Arguments
California's response to record wildfires: shift to 100% clean energy
Posted on 3 September 2018 by dana1981
In America today, it’s rare to see political leaders respond to a threat with an appropriate evidence-based policy solution. At the national level, more often we see actions that aggravate existing problems or create new ones. California – the country’s most populous and economically powerful state – has been a welcome exception.
California has been battered by extreme weather intensified by climate change. From 2012 to 2016 the state was scorched by its worst drought in over a millennium. Weather whiplash struck in 2017, when much of the state broke precipitation records. This combination led to devastating mudslides and created the conditions for the most destructive and costly wildfire season on record in 2017, followed by the state’s largest-ever wildfire in 2018, which broke the previous record (set in 2017) by more than 60%.
All of these impacts have been exacerbated by global warming. The past five years have been California’s five hottest on record. And so, the state’s leaders decided to do something about it. California had already set a renewable portfolio standard in 2002, strengthened by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2008 executive order requiring that 33% of electricity be generated by renewable sources by 2020. Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill (SB) 350 in 2015, expanding the requirement to 50% renewables by 2030.
Last week, California state lawmakers passed State Senator (and candidate for US Senate) Kevin de León’s SB 100, which amps up the target to 50% renewables by 2026, 60% by 2030, and 100% from “renewable energy resources and zero-carbon resources” by 2045.
The more aggressive clean energy targets are justified. Not only does California need to make up some of the climate slack created by the Trump administration, but the state is now ahead of its targets, with 29% of electricity last year generated from renewables and over 50% from zero-carbon sources (including nuclear and hydroelectric power).
Percentage of California’s electricity generated by renewables (black) and zero-carbon sources (gray) to date, based California Energy Commission data. The previous renewable target is shown in blue and targets under SB 100 in green. Illustration: Dana Nuccitelli
Smart leaders are responding to climate change impacts
According to the latest California Climate Change Assessment Report, global warming impacts will continue to batter the state:
- The water supply from snowpack is expected to decline two-thirds by 2050
- Heatwaves in cities could cause 2–3 times more deaths by 2050
- The average area burned annually by wildfires will increase by as much as 77% by 2100
- 31–67% of Southern California beaches may completely erode by 2100 without large-scale human interventions
- $17.9 billion worth of residential and commercial buildings could be inundated statewide by sea level rise by 2050
Kevin de León specifically cited the record-breaking wildfires as a key factor in generating the votes to pass SB 100, which had been under debate for nearly two years.
RL Miller(@RL_Miller)"Our state is one big tinderbox," says @kdeleon in closing on #SB100. "Wildfires are not longer seasonal." @HunterCutting, in case you're still wondering whether #cawildfires affect #SB100 debate.
August 29, 2018
Similarly, with its air badly polluted by smoke from wildfires, the Spokane, Washington City Council approved an ordinance setting a goal to get 100% renewable electricity by 2030. And after being struck by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, an increasing number of Houston-area residents accept human-caused global warming (64%) and are concerned about its impacts (52%).
Houston-area survey questions about climate change. Illustration: Kinder Institute for Urban Research
It’s hard to deny the reality and adverse impacts of human-caused climate change when they’re hitting people at home.
This is all good, but for many policy makers there still seems to be a serious lack of understanding of the true dimensions of the overall risk we all now face from climate change alone.
About 50% of the great Barrier reef is now dead, a process that will eventually kill off most coral reef systems globally in a matter of decades. There are also things like increasing presence of low oxygen zones in the oceans that make the entire marine system less and less stable.
Climate Change Is Suffocating Large Parts of the Ocean
In conjuction with industrial scale fishing, illegal fishing and pollution, it's questionable how much more the oceans can take. The oceans are the main factor in oxygen generation of the Earth.
Here in BC we have just had a positive development in an appeal court decision that declared the approval of the tripling of a dilbit pipeline to be biased and not objective at all removing approval for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. It would have seen an increase in the flow of oil sands synthetic crude from about the current 350,000 to almost 900,000 barrels a day. There's an estimated 173 billion barrels of bitumen in the Alberta reserves, something that the Canadian PM has declared he wants to go after.
In BC the provincial government - which although it was opposed to the TMX - has committed over $10 billion to build a large hydro-electric project(Site C dam) in the middle of the Montney gas formation that will almost certainly be used to power gas fracking for decades part of which will be turned into LNG to be sold internationally and some of which is sent to Alberta to be used in oil sands production.
Site C Dam Montney formation
Our governments here really don't seem to have any real sense of urgency even though BC is having some of the same catastrophic climate change impacts as California with record levels of flooding followed by heat waves and record wildfire seasons.
For a time the due to the smoke from wildfires the air quality in BC was some of the worst in the world.
BC air quality due to wildfires
Even more frightening is the growing prospect of what happens when the the growing damage to the oceans reaches a critical level. Very poor air quality and record level widlfires are one thing, loss of oxygen producing capacity of the Earth is a nightmare scenario.
Hi Doug
"loss of oxygen producing capacity".
You might take another look at the formula for photosynthesis.
More CO2 on one side of the equation equals more oxygen on the other side.
Bob (in Vancouver B.C.)
To Bob Hoye:
Yup, more CO2 means more O2, but that's not really where the problem lies. The issues is the mass death of phytoplankton from ocean acidification that prevents these little creatures from making shells to protect themselves against the very sunlight that lets them photosynthesize.
Of course there are some 600 species of fresh and salt water phytoplankton, but it seems the very ones we'd like to keep around are the ones that are most likely to march the road to extinction once the ocean pH falls far enough.
Bob Hoye @2
It's not the direct effect of the CO2 that is concerning, it's the rapid warming that all that extra CO2 is causing on the oceans and the increase of ocean acidity with the additions of so much carbon dioxide(i.e.carbonic acid) to the oceans.
