Carbon Taxation on Gas Bills

I did a dumb thing the other day, and wandered into the comment section on an article about Alberta's new TIER carbon levy on large emitters.

One comment stood out (not linking, because I don't want to single out a particular person; I see this kind of talk often), where the pointed out: The estimated cost of gas over the next while is 2$/GJ, according to the futures market, and a price of 50$/tonne works out to 2.80$/GJ, means that the carbon pricing more than doubles the cost of gas. This is pointed out to be particularly unfair because heating is not something people can just "go without", and on a per GJ basis electricity is way more expensive.

I think a lot of people see this stuff and go "Oh my god, they're going to more than double my gas bill!". I just want to walk through our gas bill to show how this isn't the case.

Here's our most recent gas bill, where we were charged for

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Natural Gas Charges	$0.82	$4.83
Administration Charge		$7.00
Transaction Fee	$1.00	$5.92
Rider		$0.09
Delivery Charges		$32.91
Transmission Service Charge Rider		$5.69
Interim Shortfall Rider (Fixed)		$1.56
Interim Shortfall Rider (Variable/Demand)		$0.28
Weather Adjustment Rider		-$0.48
Property Tax		$1.60
Franchise Fee Edmonton		$13.99
Total		$77.06

So of our $77 gas bill, only $4.83 was actually for you know, gas. The rest was administration, transmission fees and riders, none of which would be pushed up by a hypothetical carbon tax.

Let's add a carbon tax of 50$/tonne. That adds a row that looks like this:

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Hypothetical Carbon Tax, 50$/tonne	2.81	16.61

Ok, so now I'm paying an extra 17.44$ (after GST). That's nothing to sneeze about for sure! Its' a 23% increase on the my bill, but it's a far cry from a 100% increase to my bill, despite the fact that given the price I pay for gas on that bill, a 50$/tonne carbon tax would be a 415% increase in the price I pay for my gas.

Now. After all that, is Carbon Taxation on consumers a good idea? I'm honestly not sure. It's something I need to dig into more. Another post for another day.

Playing with Numbers around Energy and Carbon Pricing

eleI've been learning a bunch about energy lately. A lot of this is reminding me of things I learned in ages past, refreshing from middle school science class.

However, these days I find a lot of this easier to learn because I have context that I didn't have when I was a kid. This is sort of a continuation of me really getting electricity usage hammered home by a home energy meter. This post is mostly me playing with numbers to understand things better- feel free to skip.

Take my gas bill here in Edmonton. We're billed by the Gigajoule (an interesting contrast by the way to Ottawa, where were billed for gas usage in cubic meters).

What is a Gigajoule? Well, a little googling reminds me that a Joule is a watt second; so a Gigajoule is a billion watt seconds. A bit of math then gets you to the Watt hour (10^9 J / (60 * 60) = 277,777 J), and divided by 1000 gets you 277 kWh.

I don't know what to call it when different energy sources have different levels of usability (ie; I can use electricity in my house to power my blender, but I can't really burn gas to do the same thing), but discounting that, 1 GJ of gas is equivalent to 277 kWh of electricity.

Alright, cool! We did a cool conversion, and now we can compare things on a level(-ish) playing field.

So, Andrea and I pay $0.0789 per kWh for electricity, and we pay $0.816 per GJ for gas. Knowing what we know now about that conversion, that means we get a price of $0.00293 per kWh for gas: Which means that electricity is roughly 27x more expensive than gas.

Ok, so that's not great (climate wise). Let's rejigger things a bit. Andrea and I intentionally are 1) Locked into an energy price 2) Paying extra for 'green' energy. Let's instead compare against "low cost" renewable projects. These days, records are being broken for low bids everywhere, but in Alberta we have wind projects with bids at $0.037 per kWh.

If we use that price instead of what Andrea and I are paying, we see a difference of closer to 12.5x.

In Alberta, before the election of our new conservative government, we had a carbon levy of $1.517 per GJ. So if we factor that into our cost calculation, using the lower cost electricity, and gas with the carbon levy, we get to a price difference of 4.5x.

So, according to this random website on the internet, natural gas produces 56.1 kg of CO2 per GJ. This means roughly 17.8 GJ of natural gas produces one tonne of carbon dioxide (and, the Alberta Carbon Levy was priced at $27/ton.)

To get to price parity with 3.7c per kWh for electricity, we would need a carbon levy of more than 150$ per tonne. This is a fascinating number to come up with, because I've heard the number thrown around before.

Anyhow. This blog post is long and boring, but for me it was a fascinating attempt to work the numbers and understand things better.

Pro Energy: Don’t Let it Become Synonymous with Carbon Emissions

I have noticed recently that the term “Pro-Energy” is a code word in Canadian politics for pro-oil and gas sentiment. Here’s three examples I found with approximately zero effort. Or perhaps even more obvious, take a look at this Facebook Ad I was served the other day:

I find this really frustrating, because I feel like it’s a co-option by oil and gas of the word “energy” for green-washing.

