Climate change is only one of many concerns
By John Twigg
As I sat down to write this there were about a dozen issues I could have expounded on, from what it feels like to turn 67 or what Victoria should do with its sewage to what B.C.'s Auditor-General thinks of the reporting of contingent liabilities in the B.C. Public Accounts or attempt to put the so-called climate crisis into the context of international politics, amongst other topics.
For example, I really like what Bernie Sanders is doing in the contest against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's nomination in the U.S. Presidential election in November this year, such as his impromptu comment last night (March 8) after unexpectedly topping the poll in Michigan that his campaign is growing nationally because it's a populist backlash against the Clinton campaign being "funded by Wall Street and the billionaire class" - which surely is a life-changing issue, but I'm afraid nothing I could write here would do much to change the pre-rigged outcome for the corrupt Clinton machine. Except maybe prayers to God.
Turning 67 at first was more depressing than I expected it would be but soon I was cheered by a quite-unexpected flood of best wishes via facebook, which medium I rarely participate in (though I'm heavy on Twitter via @TwiggJohn), and so thank you to all who sent kind regards - especially to those who I haven't seen in a while.
Indeed the increase of that feedback is itself a telling insight into our changing online environments: it is becoming so much easier to reach out and communicate with more and more people via social media even while the traditional mainstream print media fall into decline and morph into online entities; it soon could reach a point where everyone alive who wants to will be able to watch one live event simultaneously.
Climate change is real
But instead I'll celebrate my modest milestone by writing about the most important issue that affects the most people, at least in the current context of world affairs, and that issue is Climate Change.
Note that I did not say "climate crisis" because despite all the well-meaning alarmism the reality is that the changes taking place in our air, land and water are still gradual, incremental and manageable for the vast majority of humanity.
However I am acknowledging the reality that increasingly noticeable changes have been taking place in things like average seasonal air temperatures, storm frequencies and scopes, snow-melts and droughts, ice-cap changes and many other atmospheric and hydrologic indicators such as percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere and acidity in the oceans, and greenhouse gases, human pollution and many other signs of our changing times (like more plastics and fewer fish in the oceans) - some of which have been exaggerated such as possibly the rate of ice-cap and glacier retreats.
What a horror it would be to have to swim in the sewage-polluted waters off of Rio de Janeiro in order to compete in the summer Olympics this year, and I hasten to note that the bodily emissions of 6.3 million people in Rio dwarf those of the 100,000 or so people in Victoria B.C. where they are merely emitting screened sewage through outfalls that reach far out into the Juan de Fuca Strait where the massive tide rip provides a natural and free dispersal of emissions with zero negative health or environment effects, a fact attested to by a variety of health officers here and by other knowledgeable people including former federal environment minister David Anderson.
The reality is that Victoria's sewage emissions are like a drop in a firehose and that many of the toxins in Victoria wastes such as medical items are being removed at source but nonetheless some environmental bullies are still trying to force Victoria taxpayers to spend about a billion dollars to fix a problem that really doesn't exist except in the symbolic and cosmetic realms.
Similarly it must be horrific to become pregnant in a region rife with the new Zika virus, or to be poor in a remote aboriginal community, or to be trapped in a refugee camp trying to flee the uncivil war in Syria, or in a jail in North Korea, or an interrogation unit on Diego Garcia.
Did you catch the drift of where I'm going with this narrative? Did any of the code words or lack thereof provoke a call to arms or a run to flight?
The key gist is that nowadays it's a growing challenge to keep in balance and proper perspective the many different problems and other issues we collectively face as humans and Canadians, and that includes dealing wisely with the challenges in climate change, which are not yet a real crisis.
Some of those issues entail positive options too, like using climate challenges as opportunities to develop strategies towards full employment, and really it doesn't help when extremists from either end try to unilaterally impose dubious positions prematurely, which also tend to be overly costly too, and with the biggest payoffs in them often going mainly to insiders.
Trudeau found a climate compromise
Thus I was quite heartened to see the win-win compromises in what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did at the recent First Ministers conference in Vancouver on climate issues in which a disparate group of Premiers emerged with a consensus on climate policy that each province would begin collecting ideas for ways to reduce carbon emissions (and presumably reduce other pollutants too) in means most appropriate to their respective jurisdictions, which is a wonderfully Canadian muddle-through not seen in many decades.
For British Columbia that means getting federal help to build a bridge across the river where the Massey Tunnel now is, in order to reduce energy-wasting traffic jams, getting federal help to build a transmission line from Peace River into Alberta, in order to replace coal-fired power, and federal help to develop LNG exports in order to replace coal-fired power plants in Asia. Amongst other ideas of course, hopefully tweaking the province's pioneering carbon tax in order to remove some regressive features.
Those moves may be difficult for environmental purists to accept as truly green but nonetheless it means that the Premiers have agreed to begin studying ways they each could do that, then they'll meet again in October to begin planning how to plan for implementing such improvements.