This is already having a massive impact on coral reef viability which is rapidly heading towards zero globally. 30 years from now it's projected that 90% of coral reef systems will be dead with their huge biotas, up to 25% of life in the oceans now.
This in conjunction with industrial scale fishing, much of it not regulated at all and ocean pollution at a high level.
With the warming of the oceans, there is now a cap of warm surface water in many places as well blocking the mixing of atmospheric oxygen to deeper ocean levels creating vast areas of ocean with low oxygen levels where many species cannot survive.
My concern with the oceans is that as life there is hit so hard at so many trophic levels, then how long will the overall biological structure remain intact.
And it is that biological structure that is responsible for the production of most of the free oxygen most of the biosphere depends on for life.
Almost a half of the condensation nuclei that gives us rainfall also comes from molecules produced by life in the oceans as well.
We're seriously distrupting the key ecosystem on the planet and acting as if all is well.
Here in BC we struggle to deal with wildfires, what emergency response is there going to be to rapidly dying oceans.
No more of that dimethyl sulfide, which is the main fragrance of that ocean smell.
Shucks, I think I'll move.
[JH] Off-topic sarcasm snipped. Please read the SkS Comments Policy and adhere to it in future posts. Thank you.
Bob Hoye @6
Much better than the clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide that are going to eventually be wafting across the planet if we keep driving the oceans too far into a warming/dying cycle.
After hundreds of millions of years, oceans have suddenly lost the ability to buffer their own chemistry?
And are going to suddenly emit "clouds" of H2S?
When has it happened before?
[JH] Please resist the urge to lace your comments with sarcasm. We insist that commenters to keep the conversations civil and respectful on this venue.
Bob Hoye @8
Alarming new study makes today’s climate change more comparable to Earth’s worst mass extinction
"In “High-precision timeline for Earth’s most severe extinction,” published in PNAS on February 10, authors Seth Burgess, Samuel Bowring, and Shu-zhong Shen employed new dating techniques on Permian-Triassic rocks in China, bringing unprecedented precision to our understanding of the event. They have dramatically shortened the timeframe for the initial carbon emissions that triggered the mass extinction from roughly 150,000 years to between 2,100 and 18,800 years. This new timeframe is crucial because it brings the timescale of the Permian Extinction event’s carbon emissions shorter by two orders of magnitude, into the ballpark of human emission rates for the first time.
How does this relate to today’s global warming?
Climate and CO2 have changed hand-in-hand through most of geological time. Mostly these changes happened slowly enough that the long-term feedbacks of Earth’s climate system had time to process them. This was true during the orbitally-induced glacial-interglacial cycles in the ice ages. In warmer interglacials, more intense insolation in northern hemisphere summers led to warmer oceans which were in equilibrium with slightly more CO2 in the atmosphere by adjusting their carbonate levels. In glacial times with less intense northern hemisphere summer insolation, the cooler oceans dissolved more CO2, and carbonate levels adjusted accordingly. The changes occurred over gentle timescales of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years – plenty slow enough for slow feedbacks like the deep oceans and ice sheets to keep pace.
Rapid carbon belches, such as in the Permian and today, occur within the timeframe of fast feedbacks (surface ocean, water vapor, clouds, dust, biosphere, lapse rate, etc) but before the vast deep ocean reservoir and rock weathering can cut-in to buffer the changes. The carbon overwhelms the surface ocean and biosphere reservoirs so it has nowhere to go but the atmosphere, where it builds up rapidly, creating strong global warming via the greenhouse effect. The surface oceans turn acidic as they become increasingly saturated in CO2. The oceans warm, so sea levels rise. Those symptoms should sound familiar.
Burgess et al’s paper brings the Permian into line with many other global-warming extinction events, like the Triassic, the Toarcian, the Cretaceous Ocean Anoxic Events, The PETM, and the Columbia River Basalts, whose time frames have been progressively reduced as more sophisticated dating has been applied to them. They all produced the same symptoms as today’s climate change – rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and sea level rises, together with oxygen-less ocean dead zones and extinctions. They were all (possibly excluding the PETM - see below) triggered by rare volcanic outpourings called “Large Igneous Provinces,” (LIPs) that emitted massive volumes of CO2 and methane at rates comparable to today’s emissions. The PETM may also have been triggered by a LIP, although that is still debated.
Can we seriously expect Earth’s climate to behave differently today than it did at all those times in the past?"
Even if this is a 1 in 1000 chance it's an incredibly poor bet to make.
And as we're experiencing here already, the journey to total catastrophic collapse is not a nice smooth process. It is chaotic and at times very destructive.
I'm pretty sure that as the oceans go through tipping point after tipping point as we drive them to a state of systemic failure, the impacts in human terms are going to be truly nasty.
Like the estimated 1 billion people who depend on coral reef systems for their existence right now not having anything to eat in a few decades.
Bob Hoye,
Can you produce a peer reviewed to support your wild claim that more CO2 means more O2 will be generated. I have never heard that claim before.
I have heard the claims Doug C. is making many times. There is ample evidence that most of the mass extinctions in the past were due to climate effects of too much CO2. The possibility of Hydrogen sulfide poisoning from too high ocean pH is a common proposal.
It is well known that the ocean pH has changed many times in the past. this is closely associated with mass extinctions. typical news report on mass extinctions SkS article on hhigh CO2 and extinctions
It's also likely that the massive impactor that hit in the Yucatan region about 65 Mya triggered a dramatic increase in the flow of magma from the Deccan Traps in what is now India also releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide, resulting in climate change that took out about 70% of species on Earth at that time.
Asteroid impact, volcanism were one-two punch for dinosaurs
There's very little doubt left that rapid excursions in atmospheric carbon dioixde are associated with some of the most destructive periods in the Earth's past.
