Can The “Duty To Consult” Strengthen Sustainability?
By Jim Harding
SASKATCHEWAN SUSTAINABILITY – from R-Town News Sept. 04.09
The geological formation, the Athabasca Sandstone, which spreads into northern Alberta and Manitoba, contains the highest grade uranium in the world; and the Athabasca region has the most intense uranium exploration and mining activity anywhere. This is traditional Denesuline territory and yet communities like Fond du Lac, Black Lake and Hatchet Lake have never been consulted about the expansion of uranium mining, with its toxic, radioactive legacy. Thankfully, the Duty to Consult is starting to get more attention. It comes from the right to “free, prior and informed consent”, which rules out monetary or other inducements and requires sufficient time to consider all relevant information before consenting or not to any proposed resource extraction project.
This right now exists in international law. Article 32 of the 2007 UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples calls for such consent, “particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of minerals, water or other resources.” Article 29, which emphasizes consent before hazardous wastes are stored or disposed on Indigenous lands, is particularly pertinent to the toxic, radioactive operations of the uranium industry here. Support for such consent also comes from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169.
Those promoting the nuclear industry in Saskatchewan dance around the Duty to Consult. The Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) Report says, “The process to fulfill the duty to consult with First Nations and Métis communities is not sufficiently defined.” But its’ concern is not about respecting Indigenous rights, but, as it says, that “The lack of a clear process may create an impediment to further exploration and/or development in the Province” (p. 27). Rather than coming out in support of the Duty to Consult, the UDP recommends that Saskatchewan should simply “work with the Federal government to establish clear parameters and accountability …”
Don’t hold your breath. While Canada played a vital role in the drafting of the 50-year old UN Declaration of Human Rights, and our Supreme Court has recently affirmed the Duty to Consult, Canada’s Conservative government almost stands alone globally in refusing to endorse the 2007 UN Declaration. While this doesn’t reduce the international standing of the Declaration, it shows that, under Harper, Canada has become a rogue state regarding human rights.
Given the past performance of the nuclear industry, Indigenous communities will understandably be wary of any pretense to consult. Indigenous communities were consistently sidelined from decision-making when uranium mines started up around Uranium City to supply uranium for nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Aboriginal Rights were excluded from the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry (CLBI) when it explored uranium mining expansion in the late 1970s. The recommendation in 1993 by the Joint Federal Provincial Panel (JFPP) on Uranium Mining, that Cogema’s (Areva’s) Midwest uranium mine not go ahead because “the benefits that could be obtained are insufficient to balance the potential risks” was simply ignored by the Romano NDP government of the day. (The Board of Inquiry was concerned about the cumulative impacts of mines in the Wollaston Lake area.)
In its “consultations” with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) and Métis Society, the industry-based, Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), talks of finding a “willing community” in the north to take nuclear wastes. Yet the NWMO never mentions that after seven years of hearings (1991-1998) a Federal Environmental Review on AECL’s proposed nuclear waste management concluded that “…the concept for deep geological disposal has not been demonstrated to have public support…it does not have the required level of acceptability to be adopted as Canada’s approach for managing nuclear fuel waste”.
When “consultations” with the wider public backfired, the nuclear industry just moved on with the same agenda and “consulted” with economically impoverished Indigenous communities. This manipulative, monetarily-induced “consultation” clearly fails to meet the criteria of Duty to Consult.
Compare this approach with what occurred in British Columbia or Nova Scotia, where environmental health concerns led to long-standing moratoria on uranium mining. Or, in New Brunswick, where such concerns led to banning all uranium exploration that could contaminate community aquifers or rural wells! Or, in the Ottawa valley, where a broad coalition won support for a uranium moratorium from 20 municipalities, including the capital city itself. If we look honestly at what has (or hasn’t) happened here, compared to elsewhere, we find a huge double standard which some are now calling “environmental racism”.
Ontario’s cottagers, farmers, along with Indigenous communities with outstanding land claims, have united against the antiquated policy that allows “free entry” to explore for uranium without owner consent. Cottagers returning to their small lake-side retreats to find trees cut, holes bored and claims stakes have developed more sympathy for Indigenous communities that have faced such arbitrary and destructive actions “in their back yards” for over a century.
Governments and corporations that want to continue the colonial practice of “free entry” are coming up against the international law affirming Duty to Consult. They will try to make it as ritualistic and non-consequential as possible. The rest of us need to work to make it a norm and process that governments respect and uphold. An alliance of Settlers and Indigenous communities committed to such democratization could be very powerful in moving us towards a sustainable society.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
HARDING: WEEKLY - Saskatchewan Sustainability
Can The “Duty To Consult” Strengthen Sustainability?
by Oscar » Sat Sep 05, 2009 5:07 pm
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Why Is Sask Party’s Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) Re
by Oscar » Mon Sep 21, 2009 8:19 am
Why Is Sask Party’s Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) Recommending We Become a Nuclear Waste Dump?
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Sept. 18, 2009
By the time you read this the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) will have held its by-invitation-only, Saskatoon meeting, to help find a “host community” to take nuclear wastes from across Canada. I’ve heard the NWMO pitch and it sidesteps the vital technological, ecological and ethical questions. Why, for example, is Saskatchewan even being considered as a nuclear waste dump, when all nuclear power plants are elsewhere, mostly in Ontario? Why is the NWMO promoting the risks and expense of transporting such wastes to one centralized site in Western Canada? Most fundamental: why has the industry been allowed to continue producing these toxic wastes, radioactive for tens of thousands of years, when, for six decades, they’ve had no credible nuclear waste disposal plan?
The NWMO is a nuclear industry group, federally empowered in 2002 to address the nuclear waste build- up. It was created after the eight-year running Seaborne panel concluded that the Canadian public “did not support” AECL’s proposal for deep geological disposal. AECL spent $700 million of our money on this rejected plan.
Canada has accumulated 2 million spent fuel bundles - 40,000 tonnes of nuclear wastes stored above-ground at nuclear plants. The NWMO wants to encapsulate 300 of these highly radioactive fuel bundles per container for deep burial. To just address existing waste would involve transporting nearly 7,000 of these containers across Canada, through southern Saskatchewan to the north. The NWMO wants to build tunnels one-half KM underground in a 6 KM square area to store these containers; and, after 50 years, retrieve the spent fuel. Protection of groundwater, stable geology and social acceptance are said to be the main criteria, but it will come down to willing politicians and successful economic bribery.
The industry knows full well it has little chance of animating a “nuclear renaissance” unless the public is convinced that a solution to nuclear waste build-up is in the works. In internal documents it’s even called this a “public acceptance” strategy. The NWMO hopes they can get a “host community” to accept what the Canadian public wouldn’t accept. While they talk as though this will be a “willing” community, it’s no accident that they are targeting impoverished, northern First Nations and Metis communities.
After $10 billion more taxpayer’s money down the nuclear sinkhole since 1987, President Obama pulled the plug on the centralized, nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Among other things, environmental scientists found that groundwater was circulating through the proposed waste site. (A similar thing was found in Manitoba, and it’s naïve to think that, in this world of constantly recycling natural systems, they’d find otherwise.) Nevada’s people and government stringently opposed the plan, and we should ask why there isn’t vociferous opposition from Premier Wall and his government to bringing nuclear wastes to Saskatchewan.
The NWMO targeted the Cambrian Shield in Northern Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Manitoba isn’t even on the list because, after the AECL botched millions on nuclear waste research there, the province passed legislation banning nuclear wastes. Last year the Quebec legislature passed a similar law. With most of Canada’s 22 nuclear plants in Ontario it would be too hypocritical to ban nuclear wastes; but opposition to nuclear wastes in Ontario’s north remains steadfast. When the NWMO went to Sudbury, the local member of the Legislature called for out-rightly rejecting NWMO’s proposal.
Not so here, where the Sask Party-appointed UDP recommended we take nuclear wastes from afar. This comes as no surprise when you look at the industry-dominance of the UDP, with Bruce Power, Cameco and Areva all members. The UDP, like the NWMO, is an industry-promoting body; and the government (we hope temporarily) seems to be in the industry’s pocket.
The objectives of Sask Party’s UDP are quite transparent. It supports “the NWMO consultation and siting process, given the potential benefits of a geological repository…” It also supports “any willing host community that comes forward through this process” and, furthermore, supports” the development of the deep geological repository IN THE CONTEXT OF A BROADER NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY.” And it says nuclear research here should include “advanced fuel cycle technologies”, which involve reprocessing nuclear waste to retrieve plutonium for future reactors.
Reprocessing creates a liquefied, more mobile waste and makes plutonium more available for weapons. But this isn’t primarily about nuclear waste disposal. Ontario is looking for a way to try to contain its low and medium radioactive wastes near Bruce Power’s Ontario plant. But Bruce Power wants to expand to Western Canada, and a high-level nuclear waste storage site here is part of the plan. Even if Bruce Power is forced by public opposition and rising costs to cancel its proposed nuclear plants near Peace River, Alberta, and on the North Saskatchewan River, its co-owner, Cameco, has for over a decade endorsed bringing nuclear wastes to Saskatchewan as a lucrative business venture.
The NWMO isn’t talking about how centralizing nuclear waste is part of the industry’s plan to profitably retrieve and reprocess these wastes for future reactors. They’d rather talk about “economic opportunities” for a prospective host community. But the economics are as bad as in any other area of the industry. The NWMO says the costs of its “plan” will be from $16 to $24 billion, up from $13 billion not long ago. Based on past industry cost-overruns, for which the public pays dearly, you can likely double or triple this. But to encourage a community to come forward the NWMO stresses that $200 million a year will be spent for 30 years; a clear bribe to businesses, or Indigenous communities looking for economic opportunities for their impoverished community. This “consultation” breaches the Duty to Consult, which says “There shall be no monetary inducement involved”.
If we want to help halt the production of nuclear wastes and move towards a sustainable, renewable energy system, we’ll need to clearly and loudly say “no!” to bringing nuclear wastes here. If our government truly cares about our and our children’s collective wellbeing they’ll do the same thing as Manitoba, Quebec and Nevada. Saskatchewan’s grass-roots now need to give the government some encouragement to do the right thing.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Sept. 18, 2009
By the time you read this the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) will have held its by-invitation-only, Saskatoon meeting, to help find a “host community” to take nuclear wastes from across Canada. I’ve heard the NWMO pitch and it sidesteps the vital technological, ecological and ethical questions. Why, for example, is Saskatchewan even being considered as a nuclear waste dump, when all nuclear power plants are elsewhere, mostly in Ontario? Why is the NWMO promoting the risks and expense of transporting such wastes to one centralized site in Western Canada? Most fundamental: why has the industry been allowed to continue producing these toxic wastes, radioactive for tens of thousands of years, when, for six decades, they’ve had no credible nuclear waste disposal plan?
The NWMO is a nuclear industry group, federally empowered in 2002 to address the nuclear waste build- up. It was created after the eight-year running Seaborne panel concluded that the Canadian public “did not support” AECL’s proposal for deep geological disposal. AECL spent $700 million of our money on this rejected plan.
Canada has accumulated 2 million spent fuel bundles - 40,000 tonnes of nuclear wastes stored above-ground at nuclear plants. The NWMO wants to encapsulate 300 of these highly radioactive fuel bundles per container for deep burial. To just address existing waste would involve transporting nearly 7,000 of these containers across Canada, through southern Saskatchewan to the north. The NWMO wants to build tunnels one-half KM underground in a 6 KM square area to store these containers; and, after 50 years, retrieve the spent fuel. Protection of groundwater, stable geology and social acceptance are said to be the main criteria, but it will come down to willing politicians and successful economic bribery.
The industry knows full well it has little chance of animating a “nuclear renaissance” unless the public is convinced that a solution to nuclear waste build-up is in the works. In internal documents it’s even called this a “public acceptance” strategy. The NWMO hopes they can get a “host community” to accept what the Canadian public wouldn’t accept. While they talk as though this will be a “willing” community, it’s no accident that they are targeting impoverished, northern First Nations and Metis communities.
After $10 billion more taxpayer’s money down the nuclear sinkhole since 1987, President Obama pulled the plug on the centralized, nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Among other things, environmental scientists found that groundwater was circulating through the proposed waste site. (A similar thing was found in Manitoba, and it’s naïve to think that, in this world of constantly recycling natural systems, they’d find otherwise.) Nevada’s people and government stringently opposed the plan, and we should ask why there isn’t vociferous opposition from Premier Wall and his government to bringing nuclear wastes to Saskatchewan.
The NWMO targeted the Cambrian Shield in Northern Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Manitoba isn’t even on the list because, after the AECL botched millions on nuclear waste research there, the province passed legislation banning nuclear wastes. Last year the Quebec legislature passed a similar law. With most of Canada’s 22 nuclear plants in Ontario it would be too hypocritical to ban nuclear wastes; but opposition to nuclear wastes in Ontario’s north remains steadfast. When the NWMO went to Sudbury, the local member of the Legislature called for out-rightly rejecting NWMO’s proposal.
Not so here, where the Sask Party-appointed UDP recommended we take nuclear wastes from afar. This comes as no surprise when you look at the industry-dominance of the UDP, with Bruce Power, Cameco and Areva all members. The UDP, like the NWMO, is an industry-promoting body; and the government (we hope temporarily) seems to be in the industry’s pocket.
The objectives of Sask Party’s UDP are quite transparent. It supports “the NWMO consultation and siting process, given the potential benefits of a geological repository…” It also supports “any willing host community that comes forward through this process” and, furthermore, supports” the development of the deep geological repository IN THE CONTEXT OF A BROADER NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY.” And it says nuclear research here should include “advanced fuel cycle technologies”, which involve reprocessing nuclear waste to retrieve plutonium for future reactors.
Reprocessing creates a liquefied, more mobile waste and makes plutonium more available for weapons. But this isn’t primarily about nuclear waste disposal. Ontario is looking for a way to try to contain its low and medium radioactive wastes near Bruce Power’s Ontario plant. But Bruce Power wants to expand to Western Canada, and a high-level nuclear waste storage site here is part of the plan. Even if Bruce Power is forced by public opposition and rising costs to cancel its proposed nuclear plants near Peace River, Alberta, and on the North Saskatchewan River, its co-owner, Cameco, has for over a decade endorsed bringing nuclear wastes to Saskatchewan as a lucrative business venture.
The NWMO isn’t talking about how centralizing nuclear waste is part of the industry’s plan to profitably retrieve and reprocess these wastes for future reactors. They’d rather talk about “economic opportunities” for a prospective host community. But the economics are as bad as in any other area of the industry. The NWMO says the costs of its “plan” will be from $16 to $24 billion, up from $13 billion not long ago. Based on past industry cost-overruns, for which the public pays dearly, you can likely double or triple this. But to encourage a community to come forward the NWMO stresses that $200 million a year will be spent for 30 years; a clear bribe to businesses, or Indigenous communities looking for economic opportunities for their impoverished community. This “consultation” breaches the Duty to Consult, which says “There shall be no monetary inducement involved”.
If we want to help halt the production of nuclear wastes and move towards a sustainable, renewable energy system, we’ll need to clearly and loudly say “no!” to bringing nuclear wastes here. If our government truly cares about our and our children’s collective wellbeing they’ll do the same thing as Manitoba, Quebec and Nevada. Saskatchewan’s grass-roots now need to give the government some encouragement to do the right thing.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Will Wall's Government Respect Its Consultation Process?
by Oscar » Sun Sep 27, 2009 9:32 am
Will Wall's Government Respect Its Consultation Process?
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Sept. 25, 2009
On September 15th Dan Perrins delivered his public consultations’ report to Wall’s government.
In March, the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) recommended that Saskatchewan develop nuclear power and create a nuclear waste dump. Growing public concern about UDP one-sidedness left the Sask Party government with no political alternative but to undertake a “public consultation process”, which Perrins led from April to July. With 2,637 people in total attending thirteen public meetings, 1,275 written submissions and 61 stakeholder groups presenting, Energy and Resources Minister Boyd was right in calling it “the broadest and most transparent public debate on uranium development ever undertaken in Saskatchewan”.
Perrins is to be congratulated for his methodic, direct reporting of the 2,263 “responses” he got to the UDP. But Wall’s government, already on record as pronuclear, didn’t hear what it wanted to hear; so, will it listen to Perrins? Perrins’ Executive Summary speaks for itself. He found “the overwhelming response…was that nuclear power generation should not be a choice for Saskatchewan”. “The vast majority of responses were concerned about health and safety impacts of uranium development”; many “believed it is irresponsible for Saskatchewan people to commit to storing nuclear waste that may have implications for future generations.” Perrins said “The vast majority…supported Saskatchewan moving towards a greater focus on alternative energy sources,” noting that “economic impacts – including employment – would be spread throughout the province, rather than focused in one area like with a nuclear power plant.” He also noted, “Energy efficiency was thought to be good economically for the province and for individual households, less expensive for government, and good for the environment.”
Perrins found “A large proportion of people wanted Saskatchewan to go ahead with a study on renewable sources of energy, funded to the same level as the UDP Report.” He noted widespread “…concerns around (UDP) partnership representation including the role of industry and the lack of representation from women and environmental groups…” He stressed that the UDP process did not fulfill a “Duty to Consult process” with First Nations and Métis. Perrins continued, “The majority of responses dealing with the exploration and mining of uranium in the province did not support current or future activities in this area.” The majority “are largely opposed to any upgrading, including enrichment, fuel fabrication, and all other forms of upgrading.” Regarding nuclear medicine, Perrins noted “…many people who expressed support for the production of medical isotopes stipulated it should occur without the use of nuclear fission.” The nine recommendations to Wall are worth reading in detail. In a nutshell, in the Conclusion to his Executive Summary, Perrins said, “time needs to be taken to ensure quality information is available, people are properly consulted and informed decisions are made.”
The Regina Leader Post’s September 16th editorial, predictably, downplayed the “overwhelming response” against nuclear power, suggesting it didn’t necessarily represent “the entire Saskatchewan population.” No mention that, with much greater resources than the grass-roots, community-based groups participating, the nuclear industry and Chamber of Commerce launched a province-wide pronuclear letter writing campaign. Or, that even with all these solicited, pronuclear views accounted for by Perrins, opposition to nuclear power remained overwhelming - 84% of all responses. The editorial reiterates SaskPower’s projected growth in electrical demand as if written in stone, and failed to mention that Perrins recommended that future consultations include sound information on “increased energy conservation efforts”. By attacking those who can’t “escape the bounds of doctrinaire positions – on either side of the nuclear question”, the Leader Post tried to make itself the voice of reason; yet editorially it has resolutely held a pronuclear position, and consistently “reported” on and for the nuclear industry in a highly-biased way.
