Canada and global warming: a state of denial

After all the promises from the Trudeau Liberals that the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline will meet the highest environmental standards, we are finding out the truth. Examples of pipeline work in Burnaby and Chilliwack have demonstrated the damage the pipeline is doing to BC waterways and fish, as well as the commercial salmon industry. Since this is occurring in communities, where what has happened is readily visible to the public, one has to wonder what is happening in the backwoods where people generally are not likely to see the damage. 

Work on a Trans Mountain pipeline crossing in a British Columbia stream has destroyed salmon habitat, raising concerns about the Crown corporation’s ability to build infrastructure through waterways if the expansion project proceeds, a scientist says.

Mike Pearson says the “amateur hour” work on the Stewart Creek crossing in Chilliwack will reduce food sources for coho and chum salmon and limit their ability to hide from predators. The fish are part of the diet of endangered southern resident killer whales.

“There was no consideration given whatsoever to the habitat, which is just not acceptable,” said Pearson, a biologist with 30 years’ experience, in an interview.

Trans Mountain Corp. filed documents with the National Energy Board showing its plans to cover exposed pipe in the Fraser Valley creek. It wrote that it would place concrete mats in the channel, extending about eight metres upstream and nine metres downstream of the exposed line, and cover it with small stones.

Pearson said the work was completed in August to September of last year. He visited the site in December and took photos that he says show most of the stones have been swept away by currents, leaving the concrete blocks exposed.

“The work has degraded habitat in several ways,” he wrote in an assessment filed with the energy board by intervener Yarrow Ecovillage.

The smooth, hard concrete provides no hiding places for salmon, supports very few of the aquatic invertebrates they feed on, inhibits plant growth and prevents fish from burying their eggs, the document says.

Pearson believes it’s not an isolated incident. An assessment he did of a pipeline creek crossing on Sumas Mountain in 2015 for Pipe Up Network, an anti-pipeline group, concluded the site was physically unstable and reconstructed with materials inappropriate to restoring habitat.

A stream-keeper has also raised concerns about excavation at Trans Mountain’s terminal in Burnaby. John Preissl has filed several complaints with the energy board alleging the work has caused sediment to fall into two salmon-bearing creeks.

Federal and provincial officials inspected the terminal in April and found improperly installed sediment and erosion control measures. A follow-up energy board report concluded Trans Mountain had fixed the problems by the end of November. ...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has purchased the pipeline and expansion project for $4.5-billion.

The expansion would triple the capacity of the existing line that runs from the Edmonton area to Burnaby. The energy board completed its first review in 2016 and recommended the government approve the project with 157 conditions.

In its report, the board wrote the watercourse crossing plans “would effectively reduce the extent of effects on fish and fish habitat.”

Ten conditions relate to fish, including that the company must file details on the presence of fish and fish habitat with the board before starting construction on watercourse crossings.

Most of the conditions are “a plan to make a plan,” argued Eugene Kung, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law. “They don’t have any actual measurable effect on the outcome.”

A Trans Mountain pipeline crossing in Stewart Creek, in Chilliwack, B.C., on Dec. 12, 2018.

MIKE PEARSON /THE CANADIAN PRESS

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-work-on-...

With the extreme cold temperatures across North America, we can expect the climate change deniers to be out in full force. However, this is what was predicted in climate change models.

A large swath of Canada, from the Prairies to Nova Scotia, is under a deep freeze. Temperatures in Winnipeg are dipping down to –36 C Monday night with a windchill of almost –50 C. In Windsor, which is typically the warmest spot in Ontario, the overnight temperature will dip to –27 C with a windchill of –40 C. 

Even in parts of the U.S. Midwest, temperatures are expected to have a wind chill of –50 C.

This may leave some, like U.S. president Donald Trump, wondering where global warming has wandered off to. ...