250 million years ago it was continental scale flood basalts in what is now Siberia that drove atmospheric CO2 levels rapidly up in pulses that caused climate change that eventually killed almost life in the oceans and most terrestrial life.
65 Mya an impactor hit what is now Yucatan and would have rung the entire planet like a bell. 11 on the Richter scale at the site of impact and 8-9 everywhere else on Earth. The Deccan Traps probably experienced an effect similar to soil liquifaction as a result of this massive tremblor, vastly increasing the release of greenhouse gases from this one source.
All the evidence says to be very careful when it comes to rpaid changes in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and climate change. Especially when it comes to the impacts on the oceans.
Where currently almost all the heat is going that is being downloaded from the atmosphere from the addition of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 from human activities.
Ocean Heat Content And The Importance Of The Deep Ocean
And where all that additional CO2 has already resulted in a rapid acidification of the oceans which is hitting the web of life there right at its base.
Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton
Most of the official responses from policy makers worldwide seem extremely lukewarm compared to the magnitude of negative changes that have already occured with far more to come as it will take decades for the Earth to come back into a radiative balance with the CO2 we have already emitted due to the lag created by the vast thermal capacity of the oceans.
We're relying on the lungs of the Earth to buffer us from a rapid warming of the Earth's surface and to absorb massive amounts of CO2 we emit constantly.
And these factors have already altered the most important natural system on Earth in ways that are troubling to say the least.
A dramatic change in policy in California needs to be followed by a dramatic change in policy everywhere that does reflect the existential nature of this process.
Welll....
1. If we're due for an anthropegenic extinction event, it will be a few hundred years in the future.
2. Each time such an event has occured, life sprung forth again, eventually in more complex form.
So another Great Dying, if that happens, will result in a sharp reduction of the human population and will probably not be pleasant until the system is back in balance. Humanity's arc of history frequently flexes towards vast wars, a die-off will thus prevent a WWIII or totalitarian techno-dystopia.
It would have been much better if the world had heeded the warnings about this issue starting in the '50s, we could have avoided the current predicament with ease. But that's just not how humans at mass scale work. Hysteria and witch hunts, we do those very well. Calm, deliberate and effective planning, that's mostly a dream. It happens (Holland, Switzerland) but it is rare.
Chemical Equation of Photosynthesis:
6CO2 + 6H2O + light energy = C6H12)6 + 6O2
[PS] This is verging on sloganeering. Having more CO2 does not obviously create more sites (plants) where this reaction can occur, nor does it necessarily change the kinetics. Because we emitting more CO2 than plants can absorb, O2 is dropping and CO2 is rising. If this is the quality of your arguments, then SkS is not the site for you. Please back any more claims with scientific evidence or face having your sloganeering summarily deleted.
Oops typpo
should be = C6H12O6 + 6O2
Driving by:
Can you provide a peer reviewed source to support your claim "it will be a few hundred years in the future."? I think that if the temperature goes up by 5-6C by 2100 that could cause the collapse of civilization. Since 5-6C is possible continuing BAU it could be in the lifetime of people now living.
Suggesting that the problems we face now are not due for several hundred years does not help motivate people to get started working on the problem.
Bob Hoye,
Since I teach college level chemistry I am familiar with the photosynthesis equation. I note you provide no commentary to support your wild claims. You have also not provided any peer reviewed papers to support your wild claims. I will point out that the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is decreasing since it is being converted into CO2 by reaction with carbon.
Since you are relying on your personal experience can you provide any evidence that you are an expert on atmospheric chemistry?
DrivingBy @12
"1. If we're due for an anthropegenic extinction event, it will be a few hundred years in the future."
What do you base that on, we are already starting to see some very significant loss of species from coral reef die-off alone.
Best Protected Great Barrier Reef Corals Are Now Dead
And if almost all coral reef systems are gone by 2050;
Coral Reefs Could Be Gone in 30 Years
With up to 25% of ocean species being reliant on coral reefs, that's an extinction level event right there when you consider the ripple effect it will have across the marine habitat. Plus what is going on with rapid removal of tropical rainforest and rapid transitions in many habitats globally as climate change literally rewrites local conditions so the things that used to live there no longer can.
This isn't a process that is going to take place at some point in the future, it is happening right now.
"2. Each time such an event has occured, life sprung forth again, eventually in more complex form."
Sure life comes back after extinction level events, but it can take a very long time to recover to previous levels of complexity. After the End Permian extinction it took up to 100 million years for diversity at the family level to recover.
And the life producing factors on Earth are winding down and the Sun is heating. On the scale of tens of millions of years the crisis with CO2 will be the lack of it as tectonic activity drecreases.
And as the Sun continues to heat the Earth will eventually leave the CHZ.
We may be the Earth's only shot at "intellegent" life, which isn't behaving in a very smart fashion at the moment.
Bob Hoye @13
Biological equation of photosynthesis:
No biology = no photosynthesis
The factors in the ocean alone that support overall photosynthesis are so complex as to be almost impossible to quantify.
What we can say with a high degree of certainty is that when overall factors that encourage the growth of life that engages in photosynthesis are changed in such a way as to discourage this systemic function... then it can be greatly decreased and even stop in many places.
And things like removing vast swaths of the biological community in the ocean through the warming of the oceans and a rapid transition in pH is already doing exactly that. Killing vast regions of coral reef ecosystems and creating low oxygen zones in the oceans that will no longer support most aerobic life.
This goes so far beyond a simple equation that the question becomes why would someone even present that as a discussion point on such a critical debate.
Photosynthesis is a biological process and the keystone process for most life on Earth. And current human activities are calling into question the long term viability of this keystone process as the site it is mostly active in is altered in a way that is profound to say the least.