The Leader Post demonstrated its “reasoned approach” by supporting the government’s interpretation of Perrins’ Report as a “yellow light for its uranium development plans.” There have been a lot of jokes since Minister Boyd said Perrins’ Report was “neither a green light nor a red light…it’s more like a yellow light”. One joke asks “Why is it dangerous to get in a car that Boyd’s driving?”, answering, “because he doesn’t know which light follows a yellow light”.
The Wall government may not have been sincere about public input when it initiated UDP consultations. It may have thought that, with Bruce Power’s multi-million promotions, Chamber of Commerce backing, and skewing the UDP process towards nuclear expansion, the fix was in. Wall’s government may have had no idea that Saskatchewan’s grass-roots, including many who supported the Sask Party, was deeply concerned about the cozy relationship between the government and the nuclear industry.
Can we expect Wall’s government to act differently after Perrins’ report?
It’s not encouraging that, before Perrins finished, Premier Wall was end-running his own consultations, appealing to the Harper government for up to $675 million of taxpayer’s money for nuclear isotope production, using unnecessary fission technology that just happens to be useful for nuclear waste research. (In contrast, Manitoba, which bans nuclear wastes, applied to produce isotopes with a $35 million cyclotron.)
We can’t celebrate that the Wall government initially only gave the Standing Committee on Crowns and Central Agencies from Oct. 6-13th to explore non-nuclear energy options, all behind closed doors; public pressure has thankfully extended these.
And it is not a good sign that Wall’s government is cooperating with the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organizing (NWMO), which the UDP supported, in its search for a “willing” Saskatchewan community to take nuclear wastes from afar.
Perrins concluded the public wanted more balanced, accurate information on our energy options. We need to now convince the government that it, too, needs better information than it has been receiving and acting on, in its unflinching support of the nuclear industry.
- - - -
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Sept. 25, 2009
On September 15th Dan Perrins delivered his public consultations’ report to Wall’s government.
In March, the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) recommended that Saskatchewan develop nuclear power and create a nuclear waste dump. Growing public concern about UDP one-sidedness left the Sask Party government with no political alternative but to undertake a “public consultation process”, which Perrins led from April to July. With 2,637 people in total attending thirteen public meetings, 1,275 written submissions and 61 stakeholder groups presenting, Energy and Resources Minister Boyd was right in calling it “the broadest and most transparent public debate on uranium development ever undertaken in Saskatchewan”.
Perrins is to be congratulated for his methodic, direct reporting of the 2,263 “responses” he got to the UDP. But Wall’s government, already on record as pronuclear, didn’t hear what it wanted to hear; so, will it listen to Perrins? Perrins’ Executive Summary speaks for itself. He found “the overwhelming response…was that nuclear power generation should not be a choice for Saskatchewan”. “The vast majority of responses were concerned about health and safety impacts of uranium development”; many “believed it is irresponsible for Saskatchewan people to commit to storing nuclear waste that may have implications for future generations.” Perrins said “The vast majority…supported Saskatchewan moving towards a greater focus on alternative energy sources,” noting that “economic impacts – including employment – would be spread throughout the province, rather than focused in one area like with a nuclear power plant.” He also noted, “Energy efficiency was thought to be good economically for the province and for individual households, less expensive for government, and good for the environment.”
Perrins found “A large proportion of people wanted Saskatchewan to go ahead with a study on renewable sources of energy, funded to the same level as the UDP Report.” He noted widespread “…concerns around (UDP) partnership representation including the role of industry and the lack of representation from women and environmental groups…” He stressed that the UDP process did not fulfill a “Duty to Consult process” with First Nations and Métis. Perrins continued, “The majority of responses dealing with the exploration and mining of uranium in the province did not support current or future activities in this area.” The majority “are largely opposed to any upgrading, including enrichment, fuel fabrication, and all other forms of upgrading.” Regarding nuclear medicine, Perrins noted “…many people who expressed support for the production of medical isotopes stipulated it should occur without the use of nuclear fission.” The nine recommendations to Wall are worth reading in detail. In a nutshell, in the Conclusion to his Executive Summary, Perrins said, “time needs to be taken to ensure quality information is available, people are properly consulted and informed decisions are made.”
The Regina Leader Post’s September 16th editorial, predictably, downplayed the “overwhelming response” against nuclear power, suggesting it didn’t necessarily represent “the entire Saskatchewan population.” No mention that, with much greater resources than the grass-roots, community-based groups participating, the nuclear industry and Chamber of Commerce launched a province-wide pronuclear letter writing campaign. Or, that even with all these solicited, pronuclear views accounted for by Perrins, opposition to nuclear power remained overwhelming - 84% of all responses. The editorial reiterates SaskPower’s projected growth in electrical demand as if written in stone, and failed to mention that Perrins recommended that future consultations include sound information on “increased energy conservation efforts”. By attacking those who can’t “escape the bounds of doctrinaire positions – on either side of the nuclear question”, the Leader Post tried to make itself the voice of reason; yet editorially it has resolutely held a pronuclear position, and consistently “reported” on and for the nuclear industry in a highly-biased way.
The Leader Post demonstrated its “reasoned approach” by supporting the government’s interpretation of Perrins’ Report as a “yellow light for its uranium development plans.” There have been a lot of jokes since Minister Boyd said Perrins’ Report was “neither a green light nor a red light…it’s more like a yellow light”. One joke asks “Why is it dangerous to get in a car that Boyd’s driving?”, answering, “because he doesn’t know which light follows a yellow light”.
The Wall government may not have been sincere about public input when it initiated UDP consultations. It may have thought that, with Bruce Power’s multi-million promotions, Chamber of Commerce backing, and skewing the UDP process towards nuclear expansion, the fix was in. Wall’s government may have had no idea that Saskatchewan’s grass-roots, including many who supported the Sask Party, was deeply concerned about the cozy relationship between the government and the nuclear industry.
Can we expect Wall’s government to act differently after Perrins’ report?
It’s not encouraging that, before Perrins finished, Premier Wall was end-running his own consultations, appealing to the Harper government for up to $675 million of taxpayer’s money for nuclear isotope production, using unnecessary fission technology that just happens to be useful for nuclear waste research. (In contrast, Manitoba, which bans nuclear wastes, applied to produce isotopes with a $35 million cyclotron.)
We can’t celebrate that the Wall government initially only gave the Standing Committee on Crowns and Central Agencies from Oct. 6-13th to explore non-nuclear energy options, all behind closed doors; public pressure has thankfully extended these.
And it is not a good sign that Wall’s government is cooperating with the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organizing (NWMO), which the UDP supported, in its search for a “willing” Saskatchewan community to take nuclear wastes from afar.
Perrins concluded the public wanted more balanced, accurate information on our energy options. We need to now convince the government that it, too, needs better information than it has been receiving and acting on, in its unflinching support of the nuclear industry.
- - - -
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
What’s The Alternative To Saskatchewan Becoming a Nuclear Du
by Oscar » Sat Oct 03, 2009 5:23 pm
What’s The Alternative To Saskatchewan Becoming a Nuclear Dump?
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Oct. 2, 2009
The nuclear industry supports deep geological “disposal” so that the wastes it creates will be “out of sight, out of mind”, and it can pursue its expansion plans without the waste issue dragging public support down. Internal documents indicate that convincing the public a nuclear waste “solution” is in the works is a central part of its “public acceptance”, PR strategy.
After a 7-year review the Canadian public was forthright that it didn’t support deep geological burial. Instead of honouring this, the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) now approaches impoverished Indigenous communities with monetary inducements to become a “willing” host for a deep geological burial site. The phrase used to summarize their “plan” – “Adaptive Phased Management”, shows they will be winging this venture, as they have for decades. Research on other sites in Ontario and Manitoba has already failed to establish environmental safety; and recently, after $10 billion already expended, Obama abandoned the US nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Deep geological burial is not fundamentally about credible nuclear waste disposal. By centralizing nuclear wastes in one place, with inevitable cost-overruns covered by the taxpayer, the industry would be better able to pursue its desired new generation of nuclear reactors, using plutonium retrieved from spent fuel. Since uranium is a non-renewable and the profitable high-grade ore continues to diminish, the industry is already planning for a shift in fuel. It’s no accident that the reactors proposed for both Alberta and Saskatchewan could use slightly enriched uranium, as well as, potentially, spent fuel. And the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) was quite transparent that it supported the NWMO locating a Saskatchewan community to host a nuclear dump, as well as a publicly-funded research reactor that could do research on new fuel technologies –which could involve reprocessing of nuclear wastes. The two are interconnected.
A lot of misconceptions are being used to obscure this.
I’ve heard that if we took nuclear wastes from elsewhere and buried them in abandoned uranium mines, we’d “put everything back the way it was”, and “make things rights.”
This is fundamentally erroneous since once natural uranium, originally locked in hard rock, is mined and milled it becomes more bio-available to contaminating waterways, airways, food-chains and our bodies.
Further, once uranium goes through the fission process in a nuclear reactor it creates new long-lived toxic elements, such as plutonium, that cannot be allowed to get into ecological or evolutionary pathways.
I’ve also been told that we, in Saskatchewan, have a moral responsibility to take back the nuclear wastes, from nuclear plants from afar, because we sold the uranium fuel in the first place.
Well, first of all, we’ve already been left with very toxic, long-lived radioactive wastes at the mine sites; and furthermore, those selecting nuclear power must be held accountable for the wastes they generate. Ontario, which gets any benefits from nuclear power, needs to also address the burdens in their cost-benefit analyses. They shouldn’t be allowed to “shovel these off” to Indigenous lands already carrying the burden of uranium tailings.
Since the 1970s, the US has banned reprocessing spent fuel due to this increasing proliferation risks and creating an even less manageable radioactive waste stream. Obama recently reaffirmed this. So, why is the Harper government, apparently with the Sask Party government’s tacit support, moving in the other direction? Citizen groups close to US nuclear plants have already rejected the myth that you can permanently dispose of wastes that remain poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years.
Rather than the risky “out of sight, out of mind” approach, they support a quick phase-out of nuclear power, which is responsible for over 95% of the accumulating nuclear wastes that will burden future generations. In turn they propose “Nuclear Guardianship” of the wastes where they have been created, which involves the community “keeping close watch over radioactive structures and materials” in their area. They argue that such wastes “would not be moved to other locations unless it was considered less dangerous…” The objective would be containing “radioactive liquid and solid wastes, contaminated buildings, and equipment out of direct contact with air, water, earth, all living creatures, and fire.” Rather than risk the industry walking away from their toxic legacy, as often occurs, there would be training “for short-term involvement in the long-term work of caring for these nuclear wastes.” In other words, there’d be democratic management, not industrial, bottom-line management. The guardianship vision believes this includes “the need for faithful commitment” and adds “the wisdom traditions of our planet would be very important” to ensure continuity over many generations.
If we buy into the nuclear industry’s agenda of centralizing nuclear wastes, these become available for future reprocessing and retrieving of plutonium fuel. This displaces our responsibilities and creates an even greater magnitude of risk, including from proliferation, for future generations. If we face up to the toxic, radioactive legacy, and the existing responsibilities to future generations already created by the “blind faith” of the nuclear industry, we will be more likely to monitor and minimize these dangers, while quickly shifting towards a sustainable energy path.
Out of sight, out of mind deception will not nurture the ethical, ecological or technological awareness required to face the realities of nuclear waste build-up. The first step in creating this awareness will be to say “no!” to a nuclear waste dump in Saskatchewan
- - - -
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Oct. 2, 2009
The nuclear industry supports deep geological “disposal” so that the wastes it creates will be “out of sight, out of mind”, and it can pursue its expansion plans without the waste issue dragging public support down. Internal documents indicate that convincing the public a nuclear waste “solution” is in the works is a central part of its “public acceptance”, PR strategy.
After a 7-year review the Canadian public was forthright that it didn’t support deep geological burial. Instead of honouring this, the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) now approaches impoverished Indigenous communities with monetary inducements to become a “willing” host for a deep geological burial site. The phrase used to summarize their “plan” – “Adaptive Phased Management”, shows they will be winging this venture, as they have for decades. Research on other sites in Ontario and Manitoba has already failed to establish environmental safety; and recently, after $10 billion already expended, Obama abandoned the US nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Deep geological burial is not fundamentally about credible nuclear waste disposal. By centralizing nuclear wastes in one place, with inevitable cost-overruns covered by the taxpayer, the industry would be better able to pursue its desired new generation of nuclear reactors, using plutonium retrieved from spent fuel. Since uranium is a non-renewable and the profitable high-grade ore continues to diminish, the industry is already planning for a shift in fuel. It’s no accident that the reactors proposed for both Alberta and Saskatchewan could use slightly enriched uranium, as well as, potentially, spent fuel. And the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) was quite transparent that it supported the NWMO locating a Saskatchewan community to host a nuclear dump, as well as a publicly-funded research reactor that could do research on new fuel technologies –which could involve reprocessing of nuclear wastes. The two are interconnected.
A lot of misconceptions are being used to obscure this.
I’ve heard that if we took nuclear wastes from elsewhere and buried them in abandoned uranium mines, we’d “put everything back the way it was”, and “make things rights.”
This is fundamentally erroneous since once natural uranium, originally locked in hard rock, is mined and milled it becomes more bio-available to contaminating waterways, airways, food-chains and our bodies.
Further, once uranium goes through the fission process in a nuclear reactor it creates new long-lived toxic elements, such as plutonium, that cannot be allowed to get into ecological or evolutionary pathways.
I’ve also been told that we, in Saskatchewan, have a moral responsibility to take back the nuclear wastes, from nuclear plants from afar, because we sold the uranium fuel in the first place.
Well, first of all, we’ve already been left with very toxic, long-lived radioactive wastes at the mine sites; and furthermore, those selecting nuclear power must be held accountable for the wastes they generate. Ontario, which gets any benefits from nuclear power, needs to also address the burdens in their cost-benefit analyses. They shouldn’t be allowed to “shovel these off” to Indigenous lands already carrying the burden of uranium tailings.
Since the 1970s, the US has banned reprocessing spent fuel due to this increasing proliferation risks and creating an even less manageable radioactive waste stream. Obama recently reaffirmed this. So, why is the Harper government, apparently with the Sask Party government’s tacit support, moving in the other direction? Citizen groups close to US nuclear plants have already rejected the myth that you can permanently dispose of wastes that remain poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years.
Rather than the risky “out of sight, out of mind” approach, they support a quick phase-out of nuclear power, which is responsible for over 95% of the accumulating nuclear wastes that will burden future generations. In turn they propose “Nuclear Guardianship” of the wastes where they have been created, which involves the community “keeping close watch over radioactive structures and materials” in their area. They argue that such wastes “would not be moved to other locations unless it was considered less dangerous…” The objective would be containing “radioactive liquid and solid wastes, contaminated buildings, and equipment out of direct contact with air, water, earth, all living creatures, and fire.” Rather than risk the industry walking away from their toxic legacy, as often occurs, there would be training “for short-term involvement in the long-term work of caring for these nuclear wastes.” In other words, there’d be democratic management, not industrial, bottom-line management. The guardianship vision believes this includes “the need for faithful commitment” and adds “the wisdom traditions of our planet would be very important” to ensure continuity over many generations.
If we buy into the nuclear industry’s agenda of centralizing nuclear wastes, these become available for future reprocessing and retrieving of plutonium fuel. This displaces our responsibilities and creates an even greater magnitude of risk, including from proliferation, for future generations. If we face up to the toxic, radioactive legacy, and the existing responsibilities to future generations already created by the “blind faith” of the nuclear industry, we will be more likely to monitor and minimize these dangers, while quickly shifting towards a sustainable energy path.
Out of sight, out of mind deception will not nurture the ethical, ecological or technological awareness required to face the realities of nuclear waste build-up. The first step in creating this awareness will be to say “no!” to a nuclear waste dump in Saskatchewan
- - - -
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain. His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Why Did Manitoba Ban Nuclear Wastes…Over Two Decades Ago?
by Oscar » Sat Oct 17, 2009 6:12 pm
Why Did Manitoba Ban Nuclear Wastes…Over Two Decades Ago?
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Oct. 16. 2009
The quest for a nuclear dump began in 1977 when the town of Madoc, Ontario was targeted for geological research by the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL). Stealth-like secrecy was their strategy; until a story in Harrowsmith revealed that 16,000 acres of nearby crown land had been put into reserve. The AECL had to move north, near Atikokan, Ontario, to start test drilling. When locals got wind of this, the newly formed Citizens Committee for Nuclear Responsibility quickly collected 1,700 names opposing AECL’s activities, which was more than voted in their last local election.
The AECL relocated to its Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment (WNRE) at Pinawa, Manitoba. Some local residents were already dependent on AECL employment, and the federal corporation cajoled backroom support for its waste research from the RM of Lac du Bonnet, targeted for its pre-Cambrian granite. A letter to the local paper in 1980 speculating a nuclear dump was in the works, led to the formation of the Committee of Concerned Citizens (CCC). The CCC drew 150 people to its first public meeting which, in spite of obstruction from AECL staff, endorsed public hearings into AECL’s plans. Soon the CCC was receiving unmarked envelopes; the first containing a secret 1977 report, “Radioactive Waste Repository Study, Part I”, laying out the requirements for an underground waste repository, including “retrievability” of spent fuel for future reprocessing. Later the CCC found an underground facility and injection of radioactive tracers into the rock was in the works.
Neither federal, Liberal Energy Minister, Marc LaLonde, nor Conservative Premier, Sterling Lyons, would support public hearings; though Corporate Affairs Minister, and future Manitoba Premier, Gary Filmon, seemed sympathetic. The CCC continued with local action, and George Ylonen, who first exposed the nuclear dump, got elected as Reeve in the targeted RM. The CCC pressed for independent monitoring of the AECL, getting a sympathetic hearing from the newly-elected Pawley NDP government in early 1982. Once the province agreed, the RM couldn’t really say “no!”, and local residents got their foot in “the nuclear door.”