In other words there was no rush to thwart a false crisis, there was no one-size-fits-all top-down solution imposed by a tyrant like Stephen Harper, there was no denial that some climate-related things do need to be done and there even was acknowledgement by Trudeau and the Premiers de facto of the practical reality that some new carbon-based projects including new pipelines might still proceed too (e.g. Energy East), depending on their individual merits - because as Trudeau and Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley duly noted the economic and financial realities are still very important too. And as they and other experts point out, the world will still need lots of petrochemicals for many decades to come even if the availability of green energy was to soar.
So Canada's First Ministers had a meeting, with a brief look-in by First Nations leaders, to decide on how they would plan to plan a plan of action, which may sound silly but is actually wise and appropriate in the circumstances.
One of the first steps was a commitment to remove the heavy dependence of northern communities on diesel-powered electrical generators as soon as possible, partly because of a fear that all the soot coming from them is accelerating the snow melt. So that would be a good thing, but how? Maybe it could become a new market for B.C.'s mythical and evaporating LNG industry??
Climate top topic in Washington summit
The backstory was that Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall was about to call a provincial election, now set for April 4, and Trudeau was about to hold a three-day summit with President Barack Obama in Washington, now on my TV as I write this, and Obama and the eco-maniacs around him want and need Trudeau to bring with him an apparent success story on U.S. climate diplomacy with which to play some media games for national and world consumption.
One obvious goal is to modify the world's perception of the reality that the U.S. and China are by far the largest emitters of carbon-based pollutants and really they should be doing more to mitigate that, but really their main purpose is to smokescreen the reality that the world economy is in grave danger of another great crash if the 7 billion people alive today were to see their leaders in a panic over exchange rates and/or going to war and/or failing to deal effectively with issues like climate change which in some arid regions are making day-to-day life ever more hardscrabble.
"Crisis? What crisis? Everything's fine, and look see the great progress we're making with things like solar power systems, wind turbines and Tesla electric cars. See the progress we're making with Canada! We can do this," they seem to be saying without mentioning that multi millions of people are underemployed, impoverished, sick and socially desperate even in the U.S. and Canada.
Really the politicians are like magicians tricking you into watching the distraction while they slip a card up their sleeve. Just don't ask them about those deficit levels, the mounting debts, untold contractual obligations and contingent liabilities that nowadays plague the balance sheets of governments the world over and leave them unable to help generate sufficient jobs and revenues.
Not to mention the graft and bribes and paybacks to partisan donors that rarely get revealed, such as seen now in Malaysia. And that's all too evident in the United States too because some of its largest financial houses are implicated in the Malaysian scandal (see previous link) and it even touches down here in B.C. because the same Malaysian interests also are proponents of one of B.C.'s largest proposed LNG plants and now are claiming Trudeau's new environmental policies could derail that project.
Cancellation of some LNG projects in B.C. no doubt would be welcomed by many environmental activists and some First Nations activists too but it would be a bitter loss to many other business and financial interests and of course it would be a huge political football to be kicked around in next year's B.C. election too. But for the global climate the impact would be negligible or minimal either way.
Climate smokescreens world-war threats
Nonetheless the dominance of the climate issue as a political priority is expected to be highlighted in the somewhat-rare three-day state visit to Washington D.C. that Trudeau is making at the invitation of Obama but really that will be a smokescreen to the reality that many other problem issues are more pressing and unaddressable such as the wars in the Middle East, the coming break-up of Europe and break-downs of some members, global financial deflation, spreading diseases and droughts and over-plundering of the oceans and you fill in anything you think I missed.
Really what Obama and Trudeau will be doing for a few days is feeding the mainstream media with easy content and offering soothing words to placate the many eco-maniacs who have become convinced that the climate is crashing faster than the economy is - which is a highly debatable paradigm despite some militant environmentalists such as David Suzuki saying that jailing should be the punishment for anyone who dares to deny the gospel dogma that only massive immediate changes in human social, communal, political and economic behaviours can avert a climate crisis.
It's true that the precautionary principle teaches that it would be prudent to reduce polluting effects of human behaviour, but the cost-benefits of such things as say pre-building dykes around Richmond should be weighed against the cost-benefits of doing other things such as say building new housing for mental patients who became homeless due to a former B.C. government's heartless closure and non-replacement of its Riverview sanitorium facility.
Here in B.C. we sometimes hear calls for the immediate closure and tear-down of the Burrard Thermal Generating Station in Port Moody which was built in 1962 and when used burns large volumes of natural gas to drive turbines that produce large volumes of electricity for Greater Vancouver and the whole B.C. power grid as well as help "shape" B.C. power exports to the U.S. so those exports will earn higher prices.
Environmental extremists of course believe that emissions from such plants are major contributors to global warming but that's not wholly true because other power plants are much worse than Burrard, especially the thousands of coal-fired power plants in China, many burning dirty coal, and the hundreds more thermal generating stations now coming on stream in China for many years ahead despite that country having recently promised to cap its carbon emissions by 2030.