Bob Hoyes theory appears to be more CO2 dissolved in the oceans equals more photosysnthesis and production of oxygen so the oceans won't become anoxic. However its a totally flawed idea. The oceans are already becoming more anoxic so this process if it occurs much is indisputably being overwhelmed by other factors.
The factors causing the anoxic oceans are apparently a combination of warming oceans holding less oxygen, and nutrient runoff from land use changes leading indirectly to less oxygen in the oceans. These nutrient runoff processes are linked to both land use and climate change. See this climate conversation article.
Bob Hoye seems to be working on a marine version of "CO2 is plant food":
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food.htm
Perhaps he should read the response to that myth and take his comments there.
I'll leave this site with a suggestion to read about calculated catstrophe:
In the 1840s a guy by the name of Miller determined by thorough research of scripture that the world would end on a certain date in 1842. Being V. convincing it became a movment throughout the Eastern States. Being a V. good salesman he was selling "ascension gowns" to the true believers. The big day arrived and there was no disaster. Back to the books brought forth a new day for the end of the world.
That widely watched day came and with no disaster, it went into the literature as the "Great Disappointment". Because there was no disaster.
Those preaching a disaster through climate may have to go a study a little geology. This is a preaching site that has nothing to do with the skepticism of real science.
Bob Hoye, B.Sc. geophysics.
It has been entertaining but I'm out of here.
[DB] The poster has recused himself from further participation here.
Bob Hoye is posting from Vancouver, BC where this has become a highly politicized issue with vast economic and political fortunes at stake.
Federally the Trudeau government just bought the Trans Mountain dilbit pipeline shipping bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to tidewater on the BC coast to be shipped from their to offshore refineries.
That's a $7.4 billion expansion project up in the air on a project our own courts have ruled went through with a rigged approval process that left most stakeholders out in the cold on.
Canada court halts Pacific pipeline in blow to Trudeau
Provincially the government in BC rubber stamped another review process for the Site C dam that is probably even more biased than the federal NEB review process was with the TMX.
Site C dam will cost the BC public over $10 billion and counting and was the centerpiece of the previous government which wanted to turn BC into a global scale LNG producer and the current one wants to do the same also offering massive incentives.
John Horgan offers tax break incentives to $40B Kitimat LNG project
There's a huge amount of money on the line for fossil fuel production on the decade scale in Canada right now and a great deal of money and time going into making sure that government at all levels holds the course on fossil fuel production no matter the externalized costs.
Study reveals scale of influence by fossil fuel industry on BC government, public officials
What policy makers in California are doing in regards to fossil fuels and official policy is clearly critical in today's world.
What is going on in BC and Canada is the opposite of ethical and sound business practices as our courts are already beginning to find.
For instance after the court decision that revoked the approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline Expansion was made the Premier of Alberta pulled that province out of the Canadian climate change response plan and demanded an emergency session of Parliament to pass a law that once again cleared the building of the TMX.
Premier Rachel Notley pulls Alberta out of federal climate plan over Trans Mountain ruling
"In a dramatic announcement Thursday evening, Premier Rachel Notley said she is pulling Alberta out of the national climate-change plan to protest a federal court ruling that quashed expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline."
"The premier called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government to immediately appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court and recall Parliament for an emergency session."
'Notley blamed both the current federal government and the previous one for creating a situation she said has made it "practically impossible" to build a pipeline to tidewater in a country with more coastline than any other on Earth."'
Shifting to 100% clean energy production is now possible, there have been major breakthroughs in battery technology that make the kind of grid scale energy storage required by intermittent alternative energy production like wind and solar now possible.
How three battery types work in grid-scale energy storage systems
Solid state lithium metal batteries are about to create a revolution in electrical transportation and energy storage.
All-solid-state lithium-ion and lithium metal batteries – paving the way to large-scale production
So instead of here in BC spending $7.4 billion to triple the capacity of a dilbit pipeline, +$10 billion on the Site C which will power gas fracking across the BC north and massive tax breaks and subsidies to build a $40 billion LNG production and shipping terminal in BC... we could be investing billions of dollars where they will actually be viable for the future by building a very low carbon emitting energy model.
Our governments and the energy sector which injects huge amounts of "donations" into the public sector to drive policy are not behaving in a rational fashion right now.
They really need to look to California and its decision to go with carbon free energy as the rational choice for an economic, social and ecological future for all the communities involved.
Doug_C,
As an attentive Albertan for decades, I can attest to the accuracy of your observation of leadership of Alberta.
I will add that PM Trudeau is on record declaring that it would be foolish to not try to profit from the massive oil sands reserves. And I am sure his thinking would extend to profiting from the burning of natural gas which is still significantly harmful.
In the comments on this site I have often found appropriate times to share a very appropriate quote from the the UN sanctioned 1987 report "Our Common Future": (If you are interested there was an update "Back to Our Common Future")
"25. Many present efforts to guard and maintain human progress, to meet human needs, and to realize human ambitions are simply unsustainable - in both the rich and poor nations. They draw too heavily, too quickly, on already overdrawn environmental resource accounts to be affordable far into the future without bankrupting those accounts. They may show profit on the balance sheets of our generation, but our children will inherit the losses. We borrow environmental capital from future generations with no intention or prospect of repaying. They may damn us for our spendthrift ways, but they can never collect on our debt to them. We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions.
26. But the results of the present profligacy are rapidly closing the options for future generations. Most of today's decision makers will be dead before the planet feels; the heavier effects of acid precipitation, global warming, ozone depletion, or widespread desertification and species loss. Most of the young voters of today will still be alive. In the Commission's hearings it was the young, those who have the most to lose, who were the harshest critics of the planet's present management."
That was in 1987. And since then the UN has developed more improved understanding, especially the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. And Climate Action is a significant goal since achieving it quicker makes it easier to achieve most of the other goals.
