EVs Homes and the Environment in NS

The initial expense of electric vehicles (EV) and buildings that are constructed and operated to minimize their carbon footprint needs to be compared to how their ongoing performance compares with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and conventional building construction.

EV and ICE Vehicles

 

  Bill Turpin discusses the energy efficiency and GHG emissions of his typical EV that uses the Nova Scotia electric grid for charging. His calculations indicate that using an EV in Nova Scotia produces less GHG emissions than internal combustion vehicles even as Nova Scotia Power Inc. burns coal to generate electricity.

According to Nova Scotia Power’s 2020 emission intensity report, the utility emitted 629.7 grams of carbon (strictly speaking, carbon dioxide) for each kilowatt-hour (kWh) it sold me.  This means my car indirectly emits 11,020 grams of carbon per 100 km (17.5 X 629.7). On average, a Canadian car burns nine litres of gasoline per 100 km and each burned litre creates 2,300 grams of human habitat-killing carbon dioxide. This means the average fossil-burner directly emits 20,700 grams of carbon every 100 km (9 X 2,300). Put another way, my average EV emits just 53% of the carbon emitted by a fossil-burner. Yep, right here in Nova Scotia. And that number will get better as more hydro from Muskrat Falls gets into the energy mix. Nova Scotia Power has cut its emissions intensity by 30 per cent over the past 15 years and electric motors are about two and a half times more efficient than internal combustion engines. The same amount of energy that moves an ICEV 100 km drives my EV for 250 km.1

George MacPherson writes on LinkedIn about why building a luxury home may be good for the environment.

Luxury and Green too

 

He notes that even in eco-friendly designs, we externalize costs and with passive-built structures one of those external costs is the destruction of our natural life giving forests.

 

Unless we begin framing these homes with a different material, a sustainable recycled material, or we stop building homes to passive standards all together, this will always just be a Band-Aid solution… True eco-friendly means that you can stand with pride on the job site of your home being constructed, knowing that because it's being constructed it is helping the environment and if it weren't constructed then 600,000 bottles would still be in the ocean. That's our structure. That's our eco structure. It's not passive. It's better than passive. It's positive environmental impact… A JD Composites home uses half the energy of a standard wood framed home. That means if you net zero based on the consumption of a typical home, you have 50% of your production that you can devote to "luxury" energy costs. Things like electric vehicle charging, water pumps for irrigation, hydroponics, glycol heated concrete and driveway, and even a water feature.2

Adrienne Morgan Interior Design comments that there are many ways you can refresh and organize your luxury home to make it more sustainable.

 

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certificate has become almost like a buzzword in the world of eco-friendly home design. Namely, this certificate ensures that the home’s efficiency standards are in line with the principles of green building. LEED-certified projects have so far been responsible for removing 80 million tonnes of waste that results from unsustainable building. Also, it has been estimated that LEED buildings account for $1.2 billion in energy savings and $150 million in water savings. Around the world, about 430,000 homes are LEED-certified, most of them being in the US. Both residential, private, and commercial real estate experts recognize LEED certification as an accurate sustainability indicator.3

In the transition from transportation and building systems of today to the energy efficient low carbon footprint required in the next decade we need to rely on energy use and GHG emission calculations by engineers and others with experience in the technology required to meet the goals that will minimize the effects of a warming planet.

 

References

1	Turpin,B. (March 30, 2022). Eat my electrons, CBC!. And Now This….https://andnowthis.ca/2022/03/30/eat-my-electrons-cbc/
2	MacPherson,G. (March 30, 2022). Opulence for the Populous: Why Building A Luxury Home is GOOD for the Environment. Geo Net Zero. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/opulence-populous-why-building-luxury-home-good-george-macpherson/?published=t&fbclid=IwAR02U32lsMPZqQwels8EaerHRufzl5NYbSomwaRp0LabMwH7HAYndOSfIdU
3	(n.d.). Can Luxury Homes Be Environmentally Friendly Too? - Adrienne .... Retrieved March 31, 2022, from https://amorganinteriors.com/can-luxury-homes-be-environmentally-friendly-too/

 

Fossil Fuel Dependency Cost and Climate

Bill McKibben, writing in the New Yorker, comments that this year, we may need to compensate for banning the importation of Russian oil with American hydrocarbons.

 

The only way, however, to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependence on oil. New numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down.