Already irked by noise, dust and potholes in their recreational retreat, Winnipeg cottagers became sympathetic to the CCC. Ironically, one of the first cottagers involved was a retiree, Walter Robbins, who, having once worked in the US Atomic Energy Commissions’ personnel department, knew well the secretive-closed workings of the nuclear establishment. (In 1984 he published a tell-it-all book, “Getting The Shaft: The Radioactive Waste Controversy in Manitoba”.) A leaked report, showing unacceptable levels of radioactivity in the Winnipeg River; and, after provincial monitoring started, in drinking water samples, catapulted public involvement. When the first international conference on nuclear waste storage was held in Winnipeg, in 1983, and media speculated that Manitoba might become the world first “atomic funeral home”, the broader electorate began to awaken.
AECL’s Research Station was at the west entrance to Whiteshell Provincial Park. Though the AECL could bribe or intimidate some residents through jobs, the area’s primary economy was tourism. After becoming Minister of Energy in Mulroney’s government, MP for the area, Jake Epp, enlarged AECL’s subsidies and tried in vain to keep the nuclear waste project alive. However, in July 1987, under growing public pressure, the Pawley NDP government passed The High-Level Radioactive Waste Act. At first it seemed to provide loopholes, e.g. not allowing “facilities for the storage of spent nuclear fuel, not intended for research purposes, that was produced…outside Manitoba”; and not providing “interim storage, for more than 7 days, for spent nuclear fuel that was produced…outside Manitoba.” It, however, clearly states, “No person shall provide facilities for the disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in Manitoba”, and carries penalties up to $1,000,000 a day and/or 12 months in jail for any corporation or directors involved.
The AECL was again sent packing. It tried to quietly return to Ontario, but was rebuffed by residents at New Liskard and Massey. It finally had to take its proposal into federal hearings, from 1991-1998, which concluded Canadians didn’t support deep geological burial of nuclear wastes. The Chretien Liberals then created the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), which, in 2005, started promoting the same thing the AECL had previously secretly pursued, and public hearings refused to endorse. While the NWMO says several provinces “qualify” for a nuclear dump, Quebec, like Manitoba, has now banned importing nuclear wastes. And you can bet that New Brunswick isn’t going to take the 40,000 tonnes of accumulated high-level wastes, mostly in Ontario.
So, the nuclear industry hopes Saskatchewan will be the last stop on its march across the Canadian Shield. Cameco and the AECL began promoting Saskatchewan as a nuclear dump in 1991. Since then, much behind-the-scenes, money-induced promotion has occurred with business, municipal and Indigenous groups. This year the plan came public when the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) endorsed Saskatchewan taking nuclear wastes as part of its nuclear industry expansion plan.
When it was revealed what the AECL had in store for eastern Manitoba, some cottagers asked why this “wasn’t being done in some remote area”, some place with “no people around.” There’s really no such place, and these are “code words” for the far north where mostly Indigenous people live. But the nuclear industry was listening, and the NWMO now targets First Nations and Métis communities, which it may think will be less resistant to economic bribery than people from Madoc, Atikokan, Lac du Bonnet, New Liskard or Massey. It’s surprising that Indigenous organizations here haven’t yet come out adamantly against the idea of disposing of nuclear wastes on Treaty lands, or land still under dispute, as has happened elsewhere. And if any southerners think a nuclear waste dump in the north is a “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” solution, they should imagine thousands of truck-loads of high-level wastes coming endlessly through their villages, towns and cities.
Winoa LaDuke reminded people, when she recently spoke to a Saskatoon rally supporting renewable energy, that with the US nuclear dump abandoned at Yucca, Nevada, and “free trade” between our countries, there’s 90,000 shipments of radioactive wastes waiting across the border. All in all, following the path of our Manitoba neighbours and legislatively banning nuclear wastes in Saskatchewan seems a wise, overdue idea, for us and our grandchildren. Both major parties now need to be encouraged to do the right thing.
= = = =
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain.
His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
From Saskatchewan Sustainability - R-Town News, Oct. 16. 2009
The quest for a nuclear dump began in 1977 when the town of Madoc, Ontario was targeted for geological research by the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL). Stealth-like secrecy was their strategy; until a story in Harrowsmith revealed that 16,000 acres of nearby crown land had been put into reserve. The AECL had to move north, near Atikokan, Ontario, to start test drilling. When locals got wind of this, the newly formed Citizens Committee for Nuclear Responsibility quickly collected 1,700 names opposing AECL’s activities, which was more than voted in their last local election.
The AECL relocated to its Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment (WNRE) at Pinawa, Manitoba. Some local residents were already dependent on AECL employment, and the federal corporation cajoled backroom support for its waste research from the RM of Lac du Bonnet, targeted for its pre-Cambrian granite. A letter to the local paper in 1980 speculating a nuclear dump was in the works, led to the formation of the Committee of Concerned Citizens (CCC). The CCC drew 150 people to its first public meeting which, in spite of obstruction from AECL staff, endorsed public hearings into AECL’s plans. Soon the CCC was receiving unmarked envelopes; the first containing a secret 1977 report, “Radioactive Waste Repository Study, Part I”, laying out the requirements for an underground waste repository, including “retrievability” of spent fuel for future reprocessing. Later the CCC found an underground facility and injection of radioactive tracers into the rock was in the works.
Neither federal, Liberal Energy Minister, Marc LaLonde, nor Conservative Premier, Sterling Lyons, would support public hearings; though Corporate Affairs Minister, and future Manitoba Premier, Gary Filmon, seemed sympathetic. The CCC continued with local action, and George Ylonen, who first exposed the nuclear dump, got elected as Reeve in the targeted RM. The CCC pressed for independent monitoring of the AECL, getting a sympathetic hearing from the newly-elected Pawley NDP government in early 1982. Once the province agreed, the RM couldn’t really say “no!”, and local residents got their foot in “the nuclear door.”
Already irked by noise, dust and potholes in their recreational retreat, Winnipeg cottagers became sympathetic to the CCC. Ironically, one of the first cottagers involved was a retiree, Walter Robbins, who, having once worked in the US Atomic Energy Commissions’ personnel department, knew well the secretive-closed workings of the nuclear establishment. (In 1984 he published a tell-it-all book, “Getting The Shaft: The Radioactive Waste Controversy in Manitoba”.) A leaked report, showing unacceptable levels of radioactivity in the Winnipeg River; and, after provincial monitoring started, in drinking water samples, catapulted public involvement. When the first international conference on nuclear waste storage was held in Winnipeg, in 1983, and media speculated that Manitoba might become the world first “atomic funeral home”, the broader electorate began to awaken.
AECL’s Research Station was at the west entrance to Whiteshell Provincial Park. Though the AECL could bribe or intimidate some residents through jobs, the area’s primary economy was tourism. After becoming Minister of Energy in Mulroney’s government, MP for the area, Jake Epp, enlarged AECL’s subsidies and tried in vain to keep the nuclear waste project alive. However, in July 1987, under growing public pressure, the Pawley NDP government passed The High-Level Radioactive Waste Act. At first it seemed to provide loopholes, e.g. not allowing “facilities for the storage of spent nuclear fuel, not intended for research purposes, that was produced…outside Manitoba”; and not providing “interim storage, for more than 7 days, for spent nuclear fuel that was produced…outside Manitoba.” It, however, clearly states, “No person shall provide facilities for the disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in Manitoba”, and carries penalties up to $1,000,000 a day and/or 12 months in jail for any corporation or directors involved.
The AECL was again sent packing. It tried to quietly return to Ontario, but was rebuffed by residents at New Liskard and Massey. It finally had to take its proposal into federal hearings, from 1991-1998, which concluded Canadians didn’t support deep geological burial of nuclear wastes. The Chretien Liberals then created the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), which, in 2005, started promoting the same thing the AECL had previously secretly pursued, and public hearings refused to endorse. While the NWMO says several provinces “qualify” for a nuclear dump, Quebec, like Manitoba, has now banned importing nuclear wastes. And you can bet that New Brunswick isn’t going to take the 40,000 tonnes of accumulated high-level wastes, mostly in Ontario.
So, the nuclear industry hopes Saskatchewan will be the last stop on its march across the Canadian Shield. Cameco and the AECL began promoting Saskatchewan as a nuclear dump in 1991. Since then, much behind-the-scenes, money-induced promotion has occurred with business, municipal and Indigenous groups. This year the plan came public when the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) endorsed Saskatchewan taking nuclear wastes as part of its nuclear industry expansion plan.
When it was revealed what the AECL had in store for eastern Manitoba, some cottagers asked why this “wasn’t being done in some remote area”, some place with “no people around.” There’s really no such place, and these are “code words” for the far north where mostly Indigenous people live. But the nuclear industry was listening, and the NWMO now targets First Nations and Métis communities, which it may think will be less resistant to economic bribery than people from Madoc, Atikokan, Lac du Bonnet, New Liskard or Massey. It’s surprising that Indigenous organizations here haven’t yet come out adamantly against the idea of disposing of nuclear wastes on Treaty lands, or land still under dispute, as has happened elsewhere. And if any southerners think a nuclear waste dump in the north is a “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” solution, they should imagine thousands of truck-loads of high-level wastes coming endlessly through their villages, towns and cities.
Winoa LaDuke reminded people, when she recently spoke to a Saskatoon rally supporting renewable energy, that with the US nuclear dump abandoned at Yucca, Nevada, and “free trade” between our countries, there’s 90,000 shipments of radioactive wastes waiting across the border. All in all, following the path of our Manitoba neighbours and legislatively banning nuclear wastes in Saskatchewan seems a wise, overdue idea, for us and our grandchildren. Both major parties now need to be encouraged to do the right thing.
= = = =
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who writes a weekly column “Saskatchewan Sustainability” for the R-Town News chain.
His web site is: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Why Is Climate Change Too “Earth-Shaking” To Remain a Politi
by Oscar » Fri Oct 30, 2009 4:10 pm
Why Is Climate Change Too “Earth-Shaking” To Remain a Political Football?
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability – Published in R-Town News – October 23, 2009
I recently presented to hearings on Saskatchewan’s energy options.
http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/Committees ... lAgencies/
Tabled%20Documents/Jim_Harding.pdf
These were called by the MLA's on the Standing Committee on the Crowns, in the wake of widespread public rejection of the pronuclear Uranium Development Partnership, to advise government how to affordably meet projected increases in electrical demand. A leaked report suggests that if we stay the present course our power rates could double over the coming decade.
I presented for the Fort Qu’Appelle KAIROS, an ecumenical group working for climate justice. I noted there’s a global as well as local dimension to energy futures. In December a meeting in Copenhagen will broker an international agreement to follow the Kyoto Accord after 2012. While some regions, notably in Europe, will meet their Kyoto targets, globally we are still moving towards catastrophic, irreversible climate change. We need a steady annual 3% decrease in greenhouse gases (GHGs), yet we continue to go the other way, with 3% annual increases. We need to stabilize CO2 atmospheric levels around 350 parts per million (ppm), yet we are already at 385 and, unless we quickly show restraint, are on our way to 450 ppm.
If unchecked this trend will lead to a 2 or 3 degree C rise in average global temperature, passing the threshold where huge amounts of GHGs are released from the oceans, tundra and forests. Then we go on a climate change “escalator”, with increases of 4, 5, 6 or more degrees. We already tasted the power of nature’s “feedback”, when, in 2002-2004, record-breaking, super forest fires, related to climate change, created nearly half of Canada’s total GHG emissions.
Thankfully there was international agreement last summer to “never exceed” the 2 degree rise; however, reductions to avert this are not occurring. The prestigious Hadley Centre projects we are on track to have a 4 degree C increase by 2060, which would bring unprecedented drought, famine and ecological dislocation. On Oct. 16th, World Food Day, over one billion (1 in 6) humans went to bed hungry for the first time ever. Unless we quickly change course and lower GHGs, by mid-century, we could see a 30-40% reduction in food production, with 2 billion more humans on the planet.
Globally, GHG emissions are about 4 tonnes per person per year. Though China recently surpassed the US as the largest single emitter, its per capita emissions remain close to the global average. It’s the industrialized countries that are primarily responsible for creating the climate crisis, and it will take a steady downscaling of emissions, and developing countries pursuing a sustainable path, to turn this around.
Whether such information startled some MLAs, or left them in disbelief, I cannot say.
But I continued, noting that Saskatchewan was now Canada’s largest per capita emitter, at 72 tonnes a year; nearly 20 times the global average. I laid out the sources of these huge emissions. Most (33%) are from the oil and gas industry, and if you add in other industrial sources, it rises to 39%.
Next comes electrical generation (24%), about two-thirds of which involve fossil fuels, mostly coal.
Then come transportation (16%) and agriculture (14%), with the residential sector responsible for only 3%. Harper’s federal stimulus package highlighted energy efficiency in our homes, further subsidized heavy oil as well as nuclear power, and cut funding for wind power.
There’s no sustainable future here.
Getting scientific perspective on the urgency of our situation is vital if elected representatives are to put their backs into finding solutions. I suggested several things, with policy implications, followed from the trends.
First, to reduce GHGs we have to do more than convert our electrical grid; we could phase out all coal plants and hardly make a dint in our total emissions.
Second, expanding the oil and gas industry, already the top-emitter, into even dirtier, tar sands projects, as has occurred in northern Alberta, is not going to reduce GHGs. Instead we need policies that protect the boreal forest, as a major global carbon sink, and encourage value-added activities in the renewable sector.
I proposed we lower future electrical demand by at least 20% by using energy more efficiently. After all, in July 2008 the Council of the Federation, including Premier Wall, agreed to a 20% increase in energy efficiency by 2020, which could translate into 500-700 MegaWatts (MW) savings here.
I also proposed that we target getting 20% of our electricity (e.g. 800 MW) from wind power, something already achieved in some regions; and that we use existing hydro, including from Manitoba, to help back this up. We need to start using biomass, which, unlike bio-fuels, is carbon neutral; as well as more co-generation and run-of-the river hydro. These actions would be more cost-effective than building expensive thermal plants, which contaminate water and release toxic wastes; and could reduce projected utility rate increases.
Enhanced public transportation and a shift towards less fossil-fuel intensive agriculture are also urgently needed. With the price of renewables like photovoltaic (PV) electricity continuing to fall, today’s electrical consumers can become net producers.
We need policies promoting decentralization, paying small business, farmers, villages, towns and First Nations a fair feed-in fair tariff for producing energy. More jobs would be created and they would be more fairly distributed across the province than with debt-ridden nuclear power.
I did not count on talking to the converted.
The previous Calvert NDP government resisted the Kyoto Accord, and only set a target before its electoral defeat to cut emissions by 32%. And, like the federal Conservatives, it moved the goal-posts - from 1990 to 2004.
Then, to protect the biggest polluter, the oil industry, the Wall government reduced this target to 20%, and moved the goal-posts even further, to 2007. Both parties, whether of the traditional left or right, have been playing Russian roulette with our grandchildren’s future. We must do better.
There’s a way out if both parties have the wherewithal to be non-partisan. The public should accept nothing less than the government quickly starting to make the necessary shift towards sustainable energy. The climate crisis is “too earth-shaking” to remain a political football.
Presentations to the energy hearings are at:
http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/Committees ... lAgencies/
crown_central_agencies_tabled_doc.htm
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who resides in the Qu’Appelle Valley
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability – Published in R-Town News – October 23, 2009
I recently presented to hearings on Saskatchewan’s energy options.
http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/Committees ... lAgencies/
Tabled%20Documents/Jim_Harding.pdf
These were called by the MLA's on the Standing Committee on the Crowns, in the wake of widespread public rejection of the pronuclear Uranium Development Partnership, to advise government how to affordably meet projected increases in electrical demand. A leaked report suggests that if we stay the present course our power rates could double over the coming decade.
I presented for the Fort Qu’Appelle KAIROS, an ecumenical group working for climate justice. I noted there’s a global as well as local dimension to energy futures. In December a meeting in Copenhagen will broker an international agreement to follow the Kyoto Accord after 2012. While some regions, notably in Europe, will meet their Kyoto targets, globally we are still moving towards catastrophic, irreversible climate change. We need a steady annual 3% decrease in greenhouse gases (GHGs), yet we continue to go the other way, with 3% annual increases. We need to stabilize CO2 atmospheric levels around 350 parts per million (ppm), yet we are already at 385 and, unless we quickly show restraint, are on our way to 450 ppm.
If unchecked this trend will lead to a 2 or 3 degree C rise in average global temperature, passing the threshold where huge amounts of GHGs are released from the oceans, tundra and forests. Then we go on a climate change “escalator”, with increases of 4, 5, 6 or more degrees. We already tasted the power of nature’s “feedback”, when, in 2002-2004, record-breaking, super forest fires, related to climate change, created nearly half of Canada’s total GHG emissions.
Thankfully there was international agreement last summer to “never exceed” the 2 degree rise; however, reductions to avert this are not occurring. The prestigious Hadley Centre projects we are on track to have a 4 degree C increase by 2060, which would bring unprecedented drought, famine and ecological dislocation. On Oct. 16th, World Food Day, over one billion (1 in 6) humans went to bed hungry for the first time ever. Unless we quickly change course and lower GHGs, by mid-century, we could see a 30-40% reduction in food production, with 2 billion more humans on the planet.
Globally, GHG emissions are about 4 tonnes per person per year. Though China recently surpassed the US as the largest single emitter, its per capita emissions remain close to the global average. It’s the industrialized countries that are primarily responsible for creating the climate crisis, and it will take a steady downscaling of emissions, and developing countries pursuing a sustainable path, to turn this around.
Whether such information startled some MLAs, or left them in disbelief, I cannot say.
But I continued, noting that Saskatchewan was now Canada’s largest per capita emitter, at 72 tonnes a year; nearly 20 times the global average. I laid out the sources of these huge emissions. Most (33%) are from the oil and gas industry, and if you add in other industrial sources, it rises to 39%.
Next comes electrical generation (24%), about two-thirds of which involve fossil fuels, mostly coal.
Then come transportation (16%) and agriculture (14%), with the residential sector responsible for only 3%. Harper’s federal stimulus package highlighted energy efficiency in our homes, further subsidized heavy oil as well as nuclear power, and cut funding for wind power.
There’s no sustainable future here.