No wealthy or powerful person today should be able to legitimately claim a 'lack of awareness of the future consequences of their actions'. They know that they benefit at the expense of others, particualrly at the expense of future generations (including acting in ways that would limit and may actually eliminate the potential for future generations of collaborative humanity - leaving only primitive human nature driven barbarians). And the small-minded small-worldview believers of the stories told by the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman about the 'Glorious results that will certainly be created by the freedom of people to believe whatever they want and pursue their happiness any way they please' are fighting mad to defend and promote the made-up stories they want all others to accept as gospel truths.
And people who allow their primitive human nature to overpower their ability to have their thoughts and actions based on Good Helpful Altruistic Reasoning (the things that can be done by that newer part of the human mind), are easily impressed by stories that sound like what their barbaric self-interest wants to hear, especially when the story makes 'Them personally feel threatened'.
It is no surprise that so many people want to defend unjustified developed perceptions of prosperity and opportunity from 'claims of the unacceptability of the popular and profitable burning of fossil fuels'. Many people are easily tempted to believe such efforts to improve their awareness and understanding are attacks 'on them'. And the attackers must be jealous people who maybe want to get rich by stealing 'Their perceived prosperity or potential for wealth'.
More people need to become more aware of the importance of helping to develop the gift of a sustainable better future for all of humanity, rather than doggedly and angrily pursuing a Better Present for themselves any harmful unsustainable way they think they can get away with (and that they believe they can justify and defend).
And those people who become more aware and understanding will grudgingly accept that many developed perceptions of superiority relative to others are undeserved, need to be corrected at the expense of those who benefited from the fool's game that was being played.
And that explains many things that are happening all around the world, and not just regarding the required corrections that have been identified by climate science. Some people genuinely try to improve the awareness and understanding of others to help develop a sustainable better future for humanity, and they potentially get viciously attacked rather than rewarded.
Bob Hoye @21
"Those preaching a disaster through climate may have to go a study a little geology. This is a preaching site that has nothing to do with the skepticism of real science."
It's through studying geology that we know how mass extinction is intrinsically linked to climate change primarily through the atmospheric concentration of one gas long identified as the prime persistent radiative forcing agent in the atmosphere - carbon dioxide.
That includes the Great Dying 251 million years ago with a high confidence that it was massive emissions of carbon dioxide from the Siberian Traps that triggered global feedbacks that eventually killed over 95% of life then in the oceans and over 70% of species on land.
The end Triassic extinction was also probably another climate change induced extinction level event.
The Deccan Traps and large scale release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases probably played a significant role in the End Cretaceous extinction.
The fingerprint of CO2 and mass death is all over the geological record, which makes sense when you look at the basic physics. This site has a meter for anyone to consult that indicates how much heat is added to the Earth on a constant basis by the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.
It now stands at over 2.6 billion Hiroshima bomb heat equivalent units since 1998 alone. There's no way that much heat can be added to the global system without major impacts on climate as most of that heat ends up in the oceans which are the prime driver of climate globally. Able to store vastly more heat than the atmosphere and transport it around the Earth by ocean currents and by determining how atmospheric circulation behaves to a great degree.
"Bob Hoye, B.Sc. geophysics."
Working in the oil and gas sector perhaps...
John Englander works in oceanography and consulting. His website has an interesting graph of 9 different mass extinction events and the strong relationship to historical CO2 levels here.
It is interesting to me that Bob Hoye describes a person who studies scripture (ie religion) and produced a failed prediction. He then tells scientists that they need to work harder.
Why does the failure of a religious prediction have anything to do with scientists? Bob Hoye cannot differentiate between religion and science.
Doug_C,
A follow-up to my comment @23.
The Trudeau led Federal Liberal Party and the current political leadership of Alberta and BC can indeed be seen to be promoting expansion of fossil fuel extraction for profit and related government revenue (and related political popularity).
However, they are each acting more responsibly regarding Climate Action (and many other Sustainable Development Goals) than their most popular political alternatives. With the socioeconomic-political system so full of people focused on “Their person Interests”, leaders will be losers if they do not act to some degree in ways that appease the harmful easily-triggered selfish interests among the voters.
The more helpful political leaders will likely lose the popular vote to their worse alternatives unless they take some actions, and make related claims, to appear to support the unsustainable and harmful activities.
Notley's declaration of Alberta withdrawing from the Federal Climate Action Plan has no relevance through the next two years. The Federal plan does not start for 2 years, and the NDP leadership already has action in Alberta that meets the minimum level of action required in the future Federal plan.
And the BC leadership promoting LNG export as an alternative to Bitumen export is also better than their alternative leaders. The alternative would want even more bitumen export done less safely, plus expansion of many other unsustainable and more harmful activities (to make the books look good).
And Federally, the Conservative alternative to the Liberals is a “Dig Baby Dig” type of party that will return Canada to the Climate Action crippling type of leadership of the Harper Conservative decade of rule (a government that politically-minded any and all messages from Federal fund receiving scientists and redirected federal funding to science that was expected to be 'helpful to their interests', and away form science that was expected to be contrary to 'their interests').
The reality is that many regions, and extra-regional collectives like multi-national corporations, have developed incorrectly based on unsustainable and harmful economic activity (and social attitudes and actions). Their developed perceptions of prosperity are real. They are popular and profitable for as long as they can be gotten away with. But what they benefit from is undeniably unsustainable and harmful.
The tragic creation of real reality and related perceptions of reality that needs to be corrected is due to people being allowed to compete for popularity and profitability before they have conclusively proven that what they want to benefit from is not harmful to any others, particularly not harmful to future generations (and correcting someone's harmful unsustainable beliefs is not harming them, no matter how adamant they are that 'they' are being harmed by being corrected).
Unsustainable and harmful activity will always be easier, quicker, and cheaper than the harder work of knowing that the actions are sustainably helpful (benefiting from unsustainable and harmful actions is often claimed to justify doing them).
