Government takes undue credit for drop in emissions

PJ Partington
Pembina Institute blog

Well folks, the numbers are in and it's a blow out! In 2008, Canada's emissions dropped 2.1 per cent from their all-time high of 750 million tonnes the year before. Fantastic news! And, if you believe last week's press release from Environment Minister Jim Prentice, we have mostly the federal government's clever policies to thank.

The release attributes the decline in emissions to "Canada's efforts to use greater amounts of clean energy power generation, which is part of the Government's efforts to target greenhouse gas production."

Sounds great, but a few key details are missing from that picture. For instance, the increase in hydro use came primarily because of increased rainfall, not federal support for large-scale hydro. A decline in Ontario's coal use is also partly to thank, as a result of its nuclear plants being more reliable than in 2007, paired with its commitment to phase out coal-fired generation by 2014. And then (as the release does mention), there was the start of the recession, which led to an overall decline in energy use in Canada. It's also worth mentioning that the pervious year's high of 750 million tonnes resulted from a whopping 4.5 per cent jump in 2007.

Unfortunately, it's much harder to pinpoint any federal government-led efforts that may have contributed to the drop.

But who wants to let details get in the way of an opportunity to make the government look good? The release also states that, "The Government of Canada is a strong supporter of renewable energy technologies." This is the same government that failed to renew the funding in its last budget for the main federal program supporting renewable electricity — one reason why the U.S. federal government is set to outspend ours nearly 18:1 per capita on new renewable energy investments in 2010.

Still, government members have not been shy to take credit for the recent decline. Manitoba MP James Bezan, chair of the House of Commons Environment committee, announced last Wednesday:

"Just today we released a national inventory report for 2008 which shows that greenhouse gas emissions are down 2.1 per cent from 2007, or 16 megatonnes of CO2. That is an incredible achievement in just a few short years in government. Our government has acted on climate change and has got results."

If these results were policy-driven, then surely they would have been predicted by Environment Canada? Well, last spring, considering the impacts of all of its policies — including, charitably, the now-defunct Turning the Corner regulatory framework — the government anticipated that it would reduce emissions by one million tonnes in 2008. Instead, emissions actually fell by 16 million tonnes. So either this government's less-is-more approach is wildly more successful than even it anticipated, or there was some other cause for the bulk of the emissions drop.

Now, if we accept the former explanation, we shall also have to bow to the climate policy superheroes of the Bush Administration, who clearly out-policied us with a three per cent drop in emissions in 2008 (compared to our 2.1 per cent).

Or we just might have to give credit where credit is really due.

The summary of the new emissions inventory by Environment Canada staff finds that the decline in emissions can be attributed largely to factors we mention above. No mention, sadly, of any federal government policies.

It's worth noting that in the absence of major new government policies, the underlying trend in Canada's emissions (setting aside the occasional fluctuations caused by the economy or the weather) is one of continued, indefinite increases.

Expect the spin to follow similar trends.

Iceland Volcano’s Eruption Sends Quick Wake-up Call on “Peak Oil”

By Dorothy
West Coast Climate Equity

What does an erupting volcano in Iceland have to do with our future oil supply running out?

A lot, if you consider only the effect the recent grounding of planes all over the world has had on food supply. When oil runs out, as it will, food delivery will be drastically curtailed, and the disruption caused by the April 15 eruption of the Iceland volcano demonstrates just what this might mean. Airline won’t be back to normal until volcanic activity subsides, and in the meantime vegetables grown in Kenya are rotting; undelivered roses are being ground up for compost. Kenyan flower growers are losing $2 million a day.

Food producers have in Southern Spain have also been effected, as well as the electronics and pharmaceutical industries, who rely on overnight delivery for many of their products.

The UK Guardian published this article, April 19: Iceland volcano: Can fruit and vegetable shortages turn us on to local food?

Here’s a clip:

‘But the food miles debate has a practical element to it that’s less often discussed. It really doesn’t take long for the efficiency of our global food distribution system to be found wanting. This is the system that we’ve become uber reliant on, that grew at the expense of our local food infrastructure. It can only be hoped that any shortages will boost the flourishing interest in localising our food system.