Getting scientific perspective on the urgency of our situation is vital if elected representatives are to put their backs into finding solutions. I suggested several things, with policy implications, followed from the trends.
First, to reduce GHGs we have to do more than convert our electrical grid; we could phase out all coal plants and hardly make a dint in our total emissions.
Second, expanding the oil and gas industry, already the top-emitter, into even dirtier, tar sands projects, as has occurred in northern Alberta, is not going to reduce GHGs. Instead we need policies that protect the boreal forest, as a major global carbon sink, and encourage value-added activities in the renewable sector.
I proposed we lower future electrical demand by at least 20% by using energy more efficiently. After all, in July 2008 the Council of the Federation, including Premier Wall, agreed to a 20% increase in energy efficiency by 2020, which could translate into 500-700 MegaWatts (MW) savings here.
I also proposed that we target getting 20% of our electricity (e.g. 800 MW) from wind power, something already achieved in some regions; and that we use existing hydro, including from Manitoba, to help back this up. We need to start using biomass, which, unlike bio-fuels, is carbon neutral; as well as more co-generation and run-of-the river hydro. These actions would be more cost-effective than building expensive thermal plants, which contaminate water and release toxic wastes; and could reduce projected utility rate increases.
Enhanced public transportation and a shift towards less fossil-fuel intensive agriculture are also urgently needed. With the price of renewables like photovoltaic (PV) electricity continuing to fall, today’s electrical consumers can become net producers.
We need policies promoting decentralization, paying small business, farmers, villages, towns and First Nations a fair feed-in fair tariff for producing energy. More jobs would be created and they would be more fairly distributed across the province than with debt-ridden nuclear power.
I did not count on talking to the converted.
The previous Calvert NDP government resisted the Kyoto Accord, and only set a target before its electoral defeat to cut emissions by 32%. And, like the federal Conservatives, it moved the goal-posts - from 1990 to 2004.
Then, to protect the biggest polluter, the oil industry, the Wall government reduced this target to 20%, and moved the goal-posts even further, to 2007. Both parties, whether of the traditional left or right, have been playing Russian roulette with our grandchildren’s future. We must do better.
There’s a way out if both parties have the wherewithal to be non-partisan. The public should accept nothing less than the government quickly starting to make the necessary shift towards sustainable energy. The climate crisis is “too earth-shaking” to remain a political football.
Presentations to the energy hearings are at:
http://www.legassembly.sk.ca/Committees ... lAgencies/
crown_central_agencies_tabled_doc.htm
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies who resides in the Qu’Appelle Valley
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
How Can The Ecumenical Movement Help Move Us Towards Sustain
by Oscar » Mon Nov 09, 2009 7:19 pm
How Can The Ecumenical Movement Help Move Us Towards Sustainability?
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News on October 30, 2009
The ecumenical movement brings Christians of all creeds together, and the ecumenical group KAIROS brings this unity into activism for human dignity and sustainability. What are its strengths, and what challenges is ecumenism bound to face?
Many theologians say Christ’s last prayer was “that all might be one”. Such hope for “oneness” can nurture more unity of faith among Christian creeds; it can also nurture more unity among humans of many faiths.
Speaking at a recent Regina ecumenical workshop, reported on in Prairie Messenger, the Director of the Prairie Centre for Ecumenism, Janet Bigland-Pritchard, said “We are all of the same faith…but we belong to different communities”, while emphasizing, “We are not of different religions.” Then, distinguishing ecumenism from “inter-faith work”, she said, in building relations with those of non-Christian faiths “we are not trying to become as one”, by which she likely meant that ecumenism remains “the household of Christ.”
The emphasis on commonality among Christian creeds is understandable. However it’s vital to remember that when Christ allegedly said “that all might be one”, he was not speaking to Christians, as there wasn’t a Christian church until well after his death. And a restrictive view of ecumenism can hinder the deeper unity among all humans that many believe Christ was affirming.
Theologian Harvey Cox’s recent book, The Future of Faith, points towards such deeper unity. He notes that the upcoming generation is shifting from belief in creeds towards more multi-faith spirituality. Everyone knows that “creeds are divisive”, in both politics and religion, and increasingly in how these get intertwined with cultural and ethnic identity. Many of today’s geo-political challenges are exacerbated by these creed-based identities, especially when perceived victimization fuels rage and the cycle of violence.
Disentangling this to encourage peaceful, “right relations”, in the pursuit of justice, requires clarity about both religion and spirituality. Faith is about loyalty to what Cox calls “life orientation”, which is bigger and also more flexible than what he calls “mental assent”, which unfortunately often becomes subordination to doctrine. This subordination strengthens the human tendency towards forming in-groups and excluding out-groups, and can feed fundamentalism. Cox argues that Christianity is increasingly about “the way one lives one’s life”, more akin to the first three centuries of Christian communities, before institutionalized belief and doctrinal fragmentation was underway.
For some, ecumenism comes from lowering walls among those who share foundational beliefs, such as belief in The Trinity. For some, the meaning and implications of Christ’s last payer will differ from this. Religious ritual itself carries this ambiguity. Underneath the eucharist, as “the body of Christ”, Oblate theologian Ron Rolheiser says there is an honouring that “everything is meant to be in relationship.” Everything, of course, includes all humans, regardless of belief or faith community, hence the eucharist can be seen as bigger than Christianity.
Vatican II lowered the walls around the Catholic Church, enabling more cross-Christian dialogue. Divisive language rooted in historical events that spawned anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism or anti-Protestantism can be cleared away to enable the greater respect required for greater unity. But real walls exist, such as came down in Berlin in 1989 and is going up in Gaza. To bring these down in the pursuit of peace, based on justice, will require something bigger than Christian ecumenism. It will require healing and reconciliation and new relations among people of all Abrahamic faiths – Jewish, Christian and Muslim. It will require deep understanding beyond the monotheistic tradition; Hinduism and Buddhism, and Indigenous practices, must be included within humanity’s spiritual tent. Ecumenical activism inevitably carries this tension. To be able to effectively “lobby” on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals after the World Religious Summit, scheduled for Winnipeg prior to the G20 meeting in 2010, leaders of all religions will have to become of a faith that both includes and transcends their particular creeds.
Creating unity in diversity is required to move towards sustainability; to create new “order” out of our present economic and ecological chaos. The spirit of ecumenism can help this process along. With such an urgent need for dialogue and understanding on a global scale, perhaps the walls between “ecumenism” and “inter-faith” work should also be lowered. With such divergence in creeds, it is understandable that some want to reassure Christians that they are not being unfaithful to their religious community by engaging in ecumenical work. Once faith is taken beyond creed or belief, into the realm of evolving human spirituality, all people can be reassured that dialogue helps deeper their faith.
Perhaps this is about more than lowering walls around creeds. Perhaps deepening faith is about allowing all the walls that divide us to wither “that all might be one”. We are now realizing that we always were “one” within the astonishing biosphere that sustains us. This new spiritual awakening challenges us, regardless of belief or creed, or faith seen in these narrower terms, to open our hearts and minds to the condition of all human and non-human life. I like to think that Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and the many others who helped prepare us for this huge leap in enlightenment, would all be pleased.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News on October 30, 2009
The ecumenical movement brings Christians of all creeds together, and the ecumenical group KAIROS brings this unity into activism for human dignity and sustainability. What are its strengths, and what challenges is ecumenism bound to face?
Many theologians say Christ’s last prayer was “that all might be one”. Such hope for “oneness” can nurture more unity of faith among Christian creeds; it can also nurture more unity among humans of many faiths.
Speaking at a recent Regina ecumenical workshop, reported on in Prairie Messenger, the Director of the Prairie Centre for Ecumenism, Janet Bigland-Pritchard, said “We are all of the same faith…but we belong to different communities”, while emphasizing, “We are not of different religions.” Then, distinguishing ecumenism from “inter-faith work”, she said, in building relations with those of non-Christian faiths “we are not trying to become as one”, by which she likely meant that ecumenism remains “the household of Christ.”
The emphasis on commonality among Christian creeds is understandable. However it’s vital to remember that when Christ allegedly said “that all might be one”, he was not speaking to Christians, as there wasn’t a Christian church until well after his death. And a restrictive view of ecumenism can hinder the deeper unity among all humans that many believe Christ was affirming.
Theologian Harvey Cox’s recent book, The Future of Faith, points towards such deeper unity. He notes that the upcoming generation is shifting from belief in creeds towards more multi-faith spirituality. Everyone knows that “creeds are divisive”, in both politics and religion, and increasingly in how these get intertwined with cultural and ethnic identity. Many of today’s geo-political challenges are exacerbated by these creed-based identities, especially when perceived victimization fuels rage and the cycle of violence.
Disentangling this to encourage peaceful, “right relations”, in the pursuit of justice, requires clarity about both religion and spirituality. Faith is about loyalty to what Cox calls “life orientation”, which is bigger and also more flexible than what he calls “mental assent”, which unfortunately often becomes subordination to doctrine. This subordination strengthens the human tendency towards forming in-groups and excluding out-groups, and can feed fundamentalism. Cox argues that Christianity is increasingly about “the way one lives one’s life”, more akin to the first three centuries of Christian communities, before institutionalized belief and doctrinal fragmentation was underway.
For some, ecumenism comes from lowering walls among those who share foundational beliefs, such as belief in The Trinity. For some, the meaning and implications of Christ’s last payer will differ from this. Religious ritual itself carries this ambiguity. Underneath the eucharist, as “the body of Christ”, Oblate theologian Ron Rolheiser says there is an honouring that “everything is meant to be in relationship.” Everything, of course, includes all humans, regardless of belief or faith community, hence the eucharist can be seen as bigger than Christianity.
Vatican II lowered the walls around the Catholic Church, enabling more cross-Christian dialogue. Divisive language rooted in historical events that spawned anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism or anti-Protestantism can be cleared away to enable the greater respect required for greater unity. But real walls exist, such as came down in Berlin in 1989 and is going up in Gaza. To bring these down in the pursuit of peace, based on justice, will require something bigger than Christian ecumenism. It will require healing and reconciliation and new relations among people of all Abrahamic faiths – Jewish, Christian and Muslim. It will require deep understanding beyond the monotheistic tradition; Hinduism and Buddhism, and Indigenous practices, must be included within humanity’s spiritual tent. Ecumenical activism inevitably carries this tension. To be able to effectively “lobby” on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals after the World Religious Summit, scheduled for Winnipeg prior to the G20 meeting in 2010, leaders of all religions will have to become of a faith that both includes and transcends their particular creeds.
Creating unity in diversity is required to move towards sustainability; to create new “order” out of our present economic and ecological chaos. The spirit of ecumenism can help this process along. With such an urgent need for dialogue and understanding on a global scale, perhaps the walls between “ecumenism” and “inter-faith” work should also be lowered. With such divergence in creeds, it is understandable that some want to reassure Christians that they are not being unfaithful to their religious community by engaging in ecumenical work. Once faith is taken beyond creed or belief, into the realm of evolving human spirituality, all people can be reassured that dialogue helps deeper their faith.
Perhaps this is about more than lowering walls around creeds. Perhaps deepening faith is about allowing all the walls that divide us to wither “that all might be one”. We are now realizing that we always were “one” within the astonishing biosphere that sustains us. This new spiritual awakening challenges us, regardless of belief or creed, or faith seen in these narrower terms, to open our hearts and minds to the condition of all human and non-human life. I like to think that Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and the many others who helped prepare us for this huge leap in enlightenment, would all be pleased.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Saskatchewan’s Throne Speech: Fiddling with Carbon Capture W
by Oscar » Wed Dec 16, 2009 6:15 pm
Saskatchewan’s Throne Speech: Fiddling with Carbon Capture While the Earth Burns
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News on December 11, 2009
With the Saskatchewan Legislative session over, it’s opportune to look at the government’s handling of the challenges of sustainability. On October 21st the government set out its priorities; but what wasn’t in the Throne Speech is as important as what was. While it highlights debt reduction, there’s no mention of the ecological debt accruing to our grandchildren from unsustainable growth. The government thinks that to win the next election it must tackle healthcare waiting times, but there’s nothing in the Throne Speech on how environmental degradation makes us all sicker.
The Throne Speech was expected to highlight energy policy since controversy over this was the highest-profile “issue” during the first two years of office. But when I looked at the sparse section on energy, way down near the bottom of the Throne Speech, there was no mention of the previously high priority Uranium Development Partnership (UDP). I wondered if I had been in a long, deep dream. Had I only imagined that last October the Wall government gave $3,000,000 dollars to the UDP to recommend how to expand the nuclear industry? Was it only a dream (or perhaps a nightmare) that the UDP’s March report recommended 3,000 MW of nuclear power and a nuclear waste dump for Saskatchewan? Or, that the government spent another $600,000 to consult the public on these recommendations? Or, that in August Dan Perrins reported that over 80% of the thousands consulted favoured a non-nuclear, renewable energy path? And was I dreaming that all-awhile Premier Wall was championing nuclear power in the national media?
How could something as central to the government’s agenda completely disappear from this year’s Throne Speech? All the Speech says is that government will “look at all energy options – including gas turbines, cogeneration, clean coal, wind, hydro, biomass, solar, import contracts and nuclear.” Perhaps this generality is an improvement, as it seems to open up energy options. Perhaps it’s encouraging that the Speech says there will be a “significant commitment to increased wind power”. But what does “significant” mean? Wind now provides only 4% of our electrical capacity, yet we are in one of the biggest inland wind areas of Canada. If we are going to reduce our greenhouse gases (GHGs) cost-effectively we should target at least 20% from wind, which is happening elsewhere, most recently with Nova Scotia’s NDP government. But there’s no sign the government is seriously exploring a renewable energy strategy. It defers policy to ongoing hearings of the Standing Committee on the Crowns on how to “meet Saskatchewan’s future energy needs in the most affordable, reliable and environmentally-friendly manner.”
SKIRTING AROUND COPENHAGEN
Meanwhile 192 countries are in Copenhagen negotiating a new climate deal. As Saskatchewan is among the highest per capita GHG emitters on the planet, revamping our energy policy should be a top priority. But there’s nothing in the Speech on our record-breaking emissions, or any suggestion that the government will do better than moving reduction timelines to protect the oil industry.
No, all the Throne Speech says about Copenhagen is that the province will “ensure carbon offsets or penalties imposed on heavy GHG emitters will stay in the province” and that the “emission-reduction technology” it will invest in will be “carbon capture and storage” (CCS). The Wall government is following in the footsteps of Alberta, which committed an astonishing $2 billion to promote this dubious technology as a way to prolong the tar sands.
Carbon Capture and Storage is contentious in every aspect. It’s hard to capture C02 because it is so stable and not easily bound to other substances. This process uses massive energy, some estimate from 25-40% of the total output of a plant, while doubling costs. It’s challenging to transport C02; the infrastructure costs for moving its mass, which is greater than the original fuel, are prohibitive, especially for long distances. And serious questions remain about environmental safety, e.g. dangers of C02 pipeline or reservoir leaking. The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” could be changed to “fiddling with carbon storage while the earth burns”.
SKIRTING AROUND SASKATCHEWAN
The voting public should rightly ask why the government’s previously high-profile UDP was stricken from the record. After all, for 11 of the 12 months since the 2008 Throne Speech, the UDP and nuclear controversy was front and centre in the media. Such an omission doesn’t happen by accident. So, why did the Wall government chose to censor its high-profile pronuclear agenda? Why no mention at all in the Throne Speech of the outcome of extensive public consultations, surely one highlight of the Wall government’s first term?
Is the Wall government finally admitting the huge capital costs and cost-overruns of the nuclear industry? Is it finally reassessing its blind faith in nuclear power? Consider that the Wall government overestimated revenue from potash by $1.8 billion or 95%, making what the August 25th Regina Leader Post called “…the biggest government miscalculation since PC Finance Minister Gary Lane’s 1986 budget”. That’s quite a feat! Having bragged about reducing our provincial debt, has the Wall government foreseen the political dangers of creating a huge nuclear debt? Is Brad Wall’s back too much up against the Financial Wall to continue flirting with the nuclear option?
I would like to think so; but then why didn’t the Wall government honestly admit this in its Throne Speech, rather than sweeping the whole expensive exercise under the rug? And why didn’t it say something substantial about an alternative energy path? And why isn’t the Wall government asking similar hard questions about the equally uneconomic CCS technology? Has it just gone from the pocket of nuclear into the pocket of coal? And, so no one gets off the sustainability hook, why didn’t new NDP leader, Dwain Lingenfelter, ask hard questions to make this energy policy debacle more transparent to the public?
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News on December 11, 2009
With the Saskatchewan Legislative session over, it’s opportune to look at the government’s handling of the challenges of sustainability. On October 21st the government set out its priorities; but what wasn’t in the Throne Speech is as important as what was. While it highlights debt reduction, there’s no mention of the ecological debt accruing to our grandchildren from unsustainable growth. The government thinks that to win the next election it must tackle healthcare waiting times, but there’s nothing in the Throne Speech on how environmental degradation makes us all sicker.
The Throne Speech was expected to highlight energy policy since controversy over this was the highest-profile “issue” during the first two years of office. But when I looked at the sparse section on energy, way down near the bottom of the Throne Speech, there was no mention of the previously high priority Uranium Development Partnership (UDP). I wondered if I had been in a long, deep dream. Had I only imagined that last October the Wall government gave $3,000,000 dollars to the UDP to recommend how to expand the nuclear industry? Was it only a dream (or perhaps a nightmare) that the UDP’s March report recommended 3,000 MW of nuclear power and a nuclear waste dump for Saskatchewan? Or, that the government spent another $600,000 to consult the public on these recommendations? Or, that in August Dan Perrins reported that over 80% of the thousands consulted favoured a non-nuclear, renewable energy path? And was I dreaming that all-awhile Premier Wall was championing nuclear power in the national media?
How could something as central to the government’s agenda completely disappear from this year’s Throne Speech? All the Speech says is that government will “look at all energy options – including gas turbines, cogeneration, clean coal, wind, hydro, biomass, solar, import contracts and nuclear.” Perhaps this generality is an improvement, as it seems to open up energy options. Perhaps it’s encouraging that the Speech says there will be a “significant commitment to increased wind power”. But what does “significant” mean? Wind now provides only 4% of our electrical capacity, yet we are in one of the biggest inland wind areas of Canada. If we are going to reduce our greenhouse gases (GHGs) cost-effectively we should target at least 20% from wind, which is happening elsewhere, most recently with Nova Scotia’s NDP government. But there’s no sign the government is seriously exploring a renewable energy strategy. It defers policy to ongoing hearings of the Standing Committee on the Crowns on how to “meet Saskatchewan’s future energy needs in the most affordable, reliable and environmentally-friendly manner.”