 

A few years ago, at a petroleum-industry conference in Texas, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said something both terrible and true: that “no country would find a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” He was referring to Alberta’s tar sands, where a third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one percent of the world’s population.)1

Mark Jacobson showed a gift for science, and also for tennis. He travelled for tournaments to Los Angeles and San Diego, where he was shocked by how dirty the air was. He eventually wound up at Stanford as a professor of civil and environmental engineering, It was clear that visible air pollution was only part of the problem. It was understood that the unseen gas produced by combustion—carbon dioxide—posed an even more comprehensive threat.

Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down Vermont’s nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though, advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the state’s mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the state’s public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or even most of it— Mark Jacobson’s latest numbers show that renewable power actually uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape differently—as Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times, “to conserve anything close to the climate we’ve had, we need to build as we’ve never built before.”1

Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so.  Some analysts calculate a “decisive transition” to renewable energy would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible.

 Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”1

For Americans, the best part of the Build Back Better bill may be that it tries to target significant parts of its aid to communities hardest hit by poverty and environmental damage, a residue of the Green New Deal that is its parent. Advocates are already pressing to ensure that at least some of the new technology is owned by local communities—by churches and local development agencies, not by the solar-era equivalents of Koch Industries or Exxon.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, who works for the Canadian equivalent of the Forest Service, is a member of the Métis Nation. Her family kept trapping lines near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, but left them for the city because the development of the vast tar-sands complex overwhelmed the landscape. (That’s the hundred and seventy-three billion barrels that Justin Trudeau says no country would leave in the ground—a pool of carbon so vast the climate scientist James Hansen said that pumping it from the ground would mean “game over for the climate.”) The industrial fires it stoked have helped heat the Earth, and one result was a truly terrifying forest fire that overtook Fort McMurray in 2016, after a stretch of unseasonably high temperatures. The blaze forced the evacuation of eighty-eight thousand people, and became the costliest disaster in Canadian history.1

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has required Western nations to rework energy supply arrangements. Unfortunately, a number of corporations, organisations and politicians have attempted to use this crisis in an attempt to restart fossil fuel exploration and production. The opportunity that aligns with the scientific data from the IPCC is to begin now to increase production of energy from sources with low fossil fuel use.

 

Reference

 [1] (2022, March 18). In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things | The New Yorker. Retrieved March 18, 2022, from https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things

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War Like Struggle for Peace and Health

A review of encyclical and letters from the Vatican in the past decades to determine the position of the Church on war may show an approach that is in transition to abolition of war.

Navy in Harbour

David Carroll Cochran writes that  that Catholicism’s call to abolish war, like its call to abolish the death penalty, is far from foolish.

Those who study trends in warfare find that greater economic development, more participation in international trade, and deeper involvement in regional intergovernmental bodies all significantly reduce a country’s risk of war. So too does democracy, the rule of law, and effective governance. The research also shows that there is much that the international community can do to promote these economic and political trends in countries most at risk of war. The use of mediation and peace agreements to resolve disputes between and within countries has been increasingly effective. Meanwhile, international peacekeeping missions and peace-and-reconciliation initiatives have significantly reduced the risk of conflict breaking out again in places where it has recently ended. Those who study armed conflict have also shown the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions in influencing state behavior without resort to war. Finally, studies show that in the past century nonviolent civil resistance has been twice as effective as armed struggle against both domestic dictators and foreign oppressors—and this effectiveness gap has grown even greater in the past few decades. The church’s ideas about peacemaking turn out to be pretty realistic after all.1

 

Some critics dismiss the church’s peacemaking commitments as more unrealistic sentimentality. George Weigel, for example, has described faith in greater international governance and multilateral cooperation as “inexplicably stupid” and lamented that this “fantasy” continues to appear in papal encyclicals. It is remarkable how much social-scientific research on armed conflict supports the effectiveness of the very tools Catholic teaching emphasizes.

1	alleviate poverty, inequality, protect human rights, promote democracy and the rule of law
2	conflicts resolved through nonviolent negotiation and mediation
3	robust international peacekeeping commitments
4	rely on diplomacy, sanctions, and incentives to uphold international norms
5	methods of nonviolent direct action as effective alternatives to armed struggle
Ref	(2016, January 4). A World Without War | Commonweal Magazine. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/world-without-war

 

Douglas P. Fry, Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and  Geneviève Souillac, Associate Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, report that peaceful societies are not utopian fantasy. They exist. They comment that skeptics might respond that there is no need to eliminate war from the planet. But such thinking is flawed in many respects.

