How to Talk to a Climate Change Sceptic

There's various shades of climate change denial. It's too simplistic e.g. to paint Al Gore detractors as denialists. Please read on before you judge.

First, you have people who deny any climate change is happening. Second, you have people who believe that climate change is happening but not due to human activity. Third, you have the Gore/IPCC following who squarely blame global warming on CO2 emissions. Fourth, you have people with intermediate opinions who make their own interpretation which doesn't fall neatly into the first 3 categories.

E.g. my personal opinion is that climate change is happening and that human activity is partly and maybe largely to blame. But, in my case, I fear deforestation more than CO2 emissions because human CO2 contributions are only 5% of the global budget. I won't get into a discussion of mass balances but those engineers among us who understand mass balances will realize that removing 25% of global CO2 sinks (as global deforestation has done) may well have 5 times more impact than increasing CO2 sources by 5%.

Modelling the environment may be too complicated for anyone to predict exactly. That's why we need to be precautionary. Right now we are anything but precautionary. Exploitation of natural resources is virtually unfettered.

Yes, let's reduce emissions - it can't hurt. But I personally doubt it is the complete answer. I say that as a committed environmentalist which is why I joined the GPC.

The IPCC report also has a lot of detractors. They are not necessarily fools or oil company agents. In fact many are scientists who served on the IPCC working group. Although the final report was billed as a concensus it was written by relatively few people. As this link (http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=...) demonstrates, 400 prominent scientists have expressed concerns with the IPCC report - 3 of them Canadians and one whose comments were entirely ignored in the final IPCC report.

I leave you with a quote from one scientist David Evans who studied carbon counting for the Australian government for 6 years: "At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics" .

The Senate website is valuable because it presents detailed verbatim criticisms by prominent scientists of the IPCC report. I'm interested in details of both sides of the argument and when you hear that 400 scientists contest a report of 57 scientists then you should be careful before taking sides. This thing is too important to get wrong and, again, I don't deny global warming and I don't deny it's human-caused. But if human CO2 contribution is 5% of total (as I think is scientifically accepted) and humans have cut down 50% of the Earth's forests then I rely on my own training to tell me that the problem is not the oil consumption (which will end anyway within the next 50 years) but the greatly diminished sink of CO2 (terrrestrial biota).

Ask yourself a question: if deforestation continues to 75-85% and ultimately 100% what will remove CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere?

I'm no fan of the Republican party or the Democratic party for that matter - they remind me too much of the Liberal-Conservative Alliance Party of Canada. The same applies to the U.S. Senate or Canadian Senate. They all have an inherent bias toward corporatism and the status quo. However, you can't dismiss 400 climate scientists because you don't like one senator or even the entire Senate. The IPCC report was peer-reviewed. There was disagreement.

We can only deal with one issue at a time? Is that because we're slow or because we want to hide our agenda?

Can I poll the audience on the Popeye comment? I'm stuck on that one.

I think the IPCC report review was done by experts from various fields, not just climate scientists, because the problem is multidisciplinary in nature requiring knowledge of geology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics etc. and even economics because everyone these days, including Greens, are sold on the idea that it's ok to pay for pollution and it can be taxed like a commodity. This is why the Kyoto implementation plan reads like the Income Tax Act of Canada. It unfortunately has been dreamt up by beancounters and lawyers for their gainful employment and by governments because the whole thing will end up in lawsuits while the environment gets worse. You can earn carbon credits by investing in an eco business. If that business turns out to be unsuccessful does someone sue. While everyone is suing unsuccessful eco businesses what is happening to the environment. What a mess. Everyone is avoiding the necessary pain and lifestyle changes needed to reverse global warming.

I haven't spoken to everyone. But I haven't heard anyone say that we need to restore the Earth's forests or put absolute restrictions on emissions on CO2 emissions (that you can't buy your way out of). Fuel consumption and reforestation need to be regulated (legislated) at the national level. That would be more efficient than establishing a complicated system of trading carbon credits. Make violations criminal offences under the Criminal Code.

The penalty must fit the crime.

There is nothing in these policy statements about reforestation or the impact of loss of forest. GPC policy on forest is limited to saying that there will be a tax on forestry companies and some may get credits. Period. No specifics on what it is trying to achieve. Is it trying to accomplish reforestation? Or is it trying to just slow down the destruction? What about deforestation for development and farming? Nothing.