SKIRTING AROUND COPENHAGEN
Meanwhile 192 countries are in Copenhagen negotiating a new climate deal. As Saskatchewan is among the highest per capita GHG emitters on the planet, revamping our energy policy should be a top priority. But there’s nothing in the Speech on our record-breaking emissions, or any suggestion that the government will do better than moving reduction timelines to protect the oil industry.
No, all the Throne Speech says about Copenhagen is that the province will “ensure carbon offsets or penalties imposed on heavy GHG emitters will stay in the province” and that the “emission-reduction technology” it will invest in will be “carbon capture and storage” (CCS). The Wall government is following in the footsteps of Alberta, which committed an astonishing $2 billion to promote this dubious technology as a way to prolong the tar sands.
Carbon Capture and Storage is contentious in every aspect. It’s hard to capture C02 because it is so stable and not easily bound to other substances. This process uses massive energy, some estimate from 25-40% of the total output of a plant, while doubling costs. It’s challenging to transport C02; the infrastructure costs for moving its mass, which is greater than the original fuel, are prohibitive, especially for long distances. And serious questions remain about environmental safety, e.g. dangers of C02 pipeline or reservoir leaking. The phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” could be changed to “fiddling with carbon storage while the earth burns”.
SKIRTING AROUND SASKATCHEWAN
The voting public should rightly ask why the government’s previously high-profile UDP was stricken from the record. After all, for 11 of the 12 months since the 2008 Throne Speech, the UDP and nuclear controversy was front and centre in the media. Such an omission doesn’t happen by accident. So, why did the Wall government chose to censor its high-profile pronuclear agenda? Why no mention at all in the Throne Speech of the outcome of extensive public consultations, surely one highlight of the Wall government’s first term?
Is the Wall government finally admitting the huge capital costs and cost-overruns of the nuclear industry? Is it finally reassessing its blind faith in nuclear power? Consider that the Wall government overestimated revenue from potash by $1.8 billion or 95%, making what the August 25th Regina Leader Post called “…the biggest government miscalculation since PC Finance Minister Gary Lane’s 1986 budget”. That’s quite a feat! Having bragged about reducing our provincial debt, has the Wall government foreseen the political dangers of creating a huge nuclear debt? Is Brad Wall’s back too much up against the Financial Wall to continue flirting with the nuclear option?
I would like to think so; but then why didn’t the Wall government honestly admit this in its Throne Speech, rather than sweeping the whole expensive exercise under the rug? And why didn’t it say something substantial about an alternative energy path? And why isn’t the Wall government asking similar hard questions about the equally uneconomic CCS technology? Has it just gone from the pocket of nuclear into the pocket of coal? And, so no one gets off the sustainability hook, why didn’t new NDP leader, Dwain Lingenfelter, ask hard questions to make this energy policy debacle more transparent to the public?
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
How Sustainability Challenges Our Universities
by Oscar » Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:45 pm
How Sustainability Challenges Our Universities
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News December 18, 2009
Sustainability requires changes in how we organize society, which will bring changes in how and what we learn. Universities have sometimes encouraged thinking “outside the box”, but over history the church, state, and increasingly corporations have found ways to impose their wishes. Academic freedom is supposed to protect professors in their pursuit of independent truths, and even to criticize power, although this is treated more as entitlement than responsibility. Academic freedom in practice often means the right to pursue strings-attached research.
The university is challenged to not be boxed-in so that it can better embrace the challenges of sustainability. This will be difficult as it already has many vested interests of its own which overlap with interests that strenuously resist moving towards sustainability. The fossil fuel industry is probably the best known example.
There’s much to learn about this from recent events involving professors in government deliberations on energy policy. When the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) was appointed it included two professors of physics. I wondered why they only wanted physicists, since energy policy is typically not their forte. Did they just want physicists to give credibility to their predetermined nuclear agenda? One of the professors, Saskatoon’s Dr. Florizone, asked to head the UDP, has remained high profile promoting nuclear plants and a nuclear waste dump in Saskatchewan. The other physicist, University of Regina’s Dr. Mathie, has been far lower profile, until he recently went public. I attended his November 26th lecture to see how he approached the UDP’s proposals he helped create. But rather than him stepping up to the plate about his role in this $3,000,000 exercise, Dr. Mathie chose a more academic format.
From the start there was a mixed message. His lecture was billed as about “important concepts pertinent to uranium mining, nuclear power, nuclear waste management and nuclear medicine…” Titled “Nuclear Physics for the Public”, it was held because “Many people are not familiar with the nuclear physics implicit in many of these issues”. The announcement made sure to say that “Dr. Mathie has never been an employee of the nuclear power industry”, implying that he could bring objective light to bear on the public controversy.
SCIENCE OR SCIENTISM?
But could he? Mathie, along with CEO’s from major nuclear corporations, had already signed on to the UDP’s pronuclear proposals. While qualified as a physicist, he’d already entered into a much larger public policy discussion, including energy economics, energy technology, environmental health and even participatory democracy. While he purportedly spoke as a detached professor drawing on physics to explain the workings of the nuclear industry, he’d already worked to promote its expansion. He simply wasn’t an independent expert. For those who came willing to accept the inevitable “smoke and mirrors”, the lecture might have been fairly convincing. Anyone listening carefully to how he mixed his basic knowledge of physics with promoting the nuclear industry would come away more aware of the power of language and what might be called “scientism”.
Mathie began with an overhead of his topics: radiation, fission, power generation, nuclear wastes, nuclear medicine and risk in life, all in less than one hour. It’s not realistic to expect a physics or other specialist to be qualified on all this; an interdisciplinary panel of independent experts would be a better venue, if the objectives were truly educational. And how well did Mathie do in enlightening the public on these issues? He worked to convince us that radiation was “natural”. He said “it’s everywhere – in the walls” of the lecture hall where we sat listening to him emphasizing that background radiation “has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power.” But because something is “natural” doesn’t necessarily make it safe. All the heavy metals on the planet, including uranium, are natural, but if our body burden builds up with them we get poisoned (e.g. from lead or mercury). Water is natural but if it gets into our lungs we can drown. The radioactive decay of uranium gives off radon gas, naturally, which, according to the WHO, is the world’s second cause of lung cancer after smoking. Mathie approached radiation as a basic physicist, not in terms of “health physics”, a field he didn’t mention. He spoke of alpha radiation having less “energetics” than beta or gamma radiation, being stopped by a piece of paper; whereas health physics is concerned about the risks from an inhaled alpha particle steadily emitting radiation upon DNA inside our lungs.
AVOIDING ECONOMICS
Mathie simply ruled out discussion of costs, saying “I’m dodging the bullet on economics.” He nevertheless went on to assert that nuclear power was already widespread, emphasizing that it presently provides one-half on Ontario’s electricity, while failing to mention that it provides only 15% of Canada’s. He said nuclear power was “the norm in this day and age” and even claimed that the “the lion’s share of Europe’s power comes from nuclear”, which is simply incorrect. One country, France, is responsible for one-half of Europe’s nuclear power, and with its huge dependency on an aging nuclear fleet France will increasingly become vulnerable. World Status Reports show that since 2002 nuclear has dropped from one-third to one-quarter of Europe’s electricity, while that coming from renewables long passed nuclear and continues to rise.
Next week I’ll further explore the errors resulting when specialist academics with strong industry beliefs get drawn into the policy fray. The errors reflect knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot. And if Dr. Mathie hadn’t been part of an expensive industry-based, policy body, it probably wouldn’t matter. I have no quarrel with him expressing his views on this controversy; his academic freedom and our democracy guarantee this right. However, having taken an appointment on a public policy body paid for by the taxpayer, shouldn’t he be more transparent and accountable for what he recommends? And for the backing used? His format of presenting as objective expert, while oversimplifying health aspects of radiation and ruling out economic facts, is not true accountability. If university resources are going to be used to help shape public policy they must be independent and balanced.
The university’s departmental organization of subject matter can present a highly compartmentalized view of reality. The serious challenges of sustainability require it to become more interdisciplinary and encourage a more holistic, credible approach to applied knowledge.
Next time I’ll further explore the role of the university in sustainability.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding Saskatchewan Sustainability
Published in R-Town News December 18, 2009
Sustainability requires changes in how we organize society, which will bring changes in how and what we learn. Universities have sometimes encouraged thinking “outside the box”, but over history the church, state, and increasingly corporations have found ways to impose their wishes. Academic freedom is supposed to protect professors in their pursuit of independent truths, and even to criticize power, although this is treated more as entitlement than responsibility. Academic freedom in practice often means the right to pursue strings-attached research.
The university is challenged to not be boxed-in so that it can better embrace the challenges of sustainability. This will be difficult as it already has many vested interests of its own which overlap with interests that strenuously resist moving towards sustainability. The fossil fuel industry is probably the best known example.
There’s much to learn about this from recent events involving professors in government deliberations on energy policy. When the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) was appointed it included two professors of physics. I wondered why they only wanted physicists, since energy policy is typically not their forte. Did they just want physicists to give credibility to their predetermined nuclear agenda? One of the professors, Saskatoon’s Dr. Florizone, asked to head the UDP, has remained high profile promoting nuclear plants and a nuclear waste dump in Saskatchewan. The other physicist, University of Regina’s Dr. Mathie, has been far lower profile, until he recently went public. I attended his November 26th lecture to see how he approached the UDP’s proposals he helped create. But rather than him stepping up to the plate about his role in this $3,000,000 exercise, Dr. Mathie chose a more academic format.
From the start there was a mixed message. His lecture was billed as about “important concepts pertinent to uranium mining, nuclear power, nuclear waste management and nuclear medicine…” Titled “Nuclear Physics for the Public”, it was held because “Many people are not familiar with the nuclear physics implicit in many of these issues”. The announcement made sure to say that “Dr. Mathie has never been an employee of the nuclear power industry”, implying that he could bring objective light to bear on the public controversy.
SCIENCE OR SCIENTISM?
But could he? Mathie, along with CEO’s from major nuclear corporations, had already signed on to the UDP’s pronuclear proposals. While qualified as a physicist, he’d already entered into a much larger public policy discussion, including energy economics, energy technology, environmental health and even participatory democracy. While he purportedly spoke as a detached professor drawing on physics to explain the workings of the nuclear industry, he’d already worked to promote its expansion. He simply wasn’t an independent expert. For those who came willing to accept the inevitable “smoke and mirrors”, the lecture might have been fairly convincing. Anyone listening carefully to how he mixed his basic knowledge of physics with promoting the nuclear industry would come away more aware of the power of language and what might be called “scientism”.
Mathie began with an overhead of his topics: radiation, fission, power generation, nuclear wastes, nuclear medicine and risk in life, all in less than one hour. It’s not realistic to expect a physics or other specialist to be qualified on all this; an interdisciplinary panel of independent experts would be a better venue, if the objectives were truly educational. And how well did Mathie do in enlightening the public on these issues? He worked to convince us that radiation was “natural”. He said “it’s everywhere – in the walls” of the lecture hall where we sat listening to him emphasizing that background radiation “has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power.” But because something is “natural” doesn’t necessarily make it safe. All the heavy metals on the planet, including uranium, are natural, but if our body burden builds up with them we get poisoned (e.g. from lead or mercury). Water is natural but if it gets into our lungs we can drown. The radioactive decay of uranium gives off radon gas, naturally, which, according to the WHO, is the world’s second cause of lung cancer after smoking. Mathie approached radiation as a basic physicist, not in terms of “health physics”, a field he didn’t mention. He spoke of alpha radiation having less “energetics” than beta or gamma radiation, being stopped by a piece of paper; whereas health physics is concerned about the risks from an inhaled alpha particle steadily emitting radiation upon DNA inside our lungs.
AVOIDING ECONOMICS
Mathie simply ruled out discussion of costs, saying “I’m dodging the bullet on economics.” He nevertheless went on to assert that nuclear power was already widespread, emphasizing that it presently provides one-half on Ontario’s electricity, while failing to mention that it provides only 15% of Canada’s. He said nuclear power was “the norm in this day and age” and even claimed that the “the lion’s share of Europe’s power comes from nuclear”, which is simply incorrect. One country, France, is responsible for one-half of Europe’s nuclear power, and with its huge dependency on an aging nuclear fleet France will increasingly become vulnerable. World Status Reports show that since 2002 nuclear has dropped from one-third to one-quarter of Europe’s electricity, while that coming from renewables long passed nuclear and continues to rise.
Next week I’ll further explore the errors resulting when specialist academics with strong industry beliefs get drawn into the policy fray. The errors reflect knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot. And if Dr. Mathie hadn’t been part of an expensive industry-based, policy body, it probably wouldn’t matter. I have no quarrel with him expressing his views on this controversy; his academic freedom and our democracy guarantee this right. However, having taken an appointment on a public policy body paid for by the taxpayer, shouldn’t he be more transparent and accountable for what he recommends? And for the backing used? His format of presenting as objective expert, while oversimplifying health aspects of radiation and ruling out economic facts, is not true accountability. If university resources are going to be used to help shape public policy they must be independent and balanced.
The university’s departmental organization of subject matter can present a highly compartmentalized view of reality. The serious challenges of sustainability require it to become more interdisciplinary and encourage a more holistic, credible approach to applied knowledge.
Next time I’ll further explore the role of the university in sustainability.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
The University Needs Some Soul-Searching about Sustainabilit
by Oscar » Thu Dec 31, 2009 5:37 pm
The University Needs Some Soul-Searching about Sustainability
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Dec. 24.09
Can we learn about the challenge sustainability presents our universities, from the roles professors play in public policy? On November 26th Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) member, physics Professor Mathie lectured as if he was presenting “the basic science going on in these discussions”. This wasn’t really true. Whether discussing radiation, fission, power generation, nuclear wastes or nuclear medicine, Mathie selected knowledge to give backing to his support for the nuclear industry. He did what philosophers of science call post-hoc rationalization, creating an intellectual foundation for opinions already held. This gets us in serious trouble. Mathie ruling out the cost of energy didn’t really dodge the “economic bullet”, as shown by Minister Boyd’s December 17th announcement that nuclear is too costly and inappropriate for our grid. And not seriously talking about environmental health doesn’t make us safer, for we don’t live in a make-believe world.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Discussing the build-up of nuclear wastes, Professor Mathie argued “it’s not because there’s no solution or no research.” Leave it to the expert, right? Yet the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is all industry-based with industry-appointed experts. And the federal review (1991-98) concluded Canadians don’t support deep geological storage, which the UDP and NWMO continue to promote. No mention that deep geological research has been stopped in Ontario and that both Quebec and Ontario ban nuclear wastes; or that centralized storage allowing future reprocessing of spent fuel makes plutonium more available for weapons. Or that President Obama just reaffirmed the US ban on reprocessing, a ban supported by the US Academy of Scientists, including its physicists.
Mathie lectured about “risks in life”. He reiterated that nearly one-half of us will get cancer and one-quarter of us will die from it. But this wasn’t a wake-up call to better understand how these risks accumulated to bring cancer from the 8th to 2nd cause of death. No, his risk philosophy was to get us to believe that there were relatively few additional risks from the nuclear industry when compared to overall cancer. Sounds reassuring, but this greatly oversimplifies the science of epidemiology and how health policy research should be done. The smoking industry obscured its major role in lung cancer by financing studies that compared lung cancer among smokers with average cancer rates. Differences were found but they weren’t statistical enough, industry claimed, so they stalled public health intervention. This was fallacious because the average rates already included lung cancers among smokers. You need to compare the lung cancer rate of non-smokers to smokers, which showed cigarettes are the primary cause of lung cancer.
Mathie doesn’t stand alone in his balancing act. The Chair of the UDP, Professor Florizone, also a physicist, wrote a piece for the Nov. 19th Star Phoenix entitled “Nuclear industry offers challenges and opportunities”. He wasn’t identified as the Financial VP of the University of Saskatchewan, which would be a major beneficiary if the UDP’s proposals go ahead. Rather, Florizone is identified as a “policy fellow at the John-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy”. Interestingly, the UDP that Florizone chaired said “Partnering with the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School …would help create relevant policy research and promote public discussion of nuclear-related issues” (p. 80-81). It all seems very incestuous. This School has already sponsored Florizone but to my knowledge hasn’t invited anyone outside the orbit of the nuclear industry. The UDP fully admits that “A close working relationship exists between Saskatchewan’s universities and industry”, and they want more. But there’s a cost, including for the quality of the education that the university provides. Blatant conflicts of interest such as we see with Professor Florizone will naturally increase with concentration of power.
Florizone’s opinion piece claims that “the nuclear option is cost competitive”, but then lists “capital costs” as one of the nuclear industry’s “challenges”. Yet he doesn’t mention that AECL’s recent proposal to the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) was three times the figure of $4.000 kW capacity he uses. (The UDP used $3,850.) How can an academic sworn to a version of the Hippocratic Oath say this with a straight face? As a Star Phoenix letter to the editor said, it is surprising “that a nuclear physicist working in finance should have taken so long to come to an awareness of this serious problem.”
INNOVATION SASKATCHEWAN
Has either the government or the universities learned anything from this debacle? Perhaps the recent announcement about university involvement in Innovation Saskatchewan provides a hint. Minister Boyd announced the board would include two Deans from the universities, which might seem all right, except they are both from engineering. The board includes the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Mining Association (SMA) and CEO of the Calgary-based drilling company Total Energy Services Ltd. It sounds like the government wants academics to help industry expand uranium mining, oil and gas and perhaps tarsands in Saskatchewan. Apparently, here we go again!
