshore drilling in BC worse than the Alberta tarsands? How much should I sacrifice in my personal life to reduce my oil consumption?

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.

You can spend money to make houses more energy-efficient. For example, as Don points out, you’re better off burning natural gas in your own furnace rather than having it burnt at a central powerplant. Other examples are better insulated windows and programmable thermostats.

These investments quickly pay for themselves in lowered energy bills, so homeowners have a strong financial incentive to make the investment. Owners of rental housing have no financial incentive: if your tenant pays the energy bill, who cares how big it is?

This is bad for the environment because simple energy-reduction measures don’t get implemented. It’s bad for society because it makes housing less affordable.

Nudge implies that better reporting might be a solution. When a renter is shopping around for a house now, they often ask “what’s the average utility price?” Unprepared landlords will make something up off the top of their head. This could be fixed in two ways:

• BC Hydro could put power usage statistics for every house up on the web
• Landlords could be legally required to provide accurate utility fees in person

The idea is that if tenants had accurate information, the demand for high-energy houses would drop and the rent would follow. However, in a near-zero vacancy situation like Victoria and Vancouver, the market has failed and the price signals are broken.

BC Hydro currently offers modest subsidies for energy refits. They’re obviously not enough: $30 doesn’t cover the cost of 1 programmable thermostat, never mind 5. (If I did, I would install one without asking my landlord.) Although the subsidies benefit homeowners first (so perhaps they should be offset by higher taxes?), increasing them would go toward making housing more affordable.

Smart electricity meters are all the rage in the UK and Europe. There’s even Google PowerMeter to collect your smart meter’s stats and display them in colorful ways. BC Hydro nearly rolled out smart meters province-wide until the opposition helped the government realize that they’re really expensive.

But just knowing how much energy you’re using might not cause you to use less. After all, BC Hydro already tells you how much you’ve used per bill. Nudge says that the trick is to make people who use more than the average amount of power to realize where they stand. And Jack will tell you that a bit of a game is the best way to get people who already use less than average to use even less.

A new site Welectricity = electricity monitoring + social networking. You enter your Hydro bills and then compete with your friends to lower your electricity use.

I haven’t been in my current house long enough to have enough data for my profile, and I don’t have any friends, so I can’t tell you that much about how the site works. Can you give people who live in detached rental houses in cold parts of the country a handicap? Can you have “most improved” competitions as well as absolute competitions? It was only launched last Earth Day, so perhaps all these features as coming.

Go sign up so I can beat you.

My friend Erin ran a community circle on the weekend. We started by brainstorming issues and then chunked them into logical categories (mostly ignoring the City’s topic areas). By consensus we decided to do a circle on waste management.

One reason we chose that is that I think everyone feels the City needs to be contintually prodded about curbside composting. (Oak Bay ran a “pilot project” for the Capital Region many years ago.) Organic material makes up 30% of the Capital Region’s landfill input. My goal was to keep a plastic bag ban off the table, because at less than 1% of landfill input I think it’s an insignificant step that distracts from real waste diversion strategies.

The visioning stage seemed kind of backward given that we had already narrowed in on a topic. The brainstorm-by-yourself-bring-it-back-to-the-group model worked very well for goals and strategies: we didn’t get any duplicates and by merging some ideas we got strong results.

The triple-bottom-line analysis and implementation planning felt like they were worth doing, but they didn’t change our strategies much. I wonder if the kind of people in our circle were the kind of people who do that thing in their heads?

Our three strategies:

• Composting and all recyclables pick-up for every household and in ubiquitous street bins (outstanding issue: cost!)
• Pay businesses and residences for composting and recycling, charge them a lot for garbage* (outstanding issue: will this create perverse incentives?)
• Establish a reusable container “library” with grocery stores, restaurants and other businesses – like the way that beer bottles are standardized and get reused rather than recycled (outstanding issue: implementation details)

* Based on Nudge, I think this could be accomplished just with information, but nobody else had read the book and I wasn’t able to convince them.

Maker Culture is a movement centered around building stuff not because you particularly need it, but because it’s fun to build stuff. It’s like an ultra-late-modern consumer-producer synthesis or something like that. It’s not particularly green: for example, there are environmental economies of scale to producing stuff centrally in big factories.

A weaker form of Makerism is the desire to open things up and take things apart – a common desire even in people who have never heard of Make Magazine nor Instructables. The desire to have source code to the programs you use – for them to be open source – is a special case of this. One of the arguments in favor of open source is that it allows you to maintain programs* that have been abandoned by the original producer (“abandonware”).

The other day someone gave me some speakers. The switch that turned them on stopped working after a while. I figured switches are sometimes fixable, so I removed the screws to take a look at the inside. The case was glued shut (I have no idea why it had screws). Given the herculean effort it would take to attempt a fix that might not even work, I plunked down $20 for another set of disposable speakers made in China. The earth wept.

Perhaps the government should legally require all consumer goods to be user-serviceable and repairable. It would be a step in reversing our culture of disposable goods. I would like to see the Maker community lobby for this.

* There’s no such thing as a program that doesn’t need maintenance:

A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.

Here’s the 60 Minutes piece everyone is talking about, presented just so you have context:

Okay, now I’m going to switch it up and not talk about Bloom itself, favoring a wait-and-see approach. I’m not even going to talk about Google Energy (which makes perfect sense in the context of their networking strategy — “own the grids”).

I’m more interested in the implications of distributed power generation. The way I see it there are three very interesting things poised to happen:

1. Canada’s green energy advantage is slipping away. Lack of investment by several past governments who adopted a “hydro is the future, and we’re already there” strategy have possibly crippled our theorized future as a clean energy provider. How will we get hydro when all those ugly-as-sin transmission lines come down?

   Still, fuel cells are powered primarily by fossil fuels. This means unhealthy projects like the tar sands and Mideast interventionism will remain the order-of-the-day, but at a lower level of emissions.

2. Despite Doerr’s polite, political assertion that the electric utilities have nothing to fear this might be the beginning of the end for them. Home fuel cells would make their business model (generate dirty power far away, transmit it into cities and distribute) totally, instantly obsolete.

   And a sky without so many G-D poles and lines would make photography a heckuvalot easier.

3. “Bloom box” is a hilarious name because that’s a cannabis grow-op term — the high-energy box you put your plants in to flower. Since one major way the police bust grows is by tracking all of our energy consumption, moving the power plant in beside the cannabis plant will protect growers even more from the forces of prohibition and help shield all British Columbians from continuing violations of our privacy.

   IIRC, cannabis breathes CO₂ just like any other plant, so a fuel cell power plant in your grow might actually make your product better — carbon-sink the emissions right into the bud. Delicious!

   The police may respond by using FLIR devices, as they already do illegally in the ‘States. FLIR is a technology that, essentially, lets the cops watch you inside your house from outside. It should be super-illegal for police to use.

These are just some of the multiple simultaneous revolutions that distributed energy generation will allow. I can see why they say its market is measured in “trillions” — just about the only companies unaffected by it will be Big Oil.

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?

Michael tells me that the National Post says that Quebec should hold their tongue on the oil sands as long as they’re accepting equilization payments from that revenue and burning lots of the gasoline themselves.

Via Andrew Potter’s blog, the Ottawa Citizen says that Quebec voters should stop voting for a party whose main platform plank is increasing equilization payments and start voting to green up the whole country.

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.