Burrard plant provides power backup
Meanwhile the Burrard power plant provides excellent security of power for the four million or so B.C.ers who now depend on a handful of very long power transmission lines from hydroelectric generating stations in far northern and eastern B.C. locations - lines that are highly vulnerable to damage from earthquakes, ice-storms and other interruptions such as due to human actions from target-shooters taking out insulators to terrorists blowing out footings (both of which have already happened). Not to mention the threats from computer hackers.
So shutting down the Burrard Generating Station would be akin to the folly of shutting down the Riverview sanitorium - we might need it some day! Badly!! But nonetheless the well-meaning but naive eco-militants want it torn down. And some bureaucratic bean-counters wanting to save a thimbleful of money in the contingent-liabilities footnote of the B.C. budget are now supporting them. Shame.
My main point is that making progress on climate issues is a good thing but the campaign and plans to do so do not need to be done in a panic but instead can and should be done in a reasoned and sensible manner that prioritizes the worst threats and uses the others to gradually shift from negative to positive effects.
Vancouver's sewage is an asset
A good example can be seen in Metro Vancouver's growing challenge to deal with its sewage, the amount of which is growing with the population and soon will exceed the capacity of existing treatment plants. Obviously new plants will be needed, but where and what type?
My suggestion is that a new facility be built near the existing Iona outfall on the southwest side of Vancouver and in the outflow of the north arm of the Fraser River, very near Vancouver International Airport (YVR) and also near the narrowest part of Georgia Strait.
So not only could we build a sewage treatment plant to not only capture the methane and other flammable gases from the sewage but also to process it in a way that could make it a useable fuel for a new ferry crossing that would connect a new dock near YVR to a new dock on nearby Gabriola Island, which can easily be connected to Vancouver Island via a small pair of bridges via Bligh Island on the west side of Gabriola.
The crossing would be shorter and thus faster and the ferry or ferries could be designed to maximize space for trucks and foot passengers, thus easing pressures on other terminals.
That's a good win-win idea regardless of what fuel would be used, even low-grade Bunker C, but it would be even better if it used waste fuel from a nearby source.
Dauncey book offers innovations
But there could be many other examples of new technologies like that, more than a few of which are cited in Guy Dauncey's optimistic new book titled Journey To The Future: A Better World Is Possible, published by Agio and discussed in an interview Dauncey did with me on my TV show Talk About on Shaw TV North Island viewable here and more information is at www.journeytothefuture.ca and www.earthfuture.com .
While Dauncey like many others believes that climate change is a problem needing to be addressed urgently and strongly he's also a pragmatist who believes new solutions can be found to lots of old problems, with expansion of "public banking" being one of about 500 innovations and "co-operative self-organization" and "syntropy" being key concepts in a new paradigm.
The book imagines a young man time-travelling to Vancouver, the world's greenest city, in 2032 and learning about the many good things they're doing, such as urban agriculture and energy conservation but also many social, economic and political reforms.
That's all good stuff, but how urgent is it?
CO2 levels are still miniscule
The current fixation is on CO2 which is rising and supposedly passing the tipping point of 400 parts per billion but another way to express that is that the trace levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the last few decades have gone from about 0.035% to 0.040% which is obviously not a cataclysm and still far below levels in previous Earth ages, and to some extent the increase may also be a benefit insofar as more carbon in a warmer atmosphere helps plants grow bigger faster.
Now we know other compounds such as water and methane are greenhouse gases worse than CO2 for trapping heat in the atmosphere and yes of course human activities contribute too such as with aerosols but really is a bit of warming such a bad thing? A lot depends on which region you're in but in my opinion overall it's a benefit, so far, such as warmer weather reducing winter heating bills here in coastal B.C.
Ocean acidification from higher CO2? Yes maybe that will prove to be a serious problem but so far I'm not convinced it's the crisis some zealots are so quick to claim it is.
And anyway just how much of climate change is due to human impacts and how much is due to natural cycles and other variations? Some people claim the science is settled on that but I'm not one of them.
People who want to denigrate humanity and deny there is a creator are quick to blame human greed for environmental changes but there still are many other natural forces that modern science is only now beginning to study, such as variations in sunspots and solar flairs, subtle shifts in planet Earth's tilt, wobble and oval orbit, and probably other things we do not yet comprehend.
I expect we all will learn more about such things in the years ahead, and if there does become apparent a need for more urgent actions then we will still have the time and resources to do so, but meanwhile the so-called climate crisis is dwarfed by humanity's social, political and economic problems even though many political leaders would rather have us focus on the climate smokescreens.
So should we panic about carbon emissions? Should we obsess over political theatrics? Should we retreat into spiritual nihilism? Or should we do what we can to improve what we can and gain the wisdom to live with the things we cannot fix?
Probably the correct answer is to do whatever we can to make better the things that can be improved, not get too stressed about things beyond our control and seek the wisdom needed to know the differences.
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