What’s wrong with this picture? A narrow, instrumental relationship between the university and industry can never serve the greater public interest. Not only will the independence of the university be questioned but so, too, will the credibility of its education. The university has a higher purpose than colluding with government and industry to expand unsustainable economic growth, so it’s probably time to start asking fundamental questions about knowledge. For centuries we’ve tried to understand ourselves and the world by breaking things down and taking them apart. While we’ve learned a lot of analytical knowledge from this, when we look at the effects of our narrow-minded applications (e.g. climate change) we soon realize we haven’t become wiser. Sustainability challenges us to be wiser; to put the pieces back together and to finally realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Applying a compartmentalized view of the world may be of short-term value to industry but industry’s bottom line is not sustainability. If we are going to learn to do better, the university will have to help. It has some soul-searching to do while it still has a soul to save.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Dec. 24.09
Can we learn about the challenge sustainability presents our universities, from the roles professors play in public policy? On November 26th Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) member, physics Professor Mathie lectured as if he was presenting “the basic science going on in these discussions”. This wasn’t really true. Whether discussing radiation, fission, power generation, nuclear wastes or nuclear medicine, Mathie selected knowledge to give backing to his support for the nuclear industry. He did what philosophers of science call post-hoc rationalization, creating an intellectual foundation for opinions already held. This gets us in serious trouble. Mathie ruling out the cost of energy didn’t really dodge the “economic bullet”, as shown by Minister Boyd’s December 17th announcement that nuclear is too costly and inappropriate for our grid. And not seriously talking about environmental health doesn’t make us safer, for we don’t live in a make-believe world.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Discussing the build-up of nuclear wastes, Professor Mathie argued “it’s not because there’s no solution or no research.” Leave it to the expert, right? Yet the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is all industry-based with industry-appointed experts. And the federal review (1991-98) concluded Canadians don’t support deep geological storage, which the UDP and NWMO continue to promote. No mention that deep geological research has been stopped in Ontario and that both Quebec and Ontario ban nuclear wastes; or that centralized storage allowing future reprocessing of spent fuel makes plutonium more available for weapons. Or that President Obama just reaffirmed the US ban on reprocessing, a ban supported by the US Academy of Scientists, including its physicists.
Mathie lectured about “risks in life”. He reiterated that nearly one-half of us will get cancer and one-quarter of us will die from it. But this wasn’t a wake-up call to better understand how these risks accumulated to bring cancer from the 8th to 2nd cause of death. No, his risk philosophy was to get us to believe that there were relatively few additional risks from the nuclear industry when compared to overall cancer. Sounds reassuring, but this greatly oversimplifies the science of epidemiology and how health policy research should be done. The smoking industry obscured its major role in lung cancer by financing studies that compared lung cancer among smokers with average cancer rates. Differences were found but they weren’t statistical enough, industry claimed, so they stalled public health intervention. This was fallacious because the average rates already included lung cancers among smokers. You need to compare the lung cancer rate of non-smokers to smokers, which showed cigarettes are the primary cause of lung cancer.
Mathie doesn’t stand alone in his balancing act. The Chair of the UDP, Professor Florizone, also a physicist, wrote a piece for the Nov. 19th Star Phoenix entitled “Nuclear industry offers challenges and opportunities”. He wasn’t identified as the Financial VP of the University of Saskatchewan, which would be a major beneficiary if the UDP’s proposals go ahead. Rather, Florizone is identified as a “policy fellow at the John-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy”. Interestingly, the UDP that Florizone chaired said “Partnering with the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School …would help create relevant policy research and promote public discussion of nuclear-related issues” (p. 80-81). It all seems very incestuous. This School has already sponsored Florizone but to my knowledge hasn’t invited anyone outside the orbit of the nuclear industry. The UDP fully admits that “A close working relationship exists between Saskatchewan’s universities and industry”, and they want more. But there’s a cost, including for the quality of the education that the university provides. Blatant conflicts of interest such as we see with Professor Florizone will naturally increase with concentration of power.
Florizone’s opinion piece claims that “the nuclear option is cost competitive”, but then lists “capital costs” as one of the nuclear industry’s “challenges”. Yet he doesn’t mention that AECL’s recent proposal to the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) was three times the figure of $4.000 kW capacity he uses. (The UDP used $3,850.) How can an academic sworn to a version of the Hippocratic Oath say this with a straight face? As a Star Phoenix letter to the editor said, it is surprising “that a nuclear physicist working in finance should have taken so long to come to an awareness of this serious problem.”
INNOVATION SASKATCHEWAN
Has either the government or the universities learned anything from this debacle? Perhaps the recent announcement about university involvement in Innovation Saskatchewan provides a hint. Minister Boyd announced the board would include two Deans from the universities, which might seem all right, except they are both from engineering. The board includes the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Mining Association (SMA) and CEO of the Calgary-based drilling company Total Energy Services Ltd. It sounds like the government wants academics to help industry expand uranium mining, oil and gas and perhaps tarsands in Saskatchewan. Apparently, here we go again!
What’s wrong with this picture? A narrow, instrumental relationship between the university and industry can never serve the greater public interest. Not only will the independence of the university be questioned but so, too, will the credibility of its education. The university has a higher purpose than colluding with government and industry to expand unsustainable economic growth, so it’s probably time to start asking fundamental questions about knowledge. For centuries we’ve tried to understand ourselves and the world by breaking things down and taking them apart. While we’ve learned a lot of analytical knowledge from this, when we look at the effects of our narrow-minded applications (e.g. climate change) we soon realize we haven’t become wiser. Sustainability challenges us to be wiser; to put the pieces back together and to finally realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Applying a compartmentalized view of the world may be of short-term value to industry but industry’s bottom line is not sustainability. If we are going to learn to do better, the university will have to help. It has some soul-searching to do while it still has a soul to save.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
After Copenhagen: A New Year’s Resolution Worth Making
by Oscar » Mon Jan 04, 2010 7:44 pm
After Copenhagen: A New Year’s Resolution Worth Making
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Dec. 31.09
Was Copenhagen a predictable failure? Does it still present us with an opportunity to create a comprehensive, binding agreement that will redirect our development path away from the catastrophic, irreversible climate change brought on by the carbon-economy? It depends on what we now do, especially in the build-up to meetings in Mexico in 2010. And in the aftermath of Copenhagen, nowhere is there more need for “doing” than in Canada and Saskatchewan.
Copenhagen was an unprecedented gathering in the history of the human race. The process of weaning ourselves from the carbon-economy started when 172 countries met in Rio in 1992, and continued on with the Kyoto Accord in 1998. In Copenhagen 193 countries and 131 national leaders assembled to try to enact collective foresight. As Mexico’s President Calderon put it, this is “the only world we have”; then he asked if “we as a species are capable of meeting the challenge of climate change.” Contrast this with our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who initially refused to attend Copenhagen, and then reversed his position after President Obama announced his plan to go.
With two years of planning we might have expected the two-week Copenhagen meeting to iron out a substantive, enforceable treaty to replace the Kyoto Accord that expires in two years. But in the end, geo-politics trumped the stalled UN-led inter-governmental process, as President Obama held private meetings with China and other emerging carbon-economies to work out an Accord that ended up being begrudgingly accepted by the larger meeting. This may partly be a good thing as China and the US, just two of the 193 countries present, account for one-half of the globe’s greenhouse gases (GHGs), and neither backed the Kyoto Accord.
HUGE DISCREPANCIES
However, the discrepancy between the stated goals and actual pledges is enormous. There was agreement in principle to keep temperatures from rising 2 degrees C and to have global GHG emissions reduced by 2020. But there’s no binding mechanism, and if you look at the totally voluntary individual country commitments they simply don’t add up to achieving these goals. The Accord also includes a $30 billion fund to help developing countries convert to low-carbon technology, and a commitment to find $100 billion a year for this by 2020. This is far short of what the UN says will be required. Contrast this approach with the hundreds of billions of dollars so quickly found to bail out the banks during last year’s financial crisis.
This won’t be reassuring to the people of the Maldives whose island-home will surely sink below rising sea levels as glaciers worldwide continue to melt at rates exceeding the “worst case” scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Maldives and other vulnerable countries pressed for keeping global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees C, while the EU, the only region that will (be) meeting its Kyoto targets, pushed for greater reductions of GHGs. The latest science seems to support them.
Canada’s contradictions are the worst on the planet. A fossil fuel defender and climate change skeptic at any cost, Harper abandoned Canada’s Kyoto commitment to reduce GHGs by 6% below 1990 levels by 2020. Noticeably hiding behind Environment Minister Jim Prentice at Copenhagen, Harper restated his goal of a 20% reduction from 2006 levels by 2020. This would allow a massive rise over 1990 levels, which is totally incompatible with the goals of the Copenhagen Accord, which Harper accepted.
CANADA’S UNTENABLE POSITION
The Globe and Mail’s Dec. 19th editorial highlighted Harper’s totally untenable position saying, “Canada’s unwillingness to do any work whatsoever was on full display at Copenhagen”, continuing, “The federal government seems unaware of the damage done to its reputation at Copenhagen.” It emphasized that “among developed countries Canada stood alone in its apparent apathy.”
This affects us all. Canada got the “Fossil of the Year” award from global environmental groups and some people have called for the expulsion of Canada from the Commonwealth, drawing an analogy with the expulsion of South Africa’s past apartheid regime. They say Canada is to climate change what South Africa was to systemic racism.
Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Nancy Heppner was positive about the Copenhagen Accord without seeming to gather the huge discrepancy between the stated objectives and voluntary commitments. Saskatchewan has the exact same position as Harper’s government, committing only to a 20% reduction of GHGs from 2006 levels by 2020, amounting to a huge increase over 1990 levels. Meanwhile we have the highest per capita GHG emissions in all of Canada and, at 72 tonnes per person, we are 20 times the global average. Whether it is denial or short-term economic self-interest or a combination of these, we are now one of the environmental “bad guys”. The failings of our current political leadership are a challenge for our democracy to become more vibrant and bring Canada back to responsible behaviour within the international community. Copenhagen’s “failure” demands bottom-up democracy here, now.
One way to explain the discrepancy at Copenhagen is that scientists are saying one thing while politicians and taxpayers are saying something else; this is too simple. In our eagerness to play our role in averting irreversible climate disaster, the Canadian public is far ahead of the Harper and Wall governments. Over the last year we have strenuously debated nuclear power and, to its credit, the Saskatchewan government has now announced it will follow a non-nuclear energy policy. As we approach 2010 perhaps we can make a collective commitment to quickly steer our province to renewable energy and a sustainable economy, which will reduce our emissions and get us back on track with the human species. This is a New Year’s resolution worth making.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Dec. 31.09
Was Copenhagen a predictable failure? Does it still present us with an opportunity to create a comprehensive, binding agreement that will redirect our development path away from the catastrophic, irreversible climate change brought on by the carbon-economy? It depends on what we now do, especially in the build-up to meetings in Mexico in 2010. And in the aftermath of Copenhagen, nowhere is there more need for “doing” than in Canada and Saskatchewan.
Copenhagen was an unprecedented gathering in the history of the human race. The process of weaning ourselves from the carbon-economy started when 172 countries met in Rio in 1992, and continued on with the Kyoto Accord in 1998. In Copenhagen 193 countries and 131 national leaders assembled to try to enact collective foresight. As Mexico’s President Calderon put it, this is “the only world we have”; then he asked if “we as a species are capable of meeting the challenge of climate change.” Contrast this with our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who initially refused to attend Copenhagen, and then reversed his position after President Obama announced his plan to go.
With two years of planning we might have expected the two-week Copenhagen meeting to iron out a substantive, enforceable treaty to replace the Kyoto Accord that expires in two years. But in the end, geo-politics trumped the stalled UN-led inter-governmental process, as President Obama held private meetings with China and other emerging carbon-economies to work out an Accord that ended up being begrudgingly accepted by the larger meeting. This may partly be a good thing as China and the US, just two of the 193 countries present, account for one-half of the globe’s greenhouse gases (GHGs), and neither backed the Kyoto Accord.
HUGE DISCREPANCIES
However, the discrepancy between the stated goals and actual pledges is enormous. There was agreement in principle to keep temperatures from rising 2 degrees C and to have global GHG emissions reduced by 2020. But there’s no binding mechanism, and if you look at the totally voluntary individual country commitments they simply don’t add up to achieving these goals. The Accord also includes a $30 billion fund to help developing countries convert to low-carbon technology, and a commitment to find $100 billion a year for this by 2020. This is far short of what the UN says will be required. Contrast this approach with the hundreds of billions of dollars so quickly found to bail out the banks during last year’s financial crisis.
This won’t be reassuring to the people of the Maldives whose island-home will surely sink below rising sea levels as glaciers worldwide continue to melt at rates exceeding the “worst case” scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Maldives and other vulnerable countries pressed for keeping global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees C, while the EU, the only region that will (be) meeting its Kyoto targets, pushed for greater reductions of GHGs. The latest science seems to support them.
Canada’s contradictions are the worst on the planet. A fossil fuel defender and climate change skeptic at any cost, Harper abandoned Canada’s Kyoto commitment to reduce GHGs by 6% below 1990 levels by 2020. Noticeably hiding behind Environment Minister Jim Prentice at Copenhagen, Harper restated his goal of a 20% reduction from 2006 levels by 2020. This would allow a massive rise over 1990 levels, which is totally incompatible with the goals of the Copenhagen Accord, which Harper accepted.
CANADA’S UNTENABLE POSITION
The Globe and Mail’s Dec. 19th editorial highlighted Harper’s totally untenable position saying, “Canada’s unwillingness to do any work whatsoever was on full display at Copenhagen”, continuing, “The federal government seems unaware of the damage done to its reputation at Copenhagen.” It emphasized that “among developed countries Canada stood alone in its apparent apathy.”
This affects us all. Canada got the “Fossil of the Year” award from global environmental groups and some people have called for the expulsion of Canada from the Commonwealth, drawing an analogy with the expulsion of South Africa’s past apartheid regime. They say Canada is to climate change what South Africa was to systemic racism.
Saskatchewan’s Environment Minister Nancy Heppner was positive about the Copenhagen Accord without seeming to gather the huge discrepancy between the stated objectives and voluntary commitments. Saskatchewan has the exact same position as Harper’s government, committing only to a 20% reduction of GHGs from 2006 levels by 2020, amounting to a huge increase over 1990 levels. Meanwhile we have the highest per capita GHG emissions in all of Canada and, at 72 tonnes per person, we are 20 times the global average. Whether it is denial or short-term economic self-interest or a combination of these, we are now one of the environmental “bad guys”. The failings of our current political leadership are a challenge for our democracy to become more vibrant and bring Canada back to responsible behaviour within the international community. Copenhagen’s “failure” demands bottom-up democracy here, now.
One way to explain the discrepancy at Copenhagen is that scientists are saying one thing while politicians and taxpayers are saying something else; this is too simple. In our eagerness to play our role in averting irreversible climate disaster, the Canadian public is far ahead of the Harper and Wall governments. Over the last year we have strenuously debated nuclear power and, to its credit, the Saskatchewan government has now announced it will follow a non-nuclear energy policy. As we approach 2010 perhaps we can make a collective commitment to quickly steer our province to renewable energy and a sustainable economy, which will reduce our emissions and get us back on track with the human species. This is a New Year’s resolution worth making.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies. His website is http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Are Alternative Sources of Energy Available?
by Oscar » Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:55 pm
Are Alternative Sources of Energy Available?
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Jan. 08, 2010
Saskatchewan people are becoming more informed about energy, as we should. Having twenty times (20 X) the global, per capita, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions challenges us to quickly convert to sustainable energy. Over the last year we’ve had a controversy over the “nuclear option” and the provincial government has now recognized that nuclear power is too costly and inappropriate for our needs. With the nuclear option hopefully put to rest we must seriously explore alternative energy. The Standing Committee on the Crowns is still looking at our energy options, but some of its members are understandably predisposed to conventional systems, such as coal and biofuels. It will take us a while to stop assuming that energy must come from large thermal plants that generate electricity, or large refineries that produce fuels.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
The needed transition to sustainable energy requires democratizing the process of creating energy policy. Public consultations on the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) report were a good start, but the broader citizenry and electorate needs to become more engaged. And enhanced citizen involvement requires more knowledge about energy terminology and concepts.
We all know the term “watt” because we use low wattage incandescent light bulbs in our homes. And we are all learning about energy efficiency because we know that compact fluorescent bulbs can provide as much light while using only about 25% of the electricity. Such moves toward energy efficiency are already our main and cheapest source of new electricity.
We rightly focus on the huge carbon footprint of the gas we use in our cars and trucks; but the related waste of energy has received less attention. Less than 20% of the energy in a litre of gasoline is actually used to move our vehicles; the rest is released as waste heat. Think of the inefficiency! If transportation was “fueled” by electricity from sustainable sources, about 80% of the energy would be used to move our vehicles. Far more “bang” for the buck. Energy efficiency is a win-win: reducing GHGs while creating more energy productivity.
Projections by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries about future energy demand intentionally downplay energy efficiency. However, on a global scale the savings would be staggering. To show this we need some terms based on “watts”. A kilowatt (KW) is a thousand watts, which is how we measure the electricity in our homes. A megawatt (MW) is a million watts, which is how we measure the capacity of our grid, which in Saskatchewan is around 3,600 MW. A billion watts is a gigawatt (GW), which is how countries can measure their capacity, and a trillion watts is a terawatt (TW), which is how we measure global capacity. These terms can all be used for measuring output, for example kilowatt hours (kWh), which is one thousand watts for an hour.
When demand is highest we call it “peak load”. Globally, peak demand is now around 12.5 TW, and conventional forecasters are saying that by 2030 it will rise to around 16.9 TW. The feature article in the November 2009 Scientific American however, disputes this, saying that with efficiencies from shifting to renewables, peak demand in 2030 could be 11.5 TW, which is lower than today. We see these energy savings with compact fluorescent lighting and electric cars, but the process has hardly begun.
RENEWABLE POTENTIAL
Corporations that profit from inefficient, polluting, non-renewables like coal, oil or uranium want to postpone our conversion to sustainable energy as long as possible. One tactic used to obscure self-interest is to downplay the potential of renewables. What does the Scientific American feature say about this? It concludes that globally there is around 1,700 TW of wind energy and that 40-85 TW of this is harvestable with today’s technology. It concludes there is 6,500 TW of solar energy, and that 580 TW of this is presently harvestable. Currently we only get .02 TW from wind and .008 TW from solar.