The flaw in this policy is that it assumes the greenhouse phenomenon is due almost entirely to human fuel combustion. It is not. Human carbon fuel emissions on a global scale is about 5 Gt/yr. Terrestrial photosynthetic uptake is about 120 Gt/yr. These are 1994 numbers - half of the Earth's forest had been cut down by then. So global uptake by terrestrial biota was probably in the order of 200 Gt/yr prior to the industrial era.

The problem with GPC policy is that it is spending 95% of its effort dealing with 5% of the problem. I can understand the reluctance to address forestry in Canada - it is the backbone of the rural economy. But its the greater evil.

It would be easier to regulate oil and gas production in Canada than regulate individual users. Set a production limit and let the market determine the price. Regulating fuel production and fuel imports regulates CO2 emissions.

And nothing stops a polluter like jail. A cap-and-trade system will lead to disputes which drag on for years. This is where the UN and NATO should intervene - international polluters and forestry companies are the real terrorists, not Taliban. Taliban were not responsible for damage on a global scale.

Brian, given the extent of the crisis, why do we want temporary fixes?

It's time for Canadians to lose their reputation as hewers of wood and drawers of water.

You seem to be jumping to a couple of unwarranted conclusions.

"Global trading of carbon credits has low probability of success" may well be the case, certainly if we were to allow for trading with rogue nations. Any international trading regime should be based on reliable partners. But that is no reason not to use a cap-and-trade within Canada to meet our domestic requirments. Hopefully Canada does not fall into the hands of a rogue regime, any more so than it currently may be!

And of course, since your alternative suggestion was to charge polluters under the criminal code, I presumed you were talking about domestic rather than international measures. We can't just waltz over to India and arrest people under our laws.

"Suppose that a Canadian company needs to invest in a eco research company to earn carbon credits..."

Ah, but that's not what's meant by a hard cap and trade. A hard cap does not allow credit for anything other than a real, proven emission reduction. Research alone doesn't count. You must be thinking of Harper & Baird's weak plan, whereby companies exceeding their intensity targets pay into a fund that will "research" new technologies. This isn't what the Green Party is talking about at all. Under a hard cap, you can't just spend some money to get "off the hook for the next 20 years" (if you could, it would be more money than any current polluter could afford, as you'd have to buy 20 years worth of reductions up front and still not increase your own emissions in the meantime).

The kind of worries you express are what is known as a "soft cap", one where you can buy credits from those who don't have their own caps (are outside the cap program), or can get credit for things that may reduce future emissions. There are certainly mechanisms like this in the current Kyoto round (2008-2012), such as CDM, but this round is meant to get things off the ground, not finalize emissions. The major reductions are planned to come in the decades 2030 - 2050. By then, we need all nations involved with hard caps & similar measures. First, though, we need some baby steps to get a few recalcitrant or reluctant participants to sign on. Most of the market-based mechanisms (like CDM) were originally inserted mainly to please US and Canadian critics, who didn't like the idea of being forced to follow any hard caps. (Ironically, those opponents then used such aspects of Kyoto to criticize the resulting deal as ineffective!)

Although there are better alternatives in housing material, I wouldn't just ban wood. Plastic & steel take a lot more energy (fossil fuels) to produce - things that would be rather hard to get under your proposed tight limits on fuel production. Lumber can certainly be sustainably harvested, even though that's not what we currently do in most cases in Canada. Even here, however, unsustainable logging isn't the same as deforestation, as it leads to degradation but not eradication of forest lands. (Degradation reduces things like diversity and biomass, but does not necessarily lead to increased carbon emissions). Using lumber (or paper) does not automatically emit unsustainable CO2 or destroy our forests. Certainly there are measures such as FSC certification and "Ancient-forest Friendly" paper which reduce harm. And if we banned photocopying, it would be rather hard to prosecute our criminal polluters, wouldn't it? ("We have charges and a conviction against you, but sorry, you can't have a copy, we aren't allowed to waste paper you know.")