The fact is, it's climate change, or global warming, that's behind this extreme cold. Ever since the bitter winter of 2014, a new winter-weather catchphrase has been making the rounds: polar vortex. The polar vortex is nothing new. It's just that it typically encircles the north pole. However, in recent years, it seems to be meandering southward every so often. ...

A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on Earth. This temperature difference upsets the stability of the jet stream. And that brings the cold Arctic air southward where it can linger, a result that meteorologists call a blocking pattern. 

"We have seen more of these; we've noticed that trend already, that's proven. And all of our climate models show this trend will continue," Wagstaffe said. "And that doesn't just mean more heat and more drought conditions. It can also mean more of these extreme cold blasts or extreme wet or snowy systems staying in place longer than normal."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-polar-vortex-1.4998820

Chris Tollefson reviews three books below that examine why Canada's political system is still paralyzed when it comes to dealing with climate  change despite the Trudeau Liberals promises to deal decisively with the crisis in the 2015 election. 

• Costly Fix: Power, Politics and Nature in the Tar Sands: Ian Urquhart: University of Toronto Press (2018)
• Oil’s Deep State: How the Petroleum Industry Undermines Democracy and Stops Action on Global Warming: Kevin Taft: Lorimer (2017)
• The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada: Donald Gutstein: Lorimer (2018) ...

Why is Canada so politically paralyzed in the face of such compelling evidence about the need for decisive action on climate change? ...

Urquhart argues that the 1990s Alberta tarsands boom was facilitated and characterized by a radical departure in government resource policy. Both federally and provincially, he argues, the 1990s saw the prevailing nationalist “think like an owner” approach to resource management dissipate and ultimately discredited. In its place, a continentalist vision was soon embedded, steered by an ideology Urquhart refers to as “market fundamentalism.”

And so, from the 1990s onward, the tarsands became the pampered and privileged child of Canadian government policy makers and influencers. According to Urquhart, what evolved was less an abandonment of regulation than a “re-regulation” that recast, in some basic ways, the subsisting bargain between capital and the state. In the process, the state — particularly at the provincial level — happily and completely abdicated its historic role in managing and controlling resource development and growth. ...

Like Urquhart, Taft is intimately familiar with the frontier politics of Alberta, and with the political power of Big Oil. For a good chunk of time he chronicles here, Taft was an Alberta MLA (2001 to 2012) serving as the leader of the Liberal party opposition from 2004 to 2008.

Taft combines his insider knowledge with a crisp and hard-hitting writing style. He sets out to ask why democratically elected governments, at both federal and provincial levels, have so consistently failed to take action on climate change despite compelling evidence that the fate of the future generations hangs in the balance. The answer, in his view, is quite simple: “global warming is a death sentence for the fossil fuel industry.” To delay that sentence, Taft argues that the industry has spent untold millions to capture key democratic institutions including political parties, governments, regulators and universities. ...

According to Taft, the Alberta government sold the oilsands “at fire-sale prices” with industry “gorg[ing] itself until it grew so big, it began to trip on its own tentacles.” As Urquhart puts it, the “irrational exuberance” of this period, “... encouraged by market fundamentalism’s impact on government decision-making, spawned a litany of damage, problems, and challenges.” ...

 An open mine pit in front of Syncrude’s Mildred Lake facility. Photo: Greenpeace / Eamon MacMahon. ...

Among the impacts chronicled is the price paid by nature and the environment in the tarsands region (an area Urquhart refers to a “landscape of sacrifice,” one that borders Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada’s largest national park and a UNESCO world heritage site). Urquhart also provides a nuanced account of the detrimental effects of the boom on Canada’s ability to meet its international greenhouse gas reduction targets. ...

Donald Gutstein’s latest book, The Big Stall, riffs off many of the same themes. A retired communications professor at Simon Fraser University, Gutstein offers a rollicking and opinionated diatribe about corporate power in an era of climate change rendered Chomsky-style through a blizzard of facts and information. More of a Shadbolt than a Bateman, Gutstein’s painting of how powerful business interests and their propagandists have succeeded in blocking action on climate change is loud, proud and defiantly left-wing. Gutstein, like Taft, clearly relishes exposing the backroom deals and clandestine relationships, both in Canada and the U.S., that help explain the complex politics of climate change, a politics that all three authors would agree has become heavily corporate-dominated.

