Glenn Hubbers

The scientists at MIT have come up with a new game!  You can play now and your children pay later!

Glenn Hubbers Climate Change

For anyone attending the Green Party of Ontario AGM on Saturday, I’ll be delivering a presentation on Power Generation in Ontario on Saturday afternoon.  See the agenda here.

I’m still trying to work out logistics of recording the event, and if I do (and assuming it’s not embarrasing!)  I’ll post it here.

Glenn Hubbers Energy

The results of the BC election yesterday come as no surprise, although I am thoroughly disappointed in the results of the referendum on electoral reform.

That said, I am not particularly a fan of the STV system on the ballot. I think that the opposition movement made a lot of good points about the downsides of this proposed system.

THAT said, it’s still so much better than our completely skewed FPTP system that, had I lived in British Columbia, I would have voted for the change.

Which brings me to my main point here. What is the proper means to discuss and achieve (assuming that the majority agree on the need) a change in our electoral system?

I believe we need a 2 referendum approach.

First off, there are many people, I think the majority, who understand how wonky our existing First-Past-The-Post system is or at least agree on it’s weaknesses within a 2 minute conversation. This system in which parties can achieve majority governments with less than a majority of votes, and potentially (yes, it has happened) with fewer votes than the opposition party does NOT give us the government we want.

So the first question to be asked in a referendum is, “Do you prefer our existing FPTP voting system or would you prefer a more proportional system.”

This simple to explain as the second option merely means that the makeup of the legislature would reflect the popular vote.

You could even add a question on there such as, “Do you think it is important to maintain an element of local representation?” This is for information purposes to be used later.

Assuming this first referendum passes, and I think it would pass by a large margin, they we should commit to changing the system. The citizens assembly would then propose their top 2 systems (without releasing which was 1 and 2) and hold a second referendum to choose. But at this point, FPTP would be off the table. It would be done no matter what.

Note: You could do this with multiple voting systems on the ballot as long as the vote was to rank in order of preference, but this is just confusing the issue so I would not recommend it.

This way people could argue the merits of the two systems on their face and you would not have people who want reform falsely appearing to support FPTP.

Unfortunately, with the results in BC yesterday, proponents of FPTP will be arguing that people prefer it over electoral reform, and I think this is very likely not true.

Glenn Hubbers Proportional Representation

The Main Stream Media [MSM] these days is full of discussions about carbon pricing.  We have the provincial election in full swing in British Columbia in which the Liberal Carbon Tax is on trial, US president Obama and the US Congress moving away from the Bush denial era to the adoption of some form of climate change policy (exactly what policy remains to be seen), and countries everywhere preparing and positioning for the upcoming international climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Most of this discussion centers around the difference between a Carbon Tax vs a Cap & Trade system.  Mostly it’s an argument as to which is the best system for reducing emissions  It’s clear that very many people don’t understand the difference between the two, the pros and cons, the impact each would have on emissions and the impact each would have on consumer pricing.

In the 2008 federal election, for example, most people’s understanding of the two systems was built around the Conservative’s BS misinformation campaign about the “Tax on Everything”, the NDP’s BS misinformation that Cap & Trade punishes industry and not the average Joe and the Liberal’s mishandling of the whole thing.

The difference between the two systems is simple, as is the similarity.

The Difference:

A Carbon Tax is a mile wide and an inch deep, applies (or should) to everything and everyone in the economy and provides certainty of pricing with no certainty of emission reductions.  It only works if the tax rate is set high enough to modify behavior and the best proposals for this are within a Tax Shift scenario. (See previous Liberal and ongoing Green platforms.)  The downside is that it’s fairly easy for opponents to criticize a new tax because of the word “tax” and also because the public don’t trust government to actually return the money on other taxes.

A Cap & Trade system is an inch wide and a mile foot deep, applies only to specific industries and/or companies, and provides known emission reductions with totally unpredictable pricing.  (It is a market, after all.)  It only works if the number of available credits on the market is set correctly so that emissions actually carry a significant cost and if there is enough of a reduction rate in total available credits so that emissions come down at the intended pace.  On the downside, the setting of emission credits and application of them to certain industries is ripe for political manipulation.

The Similarities:

The similarities are that ideally the price would end up the same for the same emissions reductions, that all carbon pricing will be passed on to the consumer in the end (whether politicians admit this or not), and that neither is adequate all on it’s own as a climate change response.

So which is best?

I’ve written about this several times before, here, here, here, here, here, and here and I think I’ve been abundantly clear in my position.  These are merely two tools in the toolbelt, as it were, and we have dilly-dallied long enough that we no longer have the luxury of time to choose among these tools!!!

We don’t need any more Carbon Tax vs Cap & Trade discussion.  It’s too late for that.  We need both.

Anyone who argues otherwise either does not grasp the seriousness of the problem, or for some reason has an agenda where other priorities are higher.  I, for one, do not fall into either category.  How about you?

Glenn Hubbers Climate Change Cap & Trade, Carbon Tax, Climate Change

President Barack Obama laid out a sweeping vision for high-speed rail in the United States this past week.  Obama has already secured $8 billion in funding in the stimulus bill and plans to pursue another $5 billion over the next 5 years.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress provided an excellent summary of the announcement.