There’s clearly no shortage of renewable energy, but what might a sustainable energy plan look like? The Scientific American feature suggests we could get 51% of future energy from wind, 40% from solar and 9% from water power, which translates into 5.8 TW from wind, 4.6 TW from solar energy and 1.1 TW from water to meet projected demand by 2030. To accomplish this would require 3.8 million 5-MW wind turbines; 89,000 300-MW solar plants and millions of photovoltaic (PV) rooftop installations; 5,350 100- MW geothermal plants and several hundred thousand small tidal turbines and wave converters along with 900 1,300-MW hydro plants.
Supporters of the energy status quo find fault with renewables wherever they can, but their motives aren’t always pure. Certainly wind turbines must be better located out of the paths of migrating birds and bats. But the impacts of renewables must be judged in comparison to today’s energy impacts: 3.8 million wind turbines may sound like a lot, until you realize that 73 million cars and trucks are produced globally each year. At present these vehicles are highly inefficient while spewing masses of gases into the atmosphere. Were vehicles powered with electricity from renewables, they would neither waste vast energy nor pollute the biosphere.
Land use required by renewables is also exaggerated. Comparatively speaking, all these wind turbines could be placed in 50 square miles, the size of Manhattan. This Scientific American scenario has 30% of the PV electricity coming from existing buildings, and the rest of the solar energy requiring less than one-third of 1% of the earth’s land mass. Seventy percent of the hydro installations within this plan are already in place, and additional hydro could come from low impact run-of-the-river turbines.
If we continue along the business-as-usual approach, GHGs and other environmental health hazards will increase. Without a major shift to wind, water and solar we would see 13,000 huge new coal plants or the equivalent in nuclear plants by 2030. The impact of these technologies through toxic mining, watershed contamination, climate change and radioactive wastes would be astronomical. Choices need to be made!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
Past columns and other non-nuclear resources are posted at http://jimharding.brinkster.net
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News on Jan. 08, 2010
Saskatchewan people are becoming more informed about energy, as we should. Having twenty times (20 X) the global, per capita, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions challenges us to quickly convert to sustainable energy. Over the last year we’ve had a controversy over the “nuclear option” and the provincial government has now recognized that nuclear power is too costly and inappropriate for our needs. With the nuclear option hopefully put to rest we must seriously explore alternative energy. The Standing Committee on the Crowns is still looking at our energy options, but some of its members are understandably predisposed to conventional systems, such as coal and biofuels. It will take us a while to stop assuming that energy must come from large thermal plants that generate electricity, or large refineries that produce fuels.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
The needed transition to sustainable energy requires democratizing the process of creating energy policy. Public consultations on the Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) report were a good start, but the broader citizenry and electorate needs to become more engaged. And enhanced citizen involvement requires more knowledge about energy terminology and concepts.
We all know the term “watt” because we use low wattage incandescent light bulbs in our homes. And we are all learning about energy efficiency because we know that compact fluorescent bulbs can provide as much light while using only about 25% of the electricity. Such moves toward energy efficiency are already our main and cheapest source of new electricity.
We rightly focus on the huge carbon footprint of the gas we use in our cars and trucks; but the related waste of energy has received less attention. Less than 20% of the energy in a litre of gasoline is actually used to move our vehicles; the rest is released as waste heat. Think of the inefficiency! If transportation was “fueled” by electricity from sustainable sources, about 80% of the energy would be used to move our vehicles. Far more “bang” for the buck. Energy efficiency is a win-win: reducing GHGs while creating more energy productivity.
Projections by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries about future energy demand intentionally downplay energy efficiency. However, on a global scale the savings would be staggering. To show this we need some terms based on “watts”. A kilowatt (KW) is a thousand watts, which is how we measure the electricity in our homes. A megawatt (MW) is a million watts, which is how we measure the capacity of our grid, which in Saskatchewan is around 3,600 MW. A billion watts is a gigawatt (GW), which is how countries can measure their capacity, and a trillion watts is a terawatt (TW), which is how we measure global capacity. These terms can all be used for measuring output, for example kilowatt hours (kWh), which is one thousand watts for an hour.
When demand is highest we call it “peak load”. Globally, peak demand is now around 12.5 TW, and conventional forecasters are saying that by 2030 it will rise to around 16.9 TW. The feature article in the November 2009 Scientific American however, disputes this, saying that with efficiencies from shifting to renewables, peak demand in 2030 could be 11.5 TW, which is lower than today. We see these energy savings with compact fluorescent lighting and electric cars, but the process has hardly begun.
RENEWABLE POTENTIAL
Corporations that profit from inefficient, polluting, non-renewables like coal, oil or uranium want to postpone our conversion to sustainable energy as long as possible. One tactic used to obscure self-interest is to downplay the potential of renewables. What does the Scientific American feature say about this? It concludes that globally there is around 1,700 TW of wind energy and that 40-85 TW of this is harvestable with today’s technology. It concludes there is 6,500 TW of solar energy, and that 580 TW of this is presently harvestable. Currently we only get .02 TW from wind and .008 TW from solar.
There’s clearly no shortage of renewable energy, but what might a sustainable energy plan look like? The Scientific American feature suggests we could get 51% of future energy from wind, 40% from solar and 9% from water power, which translates into 5.8 TW from wind, 4.6 TW from solar energy and 1.1 TW from water to meet projected demand by 2030. To accomplish this would require 3.8 million 5-MW wind turbines; 89,000 300-MW solar plants and millions of photovoltaic (PV) rooftop installations; 5,350 100- MW geothermal plants and several hundred thousand small tidal turbines and wave converters along with 900 1,300-MW hydro plants.
Supporters of the energy status quo find fault with renewables wherever they can, but their motives aren’t always pure. Certainly wind turbines must be better located out of the paths of migrating birds and bats. But the impacts of renewables must be judged in comparison to today’s energy impacts: 3.8 million wind turbines may sound like a lot, until you realize that 73 million cars and trucks are produced globally each year. At present these vehicles are highly inefficient while spewing masses of gases into the atmosphere. Were vehicles powered with electricity from renewables, they would neither waste vast energy nor pollute the biosphere.
Land use required by renewables is also exaggerated. Comparatively speaking, all these wind turbines could be placed in 50 square miles, the size of Manhattan. This Scientific American scenario has 30% of the PV electricity coming from existing buildings, and the rest of the solar energy requiring less than one-third of 1% of the earth’s land mass. Seventy percent of the hydro installations within this plan are already in place, and additional hydro could come from low impact run-of-the-river turbines.
If we continue along the business-as-usual approach, GHGs and other environmental health hazards will increase. Without a major shift to wind, water and solar we would see 13,000 huge new coal plants or the equivalent in nuclear plants by 2030. The impact of these technologies through toxic mining, watershed contamination, climate change and radioactive wastes would be astronomical. Choices need to be made!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
Past columns and other non-nuclear resources are posted at http://jimharding.brinkster.net
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
WHAT CHALLENGES FACE RENEWABLE ENERGY?
by Oscar » Tue Jan 19, 2010 5:52 pm
WHAT CHALLENGES FACE RENEWABLE ENERGY?
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News Jan. 15.10
The feature in the November 2009 Scientific American shows plenty of renewable energy for future uses. But what are the challenges to conversion and are they manageable? Renewables must be scrutinized with the same criteria used for other energy options. While renewable “fuels” - from wind, sun and water - are inexhaustible and free, what about the availability of other required materials? And how do renewables stack up to non-renewables insofar as reliability? What about the comparative costs? Finally, how will the economy and government policies impact conversion?
REACHING PEAK PRODUCTION
A point is inevitable when nature’s non-renewable resources and cost-impediments create “peak production”, after which there is steadily declining supplies. An argument rages as to whether we’ve already passed “peak oil” or “peak gas”, and, of course innovation in the technology of extraction plays a role; e.g. natural gas is now being accessed in shale by drilling horizontally. Today’s shortfall of uranium supply, shown by the failure to get the high-grade Cigar Lake mine into production and dependency on weapons-grade uranium to meet demand, even without a nuclear renaissance, suggests we’ve passed “peak uranium”. While there are centuries of coal supply, this is the most carbon-intensive non-renewable and the search for “clean coal” dramatically increases costs. Compared to low-cost, low-carbon renewables, spending billions on carbon-storage for high-carbon fuels looks more and more like chasing our tails.
But what about other materials required for renewables? The steel and cement used in wind power is abundant, and in contrast to a nuclear power plant, all of this is recoverable to recycle, which reduces future energy demand. Lower cost neodymium used for wind turbine gearboxes is concentrated in China, but this metal is not in short supply, and research on gearless turbines is quickly advancing. Some photovoltaic (PV) cells presently rely on materials such as tellurium and indium, which have limited supply, but these and alternative materials can be recycled, which could become the most reliable future supply. The lithium used in batteries and platinum used in fuel cells are rare-earth metals, with more than one-half of the lithium in Latin America. Rising prices and shortages are possible, but again, recycling could alter this, showing how an integrated approach to convert to sustainability is required. The throw-away economy, which builds in planned obsolescence for short-term profit, has probably run its course. Regulations to ensure fuel cells and batteries are built for recycling must be part of the sustainable policy package. Compared to unsolved and some think unsolvable carbon or nuclear waste storage problems, these challenges of renewables seem like a cake-walk.
RELIABILITY OF RENEWABLES
Intermittent supply is often mentioned as the Achilles Heel of renewables. It may surprise some readers that the downtime of coal plants runs over 12% per year compared to only 5% for wind turbines at sea and less than 2% for those on land. PV systems are also down less than 2%. And when a coal or nuclear plant goes down a huge source (e.g. 1,000 MW) of energy is removed from the grid. Maintenance of renewable technology makes the public less vulnerable because it involves taking a small amount of overcall capacity out of service at a time (e.g. a 5 MW wind turbine).The shift to renewables requires a change in mind-set; a “smart grid” requires organizing energy production around various sources. Geothermal and tidal energy can provide base power and hydro can provide back-up for wind, which produces more at night, and help meet peak loads. Solar, which produces more in the day, is a great complement to wind. And so on.
Demand-side management (DSM) is already being used by utilities to better match demand with supply and lower peak loads and capital costs. This thinking has to be expanded so that diverse energy sources are coordinated. Wind farms interconnected across wind zones can provide a reliable “base” supply. More available wind at night can be used to “refuel” vehicles to be run off electricity the next day, which shows how renewable energy can be stored cost-effectively.
COMPARATIVE COSTING
Using annualized costs for capital, land, operations, maintenance, storage and transmission, wind, hydro and geothermal are already less than 7 cents kWh, which is cheaper than conventional power. By 2020 wind, wave and hydro are expected to be down to 4 cents kWh. Wind is already equal to or less than new coal and gas plants. Concentrated (thermal) solar and PV are still more costly but are expected to be competitive (8-10 cents kWh) within a decade. Mass produced electric cars will be able to provide transportation that is competitive with gasoline, the price of which will continue to rise after “peak oil”. The hybrid vehicle is the coming transition.
But pricing models are still distorted, and can be manipulated to support powerful energy companies and government policies that support them. First, they externalize many actual costs to today’s taxpayers, and to future generations who won’t benefit at all. If the costs of climate change are added into fossil fuel costs, the industries would quickly collapse. The same is true for the nuclear industry if all future waste costs, including for uranium tailings, are included. When all environmental health costs, including the impact on the quantity and quality of water, are included, renewables consistently come out on top. Second, direct and hidden subsidies must be fully accounted for. Without these we would never have gotten into such over-dependency on unsustainable energy. The tarsands and nuclear power, but not lower-cost wind, got subsidies in Harper’s stimulus package. Meanwhile many governments, including our own, still refuse to establish a feed-in tariff to pay a fair price to farmers, small businesses, First Nations, towns and individuals willing to produce electricity for the public grid.
This shows how a more comprehensive and realistic economics comes with the shift to renewables.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
By Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News Jan. 15.10
The feature in the November 2009 Scientific American shows plenty of renewable energy for future uses. But what are the challenges to conversion and are they manageable? Renewables must be scrutinized with the same criteria used for other energy options. While renewable “fuels” - from wind, sun and water - are inexhaustible and free, what about the availability of other required materials? And how do renewables stack up to non-renewables insofar as reliability? What about the comparative costs? Finally, how will the economy and government policies impact conversion?
REACHING PEAK PRODUCTION
A point is inevitable when nature’s non-renewable resources and cost-impediments create “peak production”, after which there is steadily declining supplies. An argument rages as to whether we’ve already passed “peak oil” or “peak gas”, and, of course innovation in the technology of extraction plays a role; e.g. natural gas is now being accessed in shale by drilling horizontally. Today’s shortfall of uranium supply, shown by the failure to get the high-grade Cigar Lake mine into production and dependency on weapons-grade uranium to meet demand, even without a nuclear renaissance, suggests we’ve passed “peak uranium”. While there are centuries of coal supply, this is the most carbon-intensive non-renewable and the search for “clean coal” dramatically increases costs. Compared to low-cost, low-carbon renewables, spending billions on carbon-storage for high-carbon fuels looks more and more like chasing our tails.
But what about other materials required for renewables? The steel and cement used in wind power is abundant, and in contrast to a nuclear power plant, all of this is recoverable to recycle, which reduces future energy demand. Lower cost neodymium used for wind turbine gearboxes is concentrated in China, but this metal is not in short supply, and research on gearless turbines is quickly advancing. Some photovoltaic (PV) cells presently rely on materials such as tellurium and indium, which have limited supply, but these and alternative materials can be recycled, which could become the most reliable future supply. The lithium used in batteries and platinum used in fuel cells are rare-earth metals, with more than one-half of the lithium in Latin America. Rising prices and shortages are possible, but again, recycling could alter this, showing how an integrated approach to convert to sustainability is required. The throw-away economy, which builds in planned obsolescence for short-term profit, has probably run its course. Regulations to ensure fuel cells and batteries are built for recycling must be part of the sustainable policy package. Compared to unsolved and some think unsolvable carbon or nuclear waste storage problems, these challenges of renewables seem like a cake-walk.
RELIABILITY OF RENEWABLES
Intermittent supply is often mentioned as the Achilles Heel of renewables. It may surprise some readers that the downtime of coal plants runs over 12% per year compared to only 5% for wind turbines at sea and less than 2% for those on land. PV systems are also down less than 2%. And when a coal or nuclear plant goes down a huge source (e.g. 1,000 MW) of energy is removed from the grid. Maintenance of renewable technology makes the public less vulnerable because it involves taking a small amount of overcall capacity out of service at a time (e.g. a 5 MW wind turbine).The shift to renewables requires a change in mind-set; a “smart grid” requires organizing energy production around various sources. Geothermal and tidal energy can provide base power and hydro can provide back-up for wind, which produces more at night, and help meet peak loads. Solar, which produces more in the day, is a great complement to wind. And so on.
Demand-side management (DSM) is already being used by utilities to better match demand with supply and lower peak loads and capital costs. This thinking has to be expanded so that diverse energy sources are coordinated. Wind farms interconnected across wind zones can provide a reliable “base” supply. More available wind at night can be used to “refuel” vehicles to be run off electricity the next day, which shows how renewable energy can be stored cost-effectively.
COMPARATIVE COSTING
Using annualized costs for capital, land, operations, maintenance, storage and transmission, wind, hydro and geothermal are already less than 7 cents kWh, which is cheaper than conventional power. By 2020 wind, wave and hydro are expected to be down to 4 cents kWh. Wind is already equal to or less than new coal and gas plants. Concentrated (thermal) solar and PV are still more costly but are expected to be competitive (8-10 cents kWh) within a decade. Mass produced electric cars will be able to provide transportation that is competitive with gasoline, the price of which will continue to rise after “peak oil”. The hybrid vehicle is the coming transition.
But pricing models are still distorted, and can be manipulated to support powerful energy companies and government policies that support them. First, they externalize many actual costs to today’s taxpayers, and to future generations who won’t benefit at all. If the costs of climate change are added into fossil fuel costs, the industries would quickly collapse. The same is true for the nuclear industry if all future waste costs, including for uranium tailings, are included. When all environmental health costs, including the impact on the quantity and quality of water, are included, renewables consistently come out on top. Second, direct and hidden subsidies must be fully accounted for. Without these we would never have gotten into such over-dependency on unsustainable energy. The tarsands and nuclear power, but not lower-cost wind, got subsidies in Harper’s stimulus package. Meanwhile many governments, including our own, still refuse to establish a feed-in tariff to pay a fair price to farmers, small businesses, First Nations, towns and individuals willing to produce electricity for the public grid.
This shows how a more comprehensive and realistic economics comes with the shift to renewables.
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
CAN CARBON-CAPTURE MOVE US TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY?
by Oscar » Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:52 pm
CAN CARBON-CAPTURE MOVE US TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY?
BY Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News January 22, 2010
Saskatchewan is a pioneer in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the Sask Party government thinks this is a win-win-win: good for the economy, for the oil industry and for reducing carbon emissions. How can anything be so good? There is an international CCS consortium in Iceland and the world’s largest user of coal, China, has several test projects. With 50% of its electricity coming from coal plants, the U.S. has a few projects, notably the country’s first commercial one at the large, 1,300-MW Mountaineer coal plant at New Haven. Carbon-laden coal plants are on the short list of things that need replacing to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs). But Is CCS a good bet to do this?
WHAT IS CARBON CAPTURE & STORAGE
Three methods are being explored. First is the chilled ammonia technology in place at New Haven that uses ammonia carbonate to pull CO2 out of exhaust gases. Second is burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a CO2 rich emissions stream, which Sask Power has considered. And the third siphons off the CO2 made during the gasification of coal. All are highly experimental and very costly. The Department of Energy (DOE) claims there is geologic room for 3.9 trillion tons of C02 in the U.S. underground, more than enough to handle the 3.2 billion tons emitted by industry yearly. Meanwhile an Ohio evaluation found rock formations stored less C02 than predicted. The chemistry and geology is apparently not as simple as the industrial experts claim.
Is it ever? Is this the same “trust us…take a leap of faith with industry” that we have heard about nuclear waste storage to no avail for over three generations? While one-half million tons of C02 may get injected into rocks 8,000 feet below the New Haven plant over the next five years, this only constitutes 2% of the plant’s CO2. The November 2009 Scientific American says the CCS technology at New Haven cost $73 million upfront and American Electric Power has asked for $334 million in federal stimulus, which is only one-half of the cost of removing 20% of the plants CO2. What about the other 80%?