A provocative aspect of Gutstein’s analysis is his portrayal of the rise of what he calls the “New Gospel” — the notion that governments should respond to climate change by adopting business-friendly policy tools such as carbon pricing. In Gutstein’s view, carbon pricing is a Trojan horse, a measure favoured by business for purely self-interested reasons. His book also offers a highly skeptical interpretation of the Paris Climate Agreement, which he calls “Big Oil’s Deal” due to its reliance on carbon pricing as a policy instrument while eschewing the imposition of binding national targets. ...

All three books recognize that the continuing power exercised by Big Oil is a function of both the efforts of the business interests and their traditional allies as well as the corresponding inability of potential counter-movements to gain political traction. Urquhart, in particular, tackles this complex question with some finesse exploring why Big Labour, environmental groups and First Nations have yet to mount a serious challenge to the dominance of Big Oil. To some extent, these reasons relate to overt efforts by industry to co-opt potential opposition. Institutional factors that fragment and undermine efforts by opponents to have a voice in regulatory decision and policy-making also play a role, as well as more simply what Urquhart calls “the compelling and nature of the ideology of market fundamentalism.” ...

Gutstein concludes The Big Stall with a rabble-rousing chapter that exhorts us to question growth and to question (spoiler alert) economists. Instead, he argues, we should look to the courts and to Parliament to lend recognition to Indigenous rights and to push for the recognition of such rights internationally, including in international climate conventions. In his view, “Big Oil is correct to fear entrenchment of Indigenous rights in climate change treaties, since it could materially affect business as usual.” He also suggests that we should likewise endow nature with binding legal rights to provide a counterbalance to the rights enjoyed by corporations both under domestic and international law. ...

Urquhart is less effusive. In his view, recent experience, federally and provincially, has demonstrated that the “institutional legacy” of Big Oil-friendly rules and institutions is highly resilient even in the face of dramatic electoral change. For Big Oil to be displaced from its dominant role in Canadian politics would require, in his view, substantial changes in the nature of the Canadian state, and for the issue of combating climate change to acquire a much greater level of political/electoral salience. This, he acknowledges, may well “require a degree of mass political organization and mobilization Canadian environmentalism hasn’t seen yet.”

Taft ends his book on a more optimistic note, with some very specific suggestions. In a concluding chapter, he argues that the end game must be “crossing the divide between a high-carbon present and the post-carbon future with determination and speed... the goal of humanity must be to reach zero emissions by mid-century, and even then we will need to brace for lifetimes of climate upheaval.” ...

All three books elucidate the challenges this mobilization will face. The urgency of mounting this mobilization is undeniable, not only as the result of the dwindling time we have left to curb global temperature rises associated with greenhouse gas emissions, but also due to pending actions and decisions on the political front. It seems pretty clear, for example, that the Trudeau government is bound and determined to grant regulatory approval to the TMX pipeline project, which it now owns, by mid-2019. ...

And so, within weeks, it’s likely we will be embroiled in a second round of lawsuits and protests challenging the TMX project, and the process by which it has secured “re-approval” — a re-approval pursuant to the very Harper rules that Justin Trudeau promised, if elected, he would repeal to restore public trust, but which nonetheless still govern the TMX review process.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/01/28/Canada-Petro-Paralysis/

The British medical magazine has a new report out that climate change is interacting with undernutrition and obesity to create a global pandemic. 

The Lancet calls it the “Global Syndemic.” The report’s authors say we’re facing three pandemics — undernutrition, obesity and climate change — that are interacting to form a “synergy of epidemics,” or syndemic, and it’s a global problem. ...