That is the fundamental reason for the need to have Professional Engineers be responsible for the development of 'new things' and the correction of incorrectly developed things. It is understood that pursuers of personal benefit cannot be trusted to care to ensure that their pursuit of maximum personal benefit is actually sustainable, not harmful. And it is undeniable that the current developed socioeconomic-political systems are all about the winning by the people who get away with the easiest way of doing things (deliberately misleading the easily impressed). The level and type of unacceptable behaviour that is Winning, or nearly winning), is proof that there are serious 'errors in the developed systems'.
That is why I continue to repeat my concern that achieving the required correction for Climate Action will actually require increasing the number of people who honestly want to help develop a sustainable better future for all of humanity.
I will add that not all religious people are anti-climate science, just as not all wealthy and powerful winners try to benefit in the most harmful way they can get away with. It is important to surgically identify the real problem people rather than name generic categories of people as being the problem.
The only 'generic' category of people that are a serious problem are the wealthy and powerful people who deliberately try to deceive and mislead so that they can get more unjustified power and benefit for 'their harmful unsustainable collective interests' (the interests of their Tribe, Cabal, Corporation, Region, Nation, Religious Sect, ...) in ways that are impediments to, or harmful to, the development of a sustainable better future for all of humanity.
Humans can all thoughtfully consider how to help develop a sustainable better future for everyone That is what the modern part of the human brain can do. But people can more easily be primitively triggered to be short-sighted. Helping other people by trying to improve their awareness and understanding of how to not be harmful, to be helpful to others, is just harder work. And those helpful actions can be less rewarded than the misleading alternatives, and even result in the helpful people being attacked (made-up idea-wise and in other ways excused by made-up claims), by those who they try to help become more helpful people (attacked by those they try to 'correct' the 'unjust harmful unhelpful' beliefs and behaviours of).
And one of the most insidious impediments to the required correction is the popular claim that 'people freer to believe and do as they please is the only way to get good results'. Misunderstandings related to things like the Constitution of the USA include carefully phrased decisions by members of the Supreme Court of the USA that are harmful to the advancement of humanity to a sustainable future for a robust diversity of humanity fitting into the robust diversity of life on this, or any other, amazing planet.
Note that the recent decision by the Federal Appeals Court in Canada did not terminate the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. It stated specific items that need to be corrected. The current stoppage of work ordered by the court was made because there is a significant probability that the corrected evaluation of the impacts of the project will not justify the 'currently planned expansion'. All that means is that other actions will be required to be part of the expansion, not that the expansion cannot be built. Hopefully the built pipeline will ony be run for a short time, long enough to recover costs and many a little bit more (maybe pay off some of Alberta's debt recently accumulated to build roads schools and hospitals, required actions that were neglected by the previous government's pursuit of claiming they had 'eliminated the Provincial Debt' but neglecting to spend while boosting the rate of extraction and export of fossil fuels).
The building of the pipeline and how much increase there is in the rate of bitumen extraction and export from Alberta will depend on the type of leaders that win the popularity and profitability contest for election.
Some people do not like to be corrected, especially when the correction is contrary to a developed popular belief or profitable activity. That will never change. What has to change is that the required corrections, and limitation of influence by people who resist being corrected, have to happen sooner so that less damage is done to the future of humanity (that is the basis of all harmful behaviour correction efforts, govern and limit all behaviour with Good Helpful Altruistic Reasons).
One Planet Only Forever @27
The planet doesn't care at all about the politics of fossil fuels only the impacts of releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide and in the case of gas fracking and LNG millions of tons of methane a year from leakage.
We have viable options now and can be building a planned phase out of all fossil fuel right now.
The Trudeau government isn't doing that, Justin Trudeau has directly stated that fossil fuels are in the national interest and used public funds to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline and committed billions of dollars to it not because we need to be extracting, selling then burning tar sands bitumen for decades because we have no options. But because his political fortune is tied to the sector who funds the individuals and parties making these reckless decisions.
Same for Notley and Horgan, they were elected on a mandate of change, but have brought no real change. The science is now clear, we no longer have the decades for gradual change that these leaders claim is necessary as we are seeing here in BC, in California, in Europe and in Australia with drought, heat waves, massive wildfire and massive die-off of some of the most important ecosystems on the planet like the Great Barrier Reef.
You don't bring about real climate change mitigation be exempting from legal measures those corporations that need to be made non-comptetive through taxing so that they are removed by market forces.
Creating carbon taxes then exempting fossil fuel producers is greenwashing and goes on at all levels in Canada now.
Canada gives big polluters a break on carbon levies
"Canada is scaling back its planned carbon pricing scheme to curb greenhouse gas emissions after industry executives warned it would hurt their international competitiveness, the office of the environment minister said Wednesday."
John Horgan offers tax break incentives to $40B Kitimat LNG project
"B.C. Premier John Horgan says the province is willing to offer a break on carbon tax as well as an exemption on provincial sales tax related to construction costs at a $40-billion liquefied natural gas export terminal under consideration for the northern community of Kitimat, B.C.
The NDP leader laid out the incentives as part of what he said was a clear framework for the approval of any LNG projects under his government's tenure."
Subsidizing fossil fuel producers with billions of dollars while removing any real tax burden on them is not climate change mitigation, it is promoting those conditions that are already catastrophic and will become increasingly so as more years of total inaction proceed.
Show me anything real that has been done to limit CO2 and methane emissions in Canada and that will bring about a planned phaseout of the entire fossil fuel sector in a meaningful timescale.
There is none in this country, instead governments are directly behind massive projects that will enable decades more fossil fuel production and burning with Canada as the source.