In the meantime, Canada’s [non existent] national transportation strategy looks like this:

Yeah, I know, they’ve been really busy planning for our future, haven’t they?

Once the global recession ends, oil prices will resume their inevitable march to record levels which will be heralded with great fanfare in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland, but will serve to continue to hamper the economies of all other regions.  Airlines will switch from fighting off bankruptcy due to the recession to fighting off bankruptcy due to rising fuel costs.

In the age of Peak Oil and Climate Change, High Speed Rail must be a national priority in Canada as a means of minimizing short haul flights and large numbers of cars.  We need to outline this vision now and put the systems in place before it’s too late.  Government economic stimulus would be well placed to be working toward that vision.

I fear, however, that what we will see first is >$200 per barrel oil, airlines asking for bailouts, a public clamouring for alternate transportation plans, and a government who says, “Well, you can’t blame us because no one saw this coming.”

Glenn Hubbers Climate Change, Economics, Peak Oil, Transportation

I just today received late notice that Mike Nickerson will be speaking at an event at Newmarket Public Library, Wednesday April 15, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Here’s a bit of background on Mike.

Mike Nickerson

Mike Nickerson has spent 35 years studying cultural evolution and communicating the sustainability message. His writings include: Bakavi: Change the World I Want to Stay On (1977), Let’s Talk About Sustainability (1987), Planning for Seven Generations (1993) and the newly released Life, Money & Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay.

With Life, Money & Illusion in hand to provide details, Nickerson is now on a cross country tour introducing the Question of Direction. The program encourages people to think and talk about changing customs and institutions that aim for and benefit from material expansion, to ones capable of maintaining long-term well-being while decreasing impacts on the planet and each other. Nickerson contends that when, as a society, we wholeheartedly choose the new direction we will find ourselves moving toward a promising future.

Life, Money & Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

Now that all the politicians are singing the green tune, it is important to know what the lyrics mean. The song is an epic piece about the maturation of the human species.

For a hundred thousands years, the Earth has provided us with a practically infinite environment into which to grow. Today we have grown so big that we are overwhelming our planet. It is now time to acknowledge that we have reached maturity and to accept the responsibility that comes with that power.

Mike Nickerson, author of Life, Money & Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay, will talk about the challenge of transforming age old customs and institutions, which work to stimulate growth, into new forms that respect planetary limits and will enable secure, fulfilling lives for generations to come.

For more details, visit www.SustainWellBeing.net.

Glenn Hubbers Environmental

I tend to have a lot of complaints about public transit, being a daily user of the system. It’s trying, at best, to be reliant on public transit in this country/province and I am a dedicated user. Imagine how it appears to those who are not so altruistic? Locally, it’s designed with the assumption that all regional transit is to/from downtown Toronto, and it’s almost as if it would shock the planners to think that people might need to travel from one part of the region to another without the need to go downtown.

Case in point, I once considered a job offer at the Eglinton & Yonge area, almost due south of where I live on a straight line to downtown. It was an excellent opportunity, but I considered my transit day and the fact that I would need to take the GO train from Aurora to Union Station and then the Subway back north to Eglinton. Every day, Twice a day. No thanks.

But I digress since regional transit is not the subject of today’s post.

It would seem to me that to encourage people to leave their cars and rely on public transit, and I mean marginal people on the cusp of the decision, not the die-hard’s like me, that a local transit system designed to link to the regional transit is a critical component. George Monbiot wrote an entire section about this in his book on Climate Change solutions, “Heat, How to Keep the Planet from Burning”

Today, just as so many other days, I waited 17 minutes for a bus to appear. Add to that the three minutes during which I could have seen a bus go by and there was a 20 minute window in which no bus appeared. Now admittedly, for a route that includes two buses going to the same general location, each on a different 1/2 hour schedule you might be thinking that this certainly is a mathematical possibility. OK, that’s true, but consider the following:

• both of those buses take people in the morning to the Aurora GO station.
• they operate on different published schedules.
• one of those routes is called the “222 – Newmarket-Aurora GO Shuttle”.
• I make this trek every day and waited at my bus stop at the same time as I normally do, and generally can catch the bus by doing so.

Perhaps I’m being picky, but here are my rather humble requirements for designing this system:

• A bus route titled “GO Shuttle” ought to be designed to shuttle people to the GO station.
• It should do so within a reasonable window of time ahead of the train, say a minimum of 2 minutes ahead.
• It should have a schedule variance of NO MORE than 1/3 of the frequency.

For clarity, that means (in this case) a predictable 10 minute window each half hour where the bus would appear at stops along the route. Here it is visually…

The upshot of this is that a bus on a 1/2 hour schedule, specifically designed to take people to the train also on a 1/2 hour schedule, passed by my stop more than 25 minutes before the train and a more than 18 minutes before it actually needed to in order to meet the train. Brilliant.

The capital spend on transit systems is important, and governments of various levels are applying more, much needed funds for the expansion of transit projects. (Unfortunately they are doing this merely as an economic stimulus and don’t really care about transit for moving people or transit as a Climate Change response but whatever works to achieve those goals is good enough.)