Climate change is having serious effects on human health, bringing “crop failures, reduced food production, extreme weather events that produce droughts and flooding, increased food-borne and other infectious diseases, and civil unrest.” Those climate effects, the report says, will end up costing five to 10 per cent of global GDP, while investing just one per cent of GDP could stop the increase in climate change.

The Lancet report is blunt about why we do so little, citing “the power of vested interests by commercial actors whose engagement in policy often constitutes a conflict of interest that is at odds with the public good and planetary health.” 

For example, “The fossil fuel and food industries that are responsible for driving the Global Syndemic receive more than $5 trillion in annual subsidies from governments.” In other words, we’re spending our tax dollars on the razors that are cutting our own throats. ...

Among its recommendations, the report calls for “double-duty” actions, things like promoting public transit, which results in both increased physical activity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.  Similarly, promoting plant-based diets and reducing meat consumption will help reduce obesity and heart disease and cut methane production from livestock. Cutting subsidies to fossil fuel and the food industries would allow subsidies to sustainable energy and transportation as well as local food-production systems.

Health Canada’s recently updated food guide is largely in step with the Lancet report. But the meat and processed-food industries are fighting the changes, just as the fossil fuel industry has fought action on climate change. 

To counter such lobbies, the report recommends “collective approaches to common challenges” by building new coalitions both nationally and internationally.

https://www.thetyee.ca/News/2019/02/01/Malnutrition-Obesity-Threaten-Fut...

ETA: Another just released report states that at least one third and up to two thirds of Asian glaciers could disappear by 2100 threatening the freshwater supply for two billion people. This is because the glaciers of the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) provide the water that is essential for some 250 million people in the mountainous region in addition to 1.65 billion others below in the river valleys, according to the report.

This is almost certainly going to greatly increase the number climate change refugees and bring about a global economic downturn as Asia drives much of the world's economy now, including on Canada. 

Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people

 Melting ice on Khumbu glacier in the Everest-Khumbu region. Himalayan glaciers are a water source for 250 millions people. Photograph: Alex Treadway/ICIMOD

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people. Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” said Philippus Wester of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod), who led the report. “In the best of possible worlds, if we get really ambitious [in tackling climate change], even then we will lose one-third of the glaciers and be in trouble. That for us was the shocking finding.” Wester said that, despite being far more populous, the HKH region had received less attention than other places, such as low-lying island states and the Arctic, that are also highly vulnerable to global warming. ...

The new report, requested by the eight nations the mountains span, is intended to change that. More than 200 scientists worked on the report over five years, with another 125 experts peer reviewing their work. Until recently the impact of climate change on the ice in the HKH region was uncertain, said Wester. “But we really do know enough now to take action, and action is urgently needed,” he added. ...

The HKH region runs from Afghanistan to Myanmar and is the planet’s “third pole”, harbouring more ice than anywhere outside Arctic and Antarctica. ...

Since the 1970s, about 15% of the ice in the HKH region has disappeared as temperatures have risen. ...

The melting glaciers will increase river flows through to 2050 to 2060, he said, pushing up the risk of high-altitude lakes bursting their banks and engulfing communities. But from the 2060s, river flows will go into decline. The Indus and central Asian rivers will be most affected. “Those areas will be hard hit,” said Wester.

Lower flows will cut the power from the hydrodams that generate much of the region’s electricity. But the most serious impact will be on farmers in the foothills and downstream. They rely on predictable water supplies to grow the crops that feed the nations in the mountains’ shadows.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/04/a-third-of-himalayan...

LB Cultured Thought wrote:

jerrym wrote:

After all the promises from the Trudeau Liberals that the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline will meet the highest environmental standards, we are finding out the truth. Examples of pipeline work in Burnaby and Chilliwack have demonstrated the damage the pipeline is doing to BC waterways and fish, as well as the commercial salmon industry. Since this is occurring in communities, where what has happened is readily visible to the public, one has to wonder what is happening in the backwoods where people generally are not likely to see the damage. 