“Peace systems” are clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other and sometimes not at all. That means some peace systems are completely non-warring, whereas others only engage in acts of war outside the boundaries of the system. A systematic study of peace systems may hold valuable lessons about how to promote transborder cooperation desperately needed to meet the threats of climate change, pandemics, ecological collapse, and ticking nuclear catastrophe.2

 

Overblown military expenditures not only fail to deliver true security but also divert funding from sustainable development, education, healthcare, and other human necessities. Wars destroy the lives of combatants and civilians alike. The very presence of nuclear arsenals imperils the entire species, if not all forms of life on Earth. Wars distract attention, divert resources, and impede the concerted action required to successfully address plummeting biodiversity, soiling of the seas, displacement of peoples, ethnocide of indigenous peoples, pandemics, cataclysmic wildfires, and global warming itself. Waging of wars and oversized militarism hinder concerted “all hands on deck” responses to existential threats.

 

Charlie Smith, editor of the Georgia Straight Vancouver writes that author Seth Klein wants us all to wage A Good War to prevent a climate catastrophe.

The war effort made great use of posters, public radio, and the National Film Board to generate public support. Klein discovered in his research that the King government modified its message over time to woo more Canadians to fight fascism. Initially, government officials relied on traditional propaganda, with messages like ”Go get Hitler!” “Then they realized in ’41 that they actually had to shift gears,” Klein says. “If they were going to get the enlistment numbers that they needed, they had to engage people in a conversation about what kind of society they were going to come back to.” That led to economist Leonard Marsh’s 1943 Report on Social Security for Canada, which called for social insurance and public-welfare supports. It formed a blueprint for the creation of a welfare state after the war. Klein points out that the first income transfers occurred during the Second World War. And Tommy Douglas was elected premier of Saskatchewan in 1944, putting that province on the road toward creating the country’s first public health-insurance program.3

 

Some of the actions of a government at war have been experienced during the Covid epidemic.

Shift to Emergency Mode

War time like government involvement is likely to be required to implement the policy required to reduce the tremendous impact that the climate crisis will have on the world.

 

References

 

1	(2016, January 4). A World Without War | Commonweal Magazine. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/world-without-war
2	(2021, March 22). Peaceful societies are not utopian fantasy. They exist.. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/peaceful-societies-are-not-utopian-fantasy-they-exist/
3	(2020, September 9). Vancouver author Seth Klein wants us all to wage A Good War to .... Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://www.straight.com/living/vancouver-author-seth-klein-wants-us-all-to-wage-a-good-war-to-prevent-a-climate-catastrophe

 

War, Energy Demand, and Climate Crisis

The war launched by Russia against Ukraine has brought economic sanctions against gas and oil previously imported to Europe.

Oil and gas

 

The increase in the price of these fossil fuels has stoked the embers of sunset industries of eastern Canada’s oil and gas production and heated up the pressure to build pipelines to export western resources to Europe. CBC News reports that Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey says his government is promoting the province's oil to NATO countries, as the war in Ukraine rages. He said his government is pushing Newfoundland and Labrador oil as an alternative to Russian fossil fuels.

"We have right here what the world needs as well, and that is to relieve some of our NATO partners of the tyranny of Russia and their stranglehold on the energy around the world," he said, when asked about the provincial government's efforts regarding the war. Furey said they're not trying to capitalize on what he noted is a humanitarian crisis, but did say his government is "making sure that our voice is heard internally and externally" with regard to the province's offshore oil industry.1

 

Michael Gorman of CBC News reports that the Goldboro Nova Scotia LNG project could be revived as a floating barge while demand grows for non-Russian gas.

Goldboro Nova Scotia

 

Pieridae Energy abandoned the land-based project last summer amid cost concerns.

There would not be a need for a 5,000-person work camp, for example, during construction, although Millar said the full-time workforce would be similar — about 150 people. He said the company would build a "small hotel" by the site to provide lodging. The construction that would be required includes a jetty and a spur of a pipe to connect the vessel to the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline. While some barges have their own power supply, Millar said Pieridae has talked with officials at Nova Scotia Power about requirements if the barge it leases does not have its own power source.2

 

A report in the Economist asserts that climate change must be adapted to as well as opposed even as efforts to reduce its impact on lives and ecosystems are falling ever shorter.