Those annoying, bandied-about terms like “local food” and “provenance” suddenly feel less like marketing buzzwords. Supporting local growers and small producers, becoming more self sufficient through campaigns like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s admirable Landshare project, initiatives like the Fife Diet, and making an effort to understand the produce we eat, the effort to get it to our table, to value it more and waste less – it all feels less like a smug lifestyle choice and more like common sense, doesn’t it?’

See also this article from The Telegraph: Volcano Chaos Could Continue for Months

The Icelandic volcano causing travel chaos across Europe could go on erupting for months, geologists have warned.

Climate Change's "Evil Twin"

Video from Cochabamba – Live!

Watch live coverage of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 20-22, at Climate and Capitalism, courtesy of OneClimate.net.

Link to Climate and Capitalism video page here.

Footprints: National Film Board of Canada Resources

The NFB and the Environment

Key films, important moments in NFB history and decisive events in the 20th century reveal how environmental problems have been addressed in NFB documentaries over the last sixty years. You'll see how certain world events affected film production in the first twenty years. Note the propagandist character of sponsored films of the 1960s and 1970s. Watch the more personal and engaged works of filmmakers in the 1990s and 2000s.
 
Visit the NFB here.
 

Ecofeminism meets ecosocialism

Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology
Review by Ben Courtice
Green Left Online

What material basis could women have that might make them an objectively environmentalist constituency? This theme is an important part of Ariel Salleh’s essays in her 2009 collection of women’s writing on the environment, which tries to bring together ecofeminist and ecosocialist ideas into a synthesis.

The essays examine and take the side of the third world poor, and especially of indigenous people, peasants, and the women in those communities.

Salleh distances her materialist ecofeminism from “what ancient woman-nature mythologies say — that women have a fixed, innate identity or essence, which is ‘closer to nature’ than the essence of men is”. She rejects this characterisation of ecofeminism, but also rejects the liberal feminists who see all ecofeminism as mysticism.

Her ideas are based in women’s experience in the global division of labour. “The global majority of women do labour hands-on with nature and cope with the matter/energy transformations of their own gestational bodies.”

She also points out that, as women are often poor in time as well as money, “the timing of reproductive labour tasks is slower than the speeded up pace of capitalist working time, because regenerative work is bound to preserving, not interrupting natural processes.” This echoes the analysis of agricultural labour made by Marxist ecologist Richard Lewontin.

Lewontin argued in the 2000 book, Hungry for Profit, that the persistence of small proprietors in farming even in highly industrialised economies such as the US is related to the fact that in agriculture, “the cycle of reproduction of capital cannot be shortened because it is linked to an annual growth cycle in plants, or a fixed reproductive cycle in large animals”.

Ecosocialists look to learn from the experience of indigenous, pre-industrial cultures because of their complex interaction with and understanding of their natural environment.

Socialist Alliance’s water management policy includes the statement: “The knowledge of Indigenous communities is an essential part of … developing sound proposals for water conservation.” Themes like this recur in the book.

The various essays differ significantly in their quality and usefulness. At worst, some essays are impenetrably abstract — overly concerned with debates inside academia. But there are also some very good essays such as Nalini Nayak’s “Development for some is violence for others”.

Nayak examines how neoliberal “progress” has destroyed the status and livelihood of women (in particular) in Indian fishing communities.

The essay blames what might seem to be progressive modernisation — larger boats, motor boats, net-making machines and so on. Clearly, economic justice for the poor does not result from capitalist economic development in general. This lesson can be useful for activists looking to support environmental sustainability, women’s liberation and alternative avenues of development for the world’s poor.

The main let-down of the book is the overly academic tone of much of the writing, including Salleh’s own essays. For someone who is not accustomed to reading academic texts, it can be impenetrable. In some sections, a familiarity with many other academic works referenced is necessary — and possibly a dictionary as well.

This is a pity as many of the points raised are central to current ecosocialist debates, and deserve to be explained to a broader audience.

For those willing to make the effort, there is stimulating material in this book.

Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology
Edited by Ariel Salleh
Pluto Press/Spinifex Press, 2009

The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development

A new MR book by Michael A. Lebowitz

“At this historic moment, when the limits and insanity of capitalism are especially clear but an intimidating sense of fatalism militates against a response—neither an alternative to capitalism nor a way to get there seem ‘realistic’—Lebowitz has produced the must-read book for those still clinging to hope.

Highly accessible without setting aside the complexities involved, Lebowitz provides a desperately needed framework for linking vision to action to self-and-social transformation. The radicalism that has been so commonly written off as impractical becomes what is in fact the truly ‘practical’ in today’s world.”

Sam Gindin
York University
Former Research Director, Canadian Auto Workers

The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development
Michael A. Lebowitz
$15.95 paperback
160 pp.
July 2010

Log in to the Monthly Review Store before adding this item to your shopping cart and receive a 20% discount. Buying Directly from the MR Store Helps Support Monthly Review.

Buy This Book

Axworthy: Make Arctic nuclear-free

ArcticSecurity.org in Canada

Toronto Star columnist (and former Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) Thomas Axworthy is calling on Canada and other countries to make the Arctic a nuclear-weapon-free zone as a step towards the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Reporting on the work of the Interaction Council, a group of former world leaders co-chaired by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien that supports the abolition of nuclear weapons, Axworthy writes that:

Abolishing nuclear weapons… is a precondition for the survival, sustainability and health of the planet and for future generations. The InterAction Council endorses a strategy first of minimizing the role of nuclear weapons, then eliminating them entirely. The minimization strategy was central to the recent Washington summit: Canada, for example, committed to reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium and committed $1 billion over the next 10 years to secure vulnerable sites around the world.

Map of existing nuclear-weapon-free zones (UN graphic)

There are further steps, however, in the short and medium term that Canada can undertake to move to the elimination phase. Other states have created nuclear-weapons-free zones.

The Arctic should be the next candidate for nuclear-free status. If this militarily strategic region can be made free of nuclear weapons, then there is hope that the elimination phase can be reached.

(Thomas Axworthy, “Ray of hope flickers before nuclear midnight,” Toronto Star, 16 April 2010)

Other recent calls to make the Arctic nuclear-weapons-free include “Ridding the Arctic of Nuclear Weapons: A Task Long Overdue,” released by the Rideau Institute and the Canadian Pugwash Group in March, and the Call for an Arctic Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone agreed by the Conference on an Arctic Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone, held in Copenhagen 10-11 August 2009.

Tar Sands Tailings Leakage Subject of NAFTA Complaint

Federal government failing to enforce fisheries law, submission alleges

A coalition of environmental organizations and citizens filed a citizens’ submission today with the environmental side-body of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). The submission alleges that the Canadian government is failing to enforce the anti-pollution provisions of the federal Fisheries Act by allowing the tar sands tailings ponds to leak contaminated materials into both surface waters and groundwater in the Athabasca watershed.

“The federal government keeps saying it wants better environmental management in the tar sands, yet it is failing to enforce laws already on the books that could make this happen,” said Matt Price, Policy Director with Environmental Defence Canada. “If the Harper government is sincere, it will replace its tar sands public relations around the world with enforcement back at home.”

The citizens’ submission documents cases where contaminated tailings leakage has reached surface waters in addition to the ongoing massive and increasing leakage from un-lined tar sands tailings ponds into the region’s groundwater. The Fisheries Act prohibits the discharge of substances harmful to fish, yet the federal government has never prosecuted documented infractions nor has it enacted regulations that would permit the discharge.

“Big oil is getting away with polluting waters that flow all the way to the Arctic,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Senior Attorney with the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “In the meantime, Canada is pushing tar sands oil in the United States without disclosing the enormous potential for damage to North American waters.”

The submission was filed today by Environmental Defence Canada, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and three private citizens living downstream from the tar sands: John Rigney in Alberta, Don Deranger in Saskatchewan, and Daniel T'Seleie in the Northwest Territories. The CEC was established in 1994 by Canada, Mexico and the United States by the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation.