That includes the Horgan government committing over $10 billion to build the Site C dam to power gas fracking in the Peace River region, offering billions of dollars in tax and royalty breaks to LNG and the Trudeau government committing billions of dollars to build a pipeline expansion that Canadian courts have already decided was only approved by ignoring all conisderation that were not in support of the fossil fuel producers.
Court quashes Canadian approval of Trans Mountain oil pipeline
It's been a rigged game in regards to fossil fuels in Canada for decades and remains so under the current federal and many provincial governments. The new conservative government of Ontario just killed any plans for a carbon tax there.
The guarantee is that if we aren't part of a real global climate change mitigation plan the eventual costs will dwarf any short term economic costs in transitioning to a very low carbon emitting energy model.
In fact we will save money by getting off all fossil fuels as soon as possible while preventing some of the worst impacts of fossil fuel generated climate change.
The Data Says Climate Change Could Cost Investors Trillions
These individuals and parties are deciding to be fossil fuel sector boosters, not climate change mitigators even though there is great support from the public both here and globally for real change and an international framework to do so.
Doug_C,
I share your concern about the future.
But nothing you have presented changes the fact that the popular alternatives to the leadership you declare is unacceptable will be even less acceptable (as you note the new Conservative Leadership in Ontario is worse than the Liberals who can be claimed to be in bed with the wealthy, and I would add worse in more ways than their actions related to climate change).
The problem is the way Voters will choose to Vote. And that requires people to hear about their unacceptability "from people they meet and know". And an insidious part of the problem is Freedom. Freedom is easy and can be very rewarding especially if you can get away with bad behaviour. Responsibility is Harder and undeniably less rewarding, the future of humanity gets the real benefit.
Improving the awareness and understanding of the voters and getting more people to care about all of the Sustainable Development Goals, not just Climate Actions, is what is required. But, as I explained, that is very hard work. A lot of people have pet-personal interests that they will vote for even if it means voting for a party that is against another 'less immediate concern of theirs' like climate action.
It may be more helpful to direct your efforts to improve the awareness and understanding of what will happen if the popular alternative to the current leadership in Alberta, BC and Federally in Canada win power (and not just the negative climate action consequences).
The 'United greedy and intolerant claiming to be Right' equivalents of the wrongly developed Republican Party in the USA (based on made-up beliefs and made-up claims) are itching to get the power to do more damage to the future of humanity (that they justify as the Right things to do). Right now those damaging wanna-be-leaders of Alberta, BC and Canada are limited to shifting the current leadership actions further from the actions they would take if there was less populist promotion succeeding against those actions.
The real problem is the success of appeals to the primitive basic human nature driving people to identify and vote for their 'more personally urgent concerns' rather than vote for a less concerning issue like climate action.
Getting people to embrace the need to achieve all of the Sustainable Development Goals may be helpful. Climate Action can then be pointed out as one of the most important issues, because more rapid climate action makes it easier to achieve the other goals.
Of course, another way to sell sustainable development that may be easier is that truly sustainable economic activity will never face the uncertainty currently faced by activity like attempts to benefit from the burning of fossil fuels. But I have had people stop talking to me when I try that approach (I live in Alberta, a land filled with many made-up minds angry about losing their incorrectly developed perceptions of prosperity and superiority relative to others).
And until First past the Post voting is replaced with something like Australia's Ranked Transferable vote, groups like the United Greedy and Intolerant claiming to be Right have an unjust competitive advantage in Canada's multi-party politics, an advantage that can only be attempted to be overcome by voters gambling on how to vote against that group. And even then, only 51% support is required by the Winner in enough ridings to have 51% of the seats (that is just over 25% support to be all powerful - but better than the current system where the math is less than 15% support required to win uncontested power in a 4 party competition).
One Planet Only Forever @29
The Trudeau liberals in the 2015 election ran on a platform of genuine climate change mitigation followed up by Prime Minister Trudeau boldly stating in Paris at the end of that year that "Canada is back" in regards to real climate change action plans and letting the science dictate policy.
Justin Trudeau tells Paris climate summit Canada ready to do more
That is not consistent at all with Justin Trudeau then telling fossil fuel industry executives in Houston that Canada would in fact not restrict its production of the most polluting fossil fuels here.
173 billion barrels of oil
How is that not misleading the voters on the most important issue of our time, it's not the voters who are misinformed here it is intentional misrepresentation of policy to get elected that is at fault in Canada and our climate change mitigation.
Also the argument that we're somehow going to be worse off with another party in office is spurious. The Trudeau governments carbon dioxide emission targets are even worse than the Harper governments and as we've seen by both word and action from the Canadian federal government they are fully committed to decades more tar sands production no matter what the science or even the courts say.
The reaction of the Trudeau government to the Canadian appeal court decision overturning the rigged Trans Mountain NEB approval was to double down and complete the purchase of the pipeline anyway. Still claiming that tar sands production for decades is essential to the interests of Canada. Essentially saying this country was firmly behind making the climate change worst cas scenarios a reality.
The liberals were elected with a clear majority under a promise of real climate change action and a firm mandate to provide that. Followed up with an international commitment to do that just as a previous liberal government had done at Kyoto in 1997 and did nothing to follow up.
There is a clear pattern of promising action then doing the opposite with the current leadership in Canada, this results in the same effect as with governments who openly deny climate change as the conservatives did.
I don't know that answer is, I just know that the current "leadership" in Canada at all levels isn't providing it and I'm not going to be involved in the slightest in the ongoing fraud of Canada claiming to be part of the solution to the growing climate change catastrophe while dedicating vast resources to enable business as usual in the fossil fuel sector for decades more. Like spending tens of billions of dollars on fossil fuel infrastructure and subsidizing the industry with tax breaks and other benefits.
The time for this blatant hypocrisy is over as anyone who is even marginally rational can see from the real world effects of this profound disconnect from the evidence.
Real climate change mitigation mean creating effective measures to end large scale fossil fuel use as quickly as it can be replaced with low carbon alternatives.