The industry claims $1 billion will build state of the art plants, but we should be skeptical, for that is what the nuclear industry also said, until independent assessment showed it to be three-times the industry figure. The U.S.’s DOE has estimated that to get 90% CCS using amine scrubbers would double the cost of coal-fired electricity, from $63 to $114 per megawatt hour (mWh). Meanwhile Stanford researchers found that “clean coal” did the worst, followed by bio-fuels and nuclear, and wind did the best, when comparing the carbon footrpint of all alternative fuels, including electricity, used for transportation. “Clean coal” is a contradiction in terms. And even without doubling the costs of coal with CCS, wind is already competitive with new coal plants.
ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS REMAIN
What if the coal industry could reduce most CO2 by sequestering it safely underground? There’s three “what ifs” in this: if the technology works, if it is economic, and if it can be applied safely. And even if all were resolved, the direct ecological impacts of coal mining would continue. Strip mining would continue. Mountain tops of coal would continue to be removed and watersheds and biodiversity wrecked. The residual toxic fly ash would still come from the coal plants, and the risks of geyser-like releases of underground gases would remain.
In their rush for cake-and-eat-it tech-fixes, governments are proceeding without clarity about who owns the pore spaces in the rock or who assumes liability for accidents. Furthermore, no one is talking about the possibility of any full-scale CCS installations in coal plants before 2015, and possible before 2025, which is far too late to start to reduce absolute levels of GHGs to stop climate change from escalating beyond our control.
So is Saskatchewan pioneering sustainability by embracing CCS? Just because there’s lots of coal in southern Saskatchewan doesn’t mean we have to find some way to justify using it. Just because there is some oil left in the ground doesn’t mean we have to extract it. Value-adding at any cost is not good ecological economics. We have plenty of unused wind, sun and water in the province. And this does not require a toxic fuel. So why not use this?
SHORT-TERM MOTIVATION
In February’s Sasquatch Professor Wilson says CCS emissions “are pretty well non-toxic” and that a higher environmental return on investment comes from CCS than, say, moving to part-electric cars. This is very debatable. But as co-founder of the first CCS commercial project, started near Weyburn in 2007, the director of the International Test Centre at the University of Regina may have an axe to grind. The economic motivation for this project wasn’t primarily GHG reductions but the ability to increase production by two-thirds, or 18,000 barrels per day, in the oilfield that the CO2 is pumped into. With this oil-recovery success the Harper government of course allocated $650 million for CCS research. The agreement signed by Premier Wall and Montana’s Governor for a cross-border CCS project also has more to do with maintaining the lucrative fossil-fuel industry than with GHG reductions.
Saskatchewan presently gets half of its electricity from coal and has the highest per capita GHG emissions in Canada and the second-highest of any jurisdiction on the planet. Is it any accident that it is embracing CCS when it can be used to increase private oil production with public financing, to maintain coal plants and perhaps to use coal to produce lucrative bio-fuels? All, of course, with environmental promotions! Canada presently ranks first among the G8 countries for increased GHGs emissions. Is it any wonder that the Harper government treats CCS as a way to manage the politics of the climate crisis? If we want to get beyond environmental optics we will have to do better.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
BY Jim Harding
Saskatchewan Sustainability Published in R-Town News January 22, 2010
Saskatchewan is a pioneer in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the Sask Party government thinks this is a win-win-win: good for the economy, for the oil industry and for reducing carbon emissions. How can anything be so good? There is an international CCS consortium in Iceland and the world’s largest user of coal, China, has several test projects. With 50% of its electricity coming from coal plants, the U.S. has a few projects, notably the country’s first commercial one at the large, 1,300-MW Mountaineer coal plant at New Haven. Carbon-laden coal plants are on the short list of things that need replacing to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs). But Is CCS a good bet to do this?
WHAT IS CARBON CAPTURE & STORAGE
Three methods are being explored. First is the chilled ammonia technology in place at New Haven that uses ammonia carbonate to pull CO2 out of exhaust gases. Second is burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a CO2 rich emissions stream, which Sask Power has considered. And the third siphons off the CO2 made during the gasification of coal. All are highly experimental and very costly. The Department of Energy (DOE) claims there is geologic room for 3.9 trillion tons of C02 in the U.S. underground, more than enough to handle the 3.2 billion tons emitted by industry yearly. Meanwhile an Ohio evaluation found rock formations stored less C02 than predicted. The chemistry and geology is apparently not as simple as the industrial experts claim.
Is it ever? Is this the same “trust us…take a leap of faith with industry” that we have heard about nuclear waste storage to no avail for over three generations? While one-half million tons of C02 may get injected into rocks 8,000 feet below the New Haven plant over the next five years, this only constitutes 2% of the plant’s CO2. The November 2009 Scientific American says the CCS technology at New Haven cost $73 million upfront and American Electric Power has asked for $334 million in federal stimulus, which is only one-half of the cost of removing 20% of the plants CO2. What about the other 80%?
The industry claims $1 billion will build state of the art plants, but we should be skeptical, for that is what the nuclear industry also said, until independent assessment showed it to be three-times the industry figure. The U.S.’s DOE has estimated that to get 90% CCS using amine scrubbers would double the cost of coal-fired electricity, from $63 to $114 per megawatt hour (mWh). Meanwhile Stanford researchers found that “clean coal” did the worst, followed by bio-fuels and nuclear, and wind did the best, when comparing the carbon footrpint of all alternative fuels, including electricity, used for transportation. “Clean coal” is a contradiction in terms. And even without doubling the costs of coal with CCS, wind is already competitive with new coal plants.
ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS REMAIN
What if the coal industry could reduce most CO2 by sequestering it safely underground? There’s three “what ifs” in this: if the technology works, if it is economic, and if it can be applied safely. And even if all were resolved, the direct ecological impacts of coal mining would continue. Strip mining would continue. Mountain tops of coal would continue to be removed and watersheds and biodiversity wrecked. The residual toxic fly ash would still come from the coal plants, and the risks of geyser-like releases of underground gases would remain.
In their rush for cake-and-eat-it tech-fixes, governments are proceeding without clarity about who owns the pore spaces in the rock or who assumes liability for accidents. Furthermore, no one is talking about the possibility of any full-scale CCS installations in coal plants before 2015, and possible before 2025, which is far too late to start to reduce absolute levels of GHGs to stop climate change from escalating beyond our control.
So is Saskatchewan pioneering sustainability by embracing CCS? Just because there’s lots of coal in southern Saskatchewan doesn’t mean we have to find some way to justify using it. Just because there is some oil left in the ground doesn’t mean we have to extract it. Value-adding at any cost is not good ecological economics. We have plenty of unused wind, sun and water in the province. And this does not require a toxic fuel. So why not use this?
SHORT-TERM MOTIVATION
In February’s Sasquatch Professor Wilson says CCS emissions “are pretty well non-toxic” and that a higher environmental return on investment comes from CCS than, say, moving to part-electric cars. This is very debatable. But as co-founder of the first CCS commercial project, started near Weyburn in 2007, the director of the International Test Centre at the University of Regina may have an axe to grind. The economic motivation for this project wasn’t primarily GHG reductions but the ability to increase production by two-thirds, or 18,000 barrels per day, in the oilfield that the CO2 is pumped into. With this oil-recovery success the Harper government of course allocated $650 million for CCS research. The agreement signed by Premier Wall and Montana’s Governor for a cross-border CCS project also has more to do with maintaining the lucrative fossil-fuel industry than with GHG reductions.
Saskatchewan presently gets half of its electricity from coal and has the highest per capita GHG emissions in Canada and the second-highest of any jurisdiction on the planet. Is it any accident that it is embracing CCS when it can be used to increase private oil production with public financing, to maintain coal plants and perhaps to use coal to produce lucrative bio-fuels? All, of course, with environmental promotions! Canada presently ranks first among the G8 countries for increased GHGs emissions. Is it any wonder that the Harper government treats CCS as a way to manage the politics of the climate crisis? If we want to get beyond environmental optics we will have to do better.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Carbon Capture, Offsets and Bonds: Will Any of Them Work?
by Oscar » Mon Feb 22, 2010 5:59 pm
Carbon Capture, Offsets and Bonds: Will Any of Them Work?
By Jim Harding
Published in United Newspapers of Saskatchewan Feb. 05.10
Governments that believe the industrial economy depends on the continuing use of fossil fuels want to maintain business-as-usual. Consequently the federal and provincial governments subsidize technology that pumps C02 into oil fields to enhance private oil recovery, and then justify this because it involves some carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is naively treated as a tech-fix for reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs). But CCS comes from the same paradigm that got us into the climate crisis, and, anyway, it's more cost-effective and creates more local employment to go directly to renewables.
The Suzuki Foundation has already warned that CCS needs to be linked to strong legislation to limit and reduce GHGs, yet the Wall and Harper governments have opposed this regulatory strategy in all national and international negotiations. The Pembina institute says that for CCS to help reduce GHGs it must be part of a package of policies; without capping emissions and pricing carbon, both organizations argue, CCS won’t work. But Wall and Harper clearly don’t want the package. Pricing carbon remains a political football, as shown by the quick demise of Liberal Leader Stephane Dion. Premier Wall calls carbon pricing another tax unless it is “poured back into finding answers”, which for his government mostly means CCS, though it is encouraging that Wall seems to be realizing that renewables are on the table. In contrast to cost-effective ways of reducing GHGs, CCS sinks taxpayer’s money into underground caverns along with C02.
CARBON OFFSETS
Problems with carbon-reducing strategies also persist at the international level. The Kyoto Accord didn’t create universal, enforceable reductions of GHGs. However, since Kyoto, with Al Gore’s support, a $100 billion carbon trading market has developed, which involves companies that meet emission targets selling their “offsets” to companies that don’t want to meet theirs. However, according to Carbon Trade Watch, by September 2009 three-quarters of the offset credits being traded had nothing to do with absolute reductions. Further, carbon offsets can easily turn into another stock market bubble, not unlike what happened when mortgages got sold and resold in derivative markets, so that traders ultimately didn’t know what they were selling. The financial crash and recession followed.
The 2009 Copenhagen meeting ended with only voluntary targets that don’t add up to the required reductions. There was a plan proposed to curb deforestation, which is responsible for 20% of the world GHG emissions. But this plan assumed that existing forests have no intrinsic value, and only get value if they are depleted. This leads to the silly, Alice-In-Wonderland, notion that people should be able to trade and be paid for “avoided emissions” rather than having to make real reductions in actual emissions. In other words offsets don’t necessarily curb emissions. Indigenous peoples who live sustainably within the world’s forests obviously weren’t consulted about this plan.
CARBON BONDS
We desperately need innovations that are not lucrative ploys to procrastinate reducing carbon. Ecuador’s Yasuni rainforest sits atop 850 million barrels of oil. Already suffering the loss of much of its rainforest through resource extraction, Ecuador is looking for an alternative development path. It considered “selling” protection of the rainforest as a giant carbon offset, but rejected this because it would allow companies to maintain emissions elsewhere. Instead, it wants to partner with other countries that are willing to help preserve the rainforest as a huge global carbon sink while financing the shift to a sustainable economy.
The plan is to issue carbon bonds, like legally binding bonds, which would have to be repaid if Ecuador ever deviated from its agreement to protect the rainforest. Ecuador says it can get more money from these “non-emitted C02” certificates than if it allowed the oil to be extracted, which shows that preserving biodiversity can enhance social development more than trickle-down economic growth. The money will protect 40 conservation areas, which account for over one-third of the country’s land base, and develop renewable energy and further the countries equalitarian social agenda. Ecuador even says it is willing to trade its foreign debt for such ecological investment. Germany and Spain have responded positively with some investment and technical aid, and discussions are beginning with France, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the US. So far only the UK has said “no!”
These bonds acknowledge that the whole world benefits from stopping the destruction of rainforests, and the same thing is true for the boreal forest, which means Canada has much to learn from Ecuador. When Yolanda Kakabadse, a member of Ecuador’s Presidential Commission, was interviewed in the December 2009 New Internationalist, she said people buying these bonds “are getting a spiritual, intellectual, human benefit that is for the planet, not for Ecuador alone.”
NEW ECONOMICS
Sustainability requires a shift in how we understand economics. Old-world governments embrace unsustainable economic growth, believing there has to be a resource extracted at huge profit for there to be “development”. Environmental and social costs are externalized on to today’s taxpayers and future generations. CCS tries to keep the profitable fossil-fuel industry going by investing in costly and mostly unproven technology. Carbon offsets create a virtual carbon market which, while lucrative, can allow carbon emissions to continue to rise.
Ecuador’s approach involves investing in the shift to an ecologically-sustainable economy. Land rights and the development of a renewable economy are placed at the centre of the new economics. Unlike corporate-driven development, the new economic development won’t polarize the population into a few “haves” and a majority of “have-nots”. Settlers and Indigenous people can begin to rebuild solidarity over a common commitment to preservation, reforestation and social equality. Rather than people being dislocated by resource-extraction “development”, sustainable communities could begin to flourish.
It is possible to have a win-win situation, but not without changing the game plan. To get to a sustainable society the real value of preserving and restoring the biosphere has to become the bottom line and policies and market mechanisms must follow from this.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
By Jim Harding
Published in United Newspapers of Saskatchewan Feb. 05.10
Governments that believe the industrial economy depends on the continuing use of fossil fuels want to maintain business-as-usual. Consequently the federal and provincial governments subsidize technology that pumps C02 into oil fields to enhance private oil recovery, and then justify this because it involves some carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is naively treated as a tech-fix for reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs). But CCS comes from the same paradigm that got us into the climate crisis, and, anyway, it's more cost-effective and creates more local employment to go directly to renewables.
The Suzuki Foundation has already warned that CCS needs to be linked to strong legislation to limit and reduce GHGs, yet the Wall and Harper governments have opposed this regulatory strategy in all national and international negotiations. The Pembina institute says that for CCS to help reduce GHGs it must be part of a package of policies; without capping emissions and pricing carbon, both organizations argue, CCS won’t work. But Wall and Harper clearly don’t want the package. Pricing carbon remains a political football, as shown by the quick demise of Liberal Leader Stephane Dion. Premier Wall calls carbon pricing another tax unless it is “poured back into finding answers”, which for his government mostly means CCS, though it is encouraging that Wall seems to be realizing that renewables are on the table. In contrast to cost-effective ways of reducing GHGs, CCS sinks taxpayer’s money into underground caverns along with C02.
CARBON OFFSETS
Problems with carbon-reducing strategies also persist at the international level. The Kyoto Accord didn’t create universal, enforceable reductions of GHGs. However, since Kyoto, with Al Gore’s support, a $100 billion carbon trading market has developed, which involves companies that meet emission targets selling their “offsets” to companies that don’t want to meet theirs. However, according to Carbon Trade Watch, by September 2009 three-quarters of the offset credits being traded had nothing to do with absolute reductions. Further, carbon offsets can easily turn into another stock market bubble, not unlike what happened when mortgages got sold and resold in derivative markets, so that traders ultimately didn’t know what they were selling. The financial crash and recession followed.
The 2009 Copenhagen meeting ended with only voluntary targets that don’t add up to the required reductions. There was a plan proposed to curb deforestation, which is responsible for 20% of the world GHG emissions. But this plan assumed that existing forests have no intrinsic value, and only get value if they are depleted. This leads to the silly, Alice-In-Wonderland, notion that people should be able to trade and be paid for “avoided emissions” rather than having to make real reductions in actual emissions. In other words offsets don’t necessarily curb emissions. Indigenous peoples who live sustainably within the world’s forests obviously weren’t consulted about this plan.
CARBON BONDS
We desperately need innovations that are not lucrative ploys to procrastinate reducing carbon. Ecuador’s Yasuni rainforest sits atop 850 million barrels of oil. Already suffering the loss of much of its rainforest through resource extraction, Ecuador is looking for an alternative development path. It considered “selling” protection of the rainforest as a giant carbon offset, but rejected this because it would allow companies to maintain emissions elsewhere. Instead, it wants to partner with other countries that are willing to help preserve the rainforest as a huge global carbon sink while financing the shift to a sustainable economy.
The plan is to issue carbon bonds, like legally binding bonds, which would have to be repaid if Ecuador ever deviated from its agreement to protect the rainforest. Ecuador says it can get more money from these “non-emitted C02” certificates than if it allowed the oil to be extracted, which shows that preserving biodiversity can enhance social development more than trickle-down economic growth. The money will protect 40 conservation areas, which account for over one-third of the country’s land base, and develop renewable energy and further the countries equalitarian social agenda. Ecuador even says it is willing to trade its foreign debt for such ecological investment. Germany and Spain have responded positively with some investment and technical aid, and discussions are beginning with France, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the US. So far only the UK has said “no!”
These bonds acknowledge that the whole world benefits from stopping the destruction of rainforests, and the same thing is true for the boreal forest, which means Canada has much to learn from Ecuador. When Yolanda Kakabadse, a member of Ecuador’s Presidential Commission, was interviewed in the December 2009 New Internationalist, she said people buying these bonds “are getting a spiritual, intellectual, human benefit that is for the planet, not for Ecuador alone.”
NEW ECONOMICS
Sustainability requires a shift in how we understand economics. Old-world governments embrace unsustainable economic growth, believing there has to be a resource extracted at huge profit for there to be “development”. Environmental and social costs are externalized on to today’s taxpayers and future generations. CCS tries to keep the profitable fossil-fuel industry going by investing in costly and mostly unproven technology. Carbon offsets create a virtual carbon market which, while lucrative, can allow carbon emissions to continue to rise.
Ecuador’s approach involves investing in the shift to an ecologically-sustainable economy. Land rights and the development of a renewable economy are placed at the centre of the new economics. Unlike corporate-driven development, the new economic development won’t polarize the population into a few “haves” and a majority of “have-nots”. Settlers and Indigenous people can begin to rebuild solidarity over a common commitment to preservation, reforestation and social equality. Rather than people being dislocated by resource-extraction “development”, sustainable communities could begin to flourish.
It is possible to have a win-win situation, but not without changing the game plan. To get to a sustainable society the real value of preserving and restoring the biosphere has to become the bottom line and policies and market mechanisms must follow from this.
~ ~ ~ ~
Jim Harding is a retired professor of environmental and justice studies.
His website: http://jimharding.brinkster.netwebsite
- Oscar
- Site Admin
- Posts: 9887
- Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 3:23 pm
Return to Uranium/Nuclear/Waste
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 6 guests