“I live downstream from the tailings ponds, and not a day goes by that I don’t worry about what they are doing to the rivers and lakes where I hunt, fish and live,” said John Rigney, a citizen of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, and signatory to the submission. “When will the boosters of the tar sands learn that you can’t drink oil?”

The submission is available on the Environmental Defence Canada web site at http://www.environmentaldefence.ca/reports/reports.htm#protecting

NDP climate change bill moves closer to becoming law

NDP news release

The NDP’s Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311), which will commit the federal government to achieving practical, science-based greenhouse-gas reduction targets, moved one step closer to becoming law today.

“It was great to see a majority of the members come together to get this passed,” said New Democrat MP Bruce Hyer (Thunder Bay–Superior North), who introduced bill. “Now just one more debate and one more vote and Canada will finally be on its way to having clear regulations and frameworks for fighting climate change.”

C-311 is the country’s only federal climate-change bill and will make the government accountable to Canadians for action on climate change through regular reporting on measures to achieve firm targets. The bill passed by a vote of 155 to 137 after thousands of Canadians contacted their Members of Parliament to voice their support for the bill.

“At a time when Canada badly needs clear and decisive leadership on the climate crisis, this historic piece of legislation is now one step closer to becoming law,” said New Democrat Leader Jack Layton. “Canadians have said loud and clear that they want us to be world leaders in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and this bill would help make that a reality.”

C-311 was modelled on Bill C-377, which was introduced by New Democrat Leader Jack Layton in 2007. This bill was passed by the House of Commons in 2008 with the support of the Liberals and the Bloc, but died in the Senate when the election was called.

Oil sands PR blitz anything but balanced

Simon Dyer
OilSandsWatch.Org

It's official: the unabashed oil sands PR blitz is in full swing. It's image, not impacts that industry is addressing, and that's a problem.

CAPP, along with nine other industry associations has launched "Alberta is Energy ," a campaign complete with town hall meetings, a website and a media plan to sell oil and gas. Two recently uploaded YouTube videos highlight key messaging about the oil sands industry - that it's a clean, green, money-making machine.

But wait: don't drink the Kool-Aid yet because the video's "balanced perspective " is not-so-balanced. Some of the most important issues to stakeholders are downplayed, misrepresented or ignored altogether. Let's set the record straight.

Read the full article here.

Bolivia: Ambassador Pablo Solon on why thousands will attend World People's Climate Summit

From Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal

World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth via Climate and Capitalism.
More than 10,000 individuals and 50 governments have already registered to participate in the historic World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, on April 19-22, 2010. Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, at a press conference during UNFCCC negotiations in Bonn on April 10 condemned continued attempts by some developed countries to impose a deeply flawed Copenhagen Accord as the basis for future negotiations:

The only way to get negotiations back on track not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth is to put civil society back into the process.

Solon explained it was this belief that motivated Bolivia to host an historic World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth, to which more than 15,000 people and up to 70 governments are expected to attend.

“The central aim of any climate summit is not to save itself and accept any outcome, but to come to an agreement that will save humanity.” Solon said that the Copenhagen Accord sadly marked a “backwards step” so could never be acceptable as a basis for further negotiations. Solon pointed out that the European Union’s own analysis of the Copenhagen Accord admitted that it would lead to an increase of temperatures of up to four or five degrees Celsius.

This is no kind of solution. Yet at these talks [in Bonn] we never hear developed nations admitting concern over this. Instead the US claims this is the best agreement we have had. Are we really willing to say that allowing temperatures to rise to four or five degrees is a good goal?

Solon reiterated the demands of many developing nations by calling on industrialised nations to rebuild trust. “You cannot rebuild trust by legalizing the same methods that led to the failure in Copenhagen.” Solon called for talks to be returned to the full UNFCCC process, and to develop on what had been agreed in COP15.

Solon commenting on news that the US and Denmark were withdrawing aid from countries like Bolivia for their opposition to the Copenhagen Accord said, “This in their right, but unfair and clearly an attempt to punish Bolivia. What kind of negotiation is it where you lose money if you disagree?”

Solon said that Bolivia would not back down due to such threats. “We are a country with dignity and sovereignty and will maintain our position.”

Pablo Solon, part 1. Parts 2 and 3 below.