The argument for decades has been that will be too expensive.
The counter to that is that it is already too expensive to keep using fossil fuels, any attempts to justify decades more fossil fuel use is a cynical attempt to defend catastrophe on a scale that is simply beyond human comprehension.
Bob Hoye @ 21
Assuming the poster is actually the same Bob Hoye he purports to be, a few seconds on Google brings him up as the "Chief Investment Strategist and Editor, Institutional Advisors".
The following link points to one article of a long list. His institutional address is #210-1095 West Pender Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V6E 2M6
I suspect he is a little biased?
http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gold-silver-climate-promotion-seriously-failing.aspx?contributor=Bob+Hoye&article=10360035190H11690&redirect=False
[PS] Cyber stalking. Posting personal details about a poster is banned by comments policy. I appreciate that you only posted institutional details but this is pushing the line.
Doug_C,
My personal objective/ethic is to improve my awareness and understanding of what is going on and try to help develop a sustainable better future for humanity.
To me that means increasing awareness and understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular the Climate Action goal and support for the incrementally increased action that is written into the Paris Agreement to achieve the required limits of current day human impacts on future generations. Climate Action is like a keystone of the SDGs. The sooner and more significantly the Climate Action goals are achieved the easier it will be to achieve many of the SDGs.
I admit to being biased towards supporting leadership that I see acting 'more helpfully' towards the achievement of the 'complete set of SDGs and other Universal governing principles like the UN Declaration of Human Rights' (Big fan of the platform of the Green Party and the passion of their leader, May, who entered politics because of the damaging potential of Harper winning power in Canada).
I try to evaluate leaders by the likely result of all of their actions, not just a favourite action, and certainly not based any claims they make about a favourite issue. But because of Canada's multi-party system still choosing representatives through the fatally flawed First-Past-the-Post system (only 34% support wins when there are three candidates, 26% wins when there are four, 21% when there are five), I also have to evaluate their chance of winning in my riding (I mainly use the results of previous elections in my riding). That usually leads me to Vote 'against' the United greedy and intolerant groups claiming to be Right parties that have emerged Federally and Provincially in Canada (and have emerged in many other places around the world). I cannot simply vote for my most preferred alternative to those candidate(s). Without electoral reform I have to try to figure out how to vote for the most popular better option than the anti-Climate Action candidates in my riding (and encourage others to do the same). Note: Many political groups claiming to be on the Right, especially the ones calling themselves Conservative, can be seen to have developed into united collectives of greedier and less tolerant people supporting each other's unacceptable personal top interests, with one of the top interests being anti-climate action.
Your belief that 'Canadian Conservative Climate Action was more effective than Liberals Climate Action' indicates that I may be able to help you improve your awareness and understanding of the current actions and history of climate actions by the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada. I encourage you to do a more detailed historical review on your own, but I offer the following as a start (I have linked some statements to related articles that are not necessarily exclusively about the statement they link from):
As for the actions of the Trudeau Liberals, they appear to have honoured the pipeline related promises made during the campaign (see this Global article - there are similar evaluations available). They:
However, conspiracy theorists may claim that the Liberals were hoping for the court ruling to confirm that there had been inadequate consultation and inadequate action regarding Indigenous input. And the Federal Court of Appeal may not permit their decision to be appealed to the Supreme Court. And then Trudeau can keep his election promise to more legitimately address the concerns of the Indigenous populations that are impacted, particularly the coastal impacts of increased tanker traffic. He can approve a delayed completion of the pipeline with a significant increased associated cost to address safety concerns. That could include:
As you may surmise from my previous comment, and my opening to this comment, I am more disappointed by the actual reneging of the Liberals on their clearly stated promise that the 2015 election would be the last Federal election done with the undeniably fatally flawed First-Past-the-Post system, as system that makes it more likely that candidates who would do the least for climate action get elected because they are all in one party, with the more 'climate action concerned' candidates being in all of the other parties. Any change of the electoral system would likely reduce the chances of the Conservatives to win majority power in Canada.
In addition to electoral system reform in Canada, what is needed is 'truth in advertising' requirements on political marketing. Everyone should be appalled that Pepsi can be penalized severely for just hinting about a potential negative regarding a Coke product, but political marketing has few restrictions.
Political marketing is attacking climate science with little risk of potential legal penalty. Powerful wealthy people cannot be legally penalized for funding or participating in a misleading political marketing campaign. A business may face legal actions if they do misleading marketing for their benefit. Some oil companies are facing legal challenges for their misleading climate science marketing efforts. But there are no legal penalties for the elected representatives who participate in those misleading efforts, or for wealthy people who like that kind of leadership action.
There is a lot of what is going on to be angry about. But every more aware and considerate human should be focus on the misleading way political games are allowed to be played, with misleading marketers being free of potential serious penalty to discourage them from hoping to get away with unjustified winning. And caring and considerate people need to try to change the way that so many people seem to like the idea of being easily misled to support actions that are understandably harmful to the development of a sustainable future for humanity.
Climate Action is potentially the most important Sustainable Development Goal. More aggressive achievement of Climate Action makes it easier to achieve so many other goals. And people getting away with misleading appeals to selfish primitive human nature, in economics and politics, is the biggest impediment to improving support for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the Climate Action goal.
You are correct that a lot of people say they consider climate action important. What you may be missing is understanding what issues each of those people consider to be higher priorities than Climate Action. The real problem is people developing a preference for allowing their selfish primitive human nature driven interests to overpower their ability to thoughtfully and considerately become more aware and understanding in pursuit of how to be most helpful to the development of a sustainable better future for humanity.
I encourage you to continue to become more aware and share improved understanding to help develop a sustainable better future for humanity.
Doug_C,
I meant to also include this article link to the oil tanker moratorium on the BC coast