 

This is a great example of why news reporters should either require a science degree or have an editor with a science degree. Alternatively, they could take 10 minutes to run this kind of story past an impartial expert...

Firstly, this appears to be an ephemeral stream, which doesn't mean it can’t provide good salmon habitat, but limits the times in which in could. Second, consider that the entire span of “destroyed” habitat is about 17m (both sides) within the entire stream. Third, remember that a qualified professional (likely a Professional Biologist) was onsite the entire time…planning, monitoring, and signing off on this work.

Also probably important context for this story: this was a span of pipe within a river where the pipe had become exposed over time due to erosion, and they were adding cover to the pipe to restore the natural habitat. Back in the day, crossing a river with a pipeline meant blocking the stream, cutting into the ground to lay the pipe, then patching things up and bringing the water back. I’ve worked over 100 stream crossings for pipeline construction (as the Professional Biologist onsite monitoring), and none have used this old method. Everything these days is a horizontal directional drill job, so absolutely no effect in the waterway (as confirmed by an onsite Biologist).

Also important, the habitat laid down by the company here probably works as good fish habitat. The main deterioration one might see given the pictures in the news article might be vegetative, except we know this was already an ongoing right of way.

You cite your background as a biologist working for a pipeline construction firm as proof of having the expertise to discuss the issue, allegedly on an unbiased manner. Yet you are hardly an "impartial expert" you say reporters should talk to concerning the pipeline, having been paid by the industry involved in pipeline building. You also left out the reference quoted in the article to another biologist, who was not paid by the fossil fuel industry. 

Mike Pearson says the “amateur hour” work on the Stewart Creek crossing in Chilliwack will reduce food sources for coho and chum salmon and limit their ability to hide from predators. The fish are part of the diet of endangered southern resident killer whales.

“There was no consideration given whatsoever to the habitat, which is just not acceptable,” said Pearson, a biologist with 30 years’ experience, in an interview.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-work-on-...

Your criticism is also typical of those who attack evidence related to global warming by picking out small details to criticize  while avoiding discussing the staggering body of  scientific evidence generated by thousands of scientists that this is the number one problem of the 21st century, requiring an enormous shift in the way that we produce and distribute energy if we are to avoid an global environmental and economic catastrophe. According to the October 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to cite just one of the articles in discussed in previous posts, we have just over a decade to act on this. Building more pipelines to carry more fossil fuels is definitely not part of the solution. 

Five Canadian medical organizations are demanding that the Canadian government take immediate action on climate change. But the Trudeau Liberal government continues to promote and subsidize the fossil fuel industry and pipelines. 

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA), the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), the Urban Public Health Network (UPHN), the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) — agree that climate change is too important to the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren to be treated as a wedge issue in the upcoming federal election. ...

The mental and physical health of Canadians is already being harmed by climate change. Last year, tens of thousands of Canadians had their lives, homes or jobs threatened by wildfires, power outages, tornadoes and floods; millions in western Canada were forced to breath toxic air pollution as wildfire smoke blanketed their communities for days or weeks at a time; and millions in central and eastern Canada suffered through searing heat for much of the summer. 

On a global scale, the health impacts of climate change are already devastating. The prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, reported in 2018 that 712 extreme weather events occurred around the world in 2017, resulting in US$326-billion in economic losses — nearly a three-fold increase in economic losses over 2015. It also found that: 157 million more people were exposed to heat waves in 2017 than were exposed in 2000; insect and water-borne diseases are increasing in some regions of the world; and agricultural yield potential is decreasing in the 30 countries for which data were available. It concluded that the “trends in climate change impacts, exposures, and vulnerabilities demonstrate an unacceptably high level of risk for the current and future health of populations across the world.” ...