Erich Jacoby-Hawkins
Barrie, ON

The views I express on this blog are purely my own and should not be construed to represent the official position of the Green Party of Canada - the same goes for all other people's posts & comments.

an excerpt from http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterf%#@... (you'll have to substitute a certain trio of letters in the link for the %#@)
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The past five days I went to a pretty major environmental conference put on by the Aspen Institute in their odd little mountain town -- and nobody needs to tell me how un-correct it was that I flew all the way out to Denver and then drove a rent-a-car the size of a humpback whale deep into the heart of the Rocky Mountains to attend this thing. (I assure you, I wasn't paid to go.) The Institute grounds -- which looked like the set of a 1950s Raymond Massey movie about the future -- were thick with many eminentissimos of Climate Change (minus Al Gore) and activists in "green" politics, more generally. The latest frightful measurements of retreating glaciers, vanishing species, and creeping deserts were proffered and everybody was suitably impressed by the acceleration of scary conditions facing the human race.

Being such a formal conference, though, with the putative mission to advance understanding and set agendas-for-action, a great effort was made through the medium of panel discussions to set forth various "initiatives" to deal with all the scariness, especially by enlisting the agencies of the US Government -- and most especially with the prospect of a new administration sweeping out the detritus of Bush-dom next January.

I confess I found most of these well-intentioned proposals utterly implausible, along with their trains of hopes, wishes, and fantasies. The main conceit is that we can keep all the normal operations of the American Dream humming by some "non-carbon" related energy source -- in other words, run WalMart without oil, methane gas, or coal -- and that all the forces of government and capital can be marshaled to make that happen. The secondary conceit is that they would accomplish these things in an orderly process, harnessing "new technology," as though it were a higher sort of school science fair.

My own opinion is that these birds have the scale issue wrong. The exigencies of the Long Emergency imply that virtually everything organized at the grand scale will tend to wobble and fail as the problems of energy scarcity and climate change converge. Institutions from the federal government to WalMart to the University of Arizona will face increasing impotence, incompetence, and bankruptcy. Vesting our hopes in propping up activities run at that scale is bound to be disappointing, to say the least, and the precursor to social upheaval to go a bit further. There's probably a lot we can do at the finer and more modest scale, but that is not the scale that conferences like this focus on-- in particular because so many of the participants are current or former high-up government wonks themselves. Anyway, the scale of global distress tends, by plain inference, to invoke the wish for global "solutions," however detached from reality they may be.
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He speaks mostly to American conditions, but in the main Canada is much the same. Our respect for institutions & order are superior, and there is no comparable population with greater endowment anywhere; but for us questions of scale, effective vs. chaotic re-localization & plausibility of grand schemes reliant on distant enforcers, these are all live & serious questions to be entertained up front & non-delusionally.

Some comment seems to suggest that cap-and-trade is the most efficient way of addressing the CO2 glut. To this I totally disagree because it is unethical to pretend that pollutants have intrinsic value and, hence, decriminalize the act of pollution. This logic could be stretched to other public welfare offences.

Maybe we should just have a large administrative penalty for child pornography. Or like Chris Rock mockingly suggests - just charge $5000 per bullet and handgun murders will drop. The belief that unfettered free markets are the solution to our ills is to suggest that we should attach no stigma to these crimes. And although I have difficulty advocating punishment instead of paying for consequences of one's actions, there has to be deterrence in the form of incarceration for pollution. So I firmly stand by my earlier remarks that cap-and trade is a new low in environmental regulation.

This is heresy to Milton Friedman and Chicago School of Business groupies who just know that everything can be monetized. Sorry, I disagree. The environment cannot be valued. Without it we die. It is priceless. And we're losing it fast.

Of course nobody needs to be criminalized if we just shut down oil and gas production and importation to levels which the environment can sustain. But to take it down to individual consumers and industries and then impose a complicated trading system is the most inefficient way of controlling emissions I can think of.

To be more accurate, your concern is that a certain pollutant, CO2, is worthless. You hope that creating false value in it eliminates it.

Only an economist could concoct a perverse theory such as this. When faced with an environmental catastrophe an economist uses the shock doctrine to promote a new trading scheme. Even Suzuki gets sucked in.

We have an existing capping system known as environmental regulations and they work. We could simply legislate more restrictive fuel supply and timber cutting and let the market decide the price. But the problem is that it would work immediately and create short-term discomfort and economic decline. Fuel rationing has existed before and the world somehow survived. I've discussed alternatives to wood.

The disaster capitalism economist throws out the baby with the bath water when the situation is ripe. He has no emotional response to pollution, only a dollars and cents attachment. And when you take this approach you neglect small details like where the carbon capture market really is. And how long it will take for markets to appear if and when they do appear. Where is the latent market for the roughly 105 Gt/yr excess CO2 specifically. Spell it out.