But the operation of those systems is of equal, if not greater importance in that getting people out of their cars and onto transit requires:

• The system needs to go from/to where we need to travel.
• It needs to do so in a time frame reasonably competitively with our ability to drive.
• Most importantly, it needs to be predictable and consistent.

Why is this so difficult?

Other countries have good transit systems. Perhaps not in North America, but contrary to popular opinion we are NOT the entire world. And don’t give me the usual BS about us being a northern country or too spread out because northern European countries with just as much snow do a far better job and 97% of us live on 3% of the land area so for most Canadians our population density should be sufficient to support a decent system.

If I lived rurally I might have no legitimate case, but I live in a rather compacted town with an existing transit system and need to travel from my home to an existing regional commuter train.

No, the problem is a combination of political will and culture.

Culturally, we have been born and raised with the expectation that having and driving a car is our deity-given right and that transit systems are equivalent to social spending for people who can’t afford better.

And politically, well, they are just responding to the cultural demand (once you account for the petty infighting BS).

Some of this might change as the effects of Climate Change and Peak Oil become more apparent and richer folks start demanding a system that works, but we will likely first see more years of saving failing car companies, and don’t you dare spend a dime on public transit till you fix the potholes type rhetoric.

In the meantime, I’ll keep riding the crappy YRT service, tilting at windmills, and pointing out government stupidity wherever I find it, which should provide for years of entertaining blogs.

Glenn Hubbers Transportation Transit, YRT

There’s been a lot of hype about nuclear power, and the “nuclear renaissance.” Some would have us believe that it’s the only solution to climate change, the cheapest power on earth, the creator of recession proof jobs, and the magic bullet needed to maintain our lifestyle while leaving all the birds, butterflies and bunnies twittering about.

Bull.

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance has a new web site (well, new to me as I’ve just found it via Chris Tindal) called Ontario’s Green Future that specifically talks about nuclear power in Ontario. Check it out.

In their argument, they argue that nuclear gets a free ride that greener sources of power do not get that skews the economics.

• Radioactive waste disposal costs:  The Nuclear Waste Management Organization estimates these costs will be more than $20 billion for existing waste. Taxpayers will foot a major share of this bill, including 100% of any costs over $10 billion.
• Nuclear Liability Costs: No private insurer will insure a nuclear plant against a major accident. Therefore, the government artificially limits the liability of nuclear plant operators to $75 million — a token sum that will be dwarfed by the real costs of even a modest accident.
• Nuclear plant decommissioning: Ontario’s electricity consumers and taxpayers are responsible for 100% of the costs of taking apart and disposing of the nuclear reactors run by privately owned Bruce Power.

But there are plenty of additional arguments against the economics of nuclear as well.

For the Canadian / Ontario case:

• Which taxpayer are you today? Should the contract for new nuclear be awarded to AECL and should the Ontario government successfully contract for a fixed price (which I sincerely doubt anyway, but bear with me) what is the result?  The Canadian taxpayer would be backstopping the construction risk on behalf of the Ontario rate payer.  Now, I don’t know ’bout y’all, but that counts me twice!!  And imagine how that will fly in all those provinces who do not have anything to do with the nuclear cycle.
• Contracts are not always what they appear: Another little tidbit about the Bruce nuclear reactor is the Ontario government signing a take or pay contract with them with the government responsible for the Bruce to Milton transmission line.  The bottom line is that we will pay for their power once it is ready, regardless of whether the transmission line is in place to bring it online.  No other technology gets this advantage.

On a world scale, Joseph Romm at Climate Progress has a great deal to say about the possibility of carrying off this nuclear vision, including one of my favourites, “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power.”

As an engineer I’m really not as worried about the nuclear waste problem as many others, although I don’t deny it’s a problem. To me it’s merely an engineering/logistics/long term storage problem which, while it can’t be “solved” per se, can be dealt with by the application of enough money over enough time. The problem is that this money * time equation is never included in the rosy picture presented by nuclear enthusiasts.

So if you want to talk nuclear I’m happy to. But the first step in that conversation should be agreement on honest economics.

Glenn Hubbers Climate Change, Energy, Environmental, Nuclear Economics, Energy, Nuclear, OCAA, subsidies

Glenn Hubbers General

Spring is in the air. Time for renewal, spring cleaning, and a blog revamp.

I guess my December 7 post about blogging again was a bit premature and as the winter wore on I decided that I needed to do a wholesale revamp of my site including a new theme to make it look less like a campaign blog and an upgrade of Wordpress behind the scenes. And I just didn’t have it in me.

But thanks to the better weather and new found motivation, here’s the new site. Let me know what you think. In the meantime I’m working on a few entries covering issues that have happened in the meantime, such as the proposed Green Energy Act for Ontario.

Along with that, I’ll let you know that I am scheduled to give a presentation at the Green Party of Ontario Annual Meeting in May, discussing the electricity sector, so the Green Energy Act is likely to be the main topic of conversation. I’ll post the presentation here when it’s done.

Glenn Hubbers General