Previous reports on impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation relied on prediction. In this one the authors need only to look around them to catalogue increased flooding, more heatwaves, stressed ecosystems and millions of lives that have become harder to live. The “emissions gap” that dogs climate policy is well known. Though the reductions in emissions that the world’s countries have pledged themselves to make are steeper than they used to be, they still fall well short of those needed to give the world a good chance of keeping the rise in average temperature relative to pre-industrial levels well below 2°C. The new report highlights a parallel adaptation gap. Though efforts to reduce the impact of climate change on lives and ecosystems are greater than they once were, the extent to which they fall short of what circumstances require is increasing, as impacts pile up apace.3

Natasha Bulowski, News, Energy, Politics, Ottawa Insider with the National Observer writes that Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, is rebuking Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s assertion Canada must “get some pipelines built” to help “defang” the Russian President.

“The solution to global energy problems is not to increase our dependency on fossil fuels,” said Guilbeault. The best way to improve the energy security of European countries is to simply reduce dependence on oil and gas “regardless of where it's coming from,” he said. Even if Canada could build more pipelines to increase oil and gas capacity, this would take “a number of years” and wouldn’t address the crisis people in Ukraine and Europe are now facing, he added. The real solution, he says, is to “quickly deploy renewables and cleantech” to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas.4

 

Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, reviews the idea that Europe will want to replace Russian oil and gas with fossil fuels from elsewhere.

If Europe does face a gas shortage, immediate solutions are needed and costly investments for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and similar projects will take years to get approved and built, she added. “Making investments in new fossil fuel facilities that won't be built in the time they need and then will be white elephants as the continent shifts away from fossil fuels is not an obvious solution for Europe,” said Harrison, referring to the European Union’s pledge to reduce emissions 55 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030.4

 

A press release from the Climate Action Network asserts that Canada’s oil and gas industry's current attempt to lobby for fossil fuel expansion should be recognized as the desperate ploy of an outdated industry that has never failed to capitalize on a crisis.

In the spring of 2020, Canada’s oil and gas industry used the pandemic as an excuse to press the federal government to water down or suspend environmental regulations and to delay the introduction of UNDRIP legislation. Its current attempt to lobby for fossil fuel expansion should be recognized as more of the same: the desperate ploy of an outdated industry that has never failed to capitalize on a crisis. This week’s IPCC report, cataloguing an “atlas of suffering,” underscored the dire consequences of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels and the urgent need to break the habit. As Svitlana Krakovska, the climate scientist heading Ukraine’s delegation to the IPCC, said when her team was forced to withdraw from the negotiations to move to bomb shelters: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”5

 

Cloe Logan, writing in the National Observer, reports that environmentalists, citizens and academics are urging the federal government to reject Newfoundland offshore oil project known as Bay du Nord.

“The Bay du Nord project poses significant environmental risks and it would undermine the urgent global effort to reduce emissions and protect climate stability. Instead of expanding oil production, our priority challenge right now is managing a wind-down of oil production that allows workers and communities to seize the benefits of the low-carbon energy transition,” said Carter. “Approving Bay du Nord would take Newfoundland and Labrador in the wrong direction — both in terms of the climate crisis and long-term economic security.”6

 

The time frame for building new LNG facilities and pipelines is long and the “just transition” for workers in Canada’s GHG producing industries needs immediate retraining for green energy careers. To delay GHG reduction action may eliminate the existing workforce from transition and exacerbate the consequences in more intense storms, fires, and floods in Canada.

 

References

1	(2022, March 3). Furey promotes NL oil as Russian invasion drives up fuel prices - CBC. Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-oil-russian-invasion-1.6370127
2	(2022, March 3). Goldboro LNG project could be revived as floating barge while .... Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/goldboro-lng-energy-project-gas-pieridae-1.6370827
3	(2022, March 5). Climate change must be adapted to as well as opposed. Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/03/05/climate-change-must-be-adapted-to-as-well-as-opposed
4	(2022, March 2). Environment minister rebukes claims Canadian oil and gas can fix .... Retrieved March 3, 2022, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/03/02/news/environment-minister-rebukes-claims-canadian-oil-and-gas-can-fix-europes
5	(n.d.). Climate Action Network. Retrieved March 4, 2022, from https://climateactionnetwork.ca/
6	(n.d.). Environmentalists, citizens and academics urge feds to reject .... Retrieved March 5, 2022, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/03/03/news/environmentalists-citizens-and-academics-urge-feds-reject-newfoundland-offshore-oil