The health impacts we experience today pale in comparison to those expected if we allow global warming to increase to two degrees Celsius. The 2018 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report portrays a world with 2C of warming as one with higher sea levels, significant loss of biodiversity, prolonged heat waves, water shortages, shrinking food supplies, disruptions in transportation systems, exploding numbers of refugees displaced by flooding coastlines and parched lands, and increased global strife. It concludes that, if global warming reaches 2C, each year hundreds of millions of people will be forced into poverty by water scarcity, severe droughts, declining crop yields, and flooding along coastal areas. 

This bleak picture is not some distant future. The IPCC concluded that the world, which has already warmed by 1C, is on course to warm by 1.5C between 2030 and 2050 and by 2.6 to 4.8C by 2100. It estimated that we have 12 years to act and that we have to cut carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, and cut them to zero by 2050, if we are to prevent global warming from reaching 2C. 

The good news is that many of the policies needed to fight climate change will produce significant and immediate health benefits and healthcare savings across Canada. With the burning of fossil fuels responsible for 7,100 air-pollution related premature deaths and $53.5-billion in health-related costs per year, climate solutions directed at cars, trucks, coal plants, industry, and oil and gas extraction would save many lives, reduce rates of heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, and cut healthcare costs for the people of Canada, all while reducing carbon emissions.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/21/opinion/canadas-health-organ...

The Newfoundland Liberals are promoting their new climate change policies aimed at dealing with the threats from climate change but are also promoting their oil and gas industry at the same time. Very Liberal of them. We are way pass the time for quarter measures. Even though they admit that the province needs to build "reslience" for the growing impacts of global warming, the Liberals  continue on the same old path. 

On Friday, Environment Minister Graham Letto launched The Way Forward on Climate Change at an event in Corner Brook.

The five-year plan includes 33 actions the province says are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and 17 strategies for building "resilience" to climate change. 

These directions include plans to encourage the use of more electric vehicles, implementing the Made-in-NL carbon pricing program, and increasing energy efficiency in homes and offices.  The report also lays out the need for the province to build climate-resilient infrastructure, address health issues that may arise from climate change, increase community and education outreach, and decrease the reliance on diesel electricity generation for off-grid communities. ...

But Letto said cranking down the carbon won't come at the expense of N.L.'s offshore. "When we look at our oil and gas industry, we're promoting that, and rightly so," he said. "Because we need that for the economy. So we need to find that balance."

According to the National Energy Board, Newfoundland and Labrador's oil and gas sector emitted 2.7 megatonnes of greenhouse gasses in 2016.

Officials stressed throughout the launch that the oil and gas industry would not suffer as a result of the plan, confirmed Simon Jansen, a member of the steering committee for citizens' group Climate Watch NL.

"We are an oil and gas province," Jansen acknowledged. "Several times throughout the afternoon [it was] mentioned that we are protecting our economy.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-unveils-climate-...

A new carbon dioxide ppm record has just been set in Hawaii and that is deeply concerning scientists because that is not supposed to happen in February. 

For decades, a small research lab atop Mauna Loa has measured carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. ...

And last month, carbon dioxide levels set a new and foreboding milestone. The lab’s scientists reported this week carbon dioxide levels measured at the Mauna Loa facility hit a record monthly average high in February: 411.66 parts per million. ...

Scientists have warned that the growth rate of carbon dioxide levels is accelerating. Increases averaged 1.6 parts per million per year in the 1980s and 1.5 parts per million in the 1990s. 

But during the last decade, annual increases have averaged 2.2 parts per million.

“Carbon dioxide levels are continuing to grow at an all-time record rate because emissions from coal, oil, and natural gas are also at record high levels,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, in a post on the Scripps lab website last year.

“Today’s emissions will still be trapping heat in the atmosphere thousands of years from now.” He has said that if the current rate of increase holds for another 20 years, global carbon dioxide levels will easily surpass 450 parts per million in 2038.

At those levels, scientists predict, the Earth would warm by 2 degrees Celsius and trigger a host of other climate consequences.

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/03/07/global-carbon-dioxide-levels-mea...