Here’s the thing: I am hugely pro-energy, in that I believe our society runs on energy, and that all things being equal, we can improve our quality of living, and address huge numbers of problems in the world with the application of cheap to free energy. Imagine a hypothetical world where fusion has become common place and the cost of electricity has dropped to approximately zero per kWh. Think about the way that world can work:

• We can eliminate the scarcity of fresh water by deploying desalination.
• We can harvest minerals from ocean water, reducing the need for mining.
• We can literally pull carbon dioxide from the air.

None of this “pro-energy” position makes me a supporter of oil and gas for energy. I think this conflagration of oil and gas with “energy” makes real harms, and is worth fighting against.

The biggest harm I think that comes from conflating energy with oil and gas is that people naturally then assume that if one isn’t supporting oil and gas, they’re advocating for scarcity: A contraction in living standards on all dimensions.

When we talk about sustainability, environmentalism, and action on climate change, mostly we hear about how we need to radically reshape our lives. I am terrified that is 100% right; I like my life, and I would like to keep living it. Let’s think ambitious for a moment (far more ambitious than is realistic — let us build some hope here). Take a peek at this amazing diagram from the World Resources Institute, where they draw the flows from sector to production of greenhouse gasses (slightly dated, as it was generated from 2003 data for the USA).

Of the end-use column in this, look at how little is inherently dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. Would it be easy to replace all this energy with sustainable resources? Heck no! Yet, I look at the diagram and I find an enormous sense of comfort: It’s not impossible to radically alter the emissions output of a huge industrialized nation like the USA. Sure, it’s a political nightmare; but the fact of the matter is: Almost nothing on that chart is intrinsically dependent on taking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them for energy. That’s fantastic news.

Imagine a Thanos-like snap: We could stop worrying about climate change if we got rid of all the use of fossil fuels in that energy section. The world wouldn’t be a Star Trek-like utopia, and we’d still have problems galore (inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, war, and more), but, no one would necessarily have to lose the quality of living they’ve become accustomed to. In this Snap, of course we need to have a just transition for those whose livelihoods currently depend on oil and gas, but we need that in the real world too!

I feel that’s something we need to remind people of. Climate change is terrifying, and I feel like a lot of coverage and writing on it is causing people to freeze up. Only naturally, people want to protect what they have, and it seems like to battle climate change what is being asked of them is to give it all up, and live on a commune. Taking off my optimists hat for a second, I think most plans that take world emissions rates low enough to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming will be painful. Putting my hat back on, I think a huge amount of that pain is because we have allowed fear to rule, which means that we don’t consider the positive possible outcomes. I think a lot of people who fight action on climate change do it because they’re scared of what it means to them personally, something I totally sympathize with, but I believe we need to be fighting that. We need to give everyone hope that the future includes them, and their lives. It’s not something I think we’re very good at yet.

Returning to my original thesis, giving people hope means disconnecting “energy” from oil and gas. We need to be pro-energy in the sense that we need to produce large amounts of clean energy throughout the world, to help create prosperous society that limits our impact on the non-human aspects of the globe. We need to recognize that as much as climate change is a dangerous challenge to humanity, it’s also an opportunity to build a richer society that nevertheless ultimately has a lower impact on the globe. I think that’s worth fighting for.

Like a Legacy Codebase

It seems to me, that owning a house is sort of like living inside a legacy codebase.

Maybe it's not so true for a new house, but for a house where you're the second owner, it's like inheriting an old codebase. You look around, start to piece together how the whole thing works.

Initially, you just see the high level components. You figure out the basics, how to turn the lights off and on again. As you look closer, you start to catch the idiosyncrasies of the original owner. Then you start to see the bugs-- the things that don't work properly. You see the odd extensions that aren't being used; designs for plans that never came to fruition. There will be scary bits that you pray don’t explode in your face, because you’ve no idea whats going on inside them.

You fix some of the bugs yourself. Others you reach out to professionals to handle.

As you get a handle on the whole thing, you start planning refactoring and maintenance changes. You'll tear out that weird subsystem that you're never going to use. Rename this and that to make them understandable to you, comment as you figure things out.

Slowly you refactor the codebase to suit your needs, and to help it fit your taste.

Still, as you keep looking it over, you'll continue to find oddities. You'll find mysteries; design pieces whose reasoning has been lost to the mists of time. Such is the nature of old code.

---

Andrea and I have been the second owner for each of the houses we've bought, and neither of them have been too terribly old. I can only imagine what it must be like for people who buy a house that is a century old, having been through half a dozen owners over that time. The layers and layers of people's dream and mistakes.

As it is in our new house, we've got the basics down. We're working through a couple of bugs here and there. We're building a list of future maintenance items, and planning renovations. We've called in professionals for sure; so far none of them have run away screaming "call an exorcist instead!"... so that's nice. There's design pieces I don't understand... and probably never will. Wires that go nowhere that seem to do nothing and serve no purpose.

We've started some refactoring (the big project codenamed PAINT-INTERIOR finished up a week or two ago). Lots more projects planned. Maintenance fund is setup, and maintenance projects are on the mind.

So far so good though.

Another Move, another Cliff

It’s funny to me that I wrote this post two years and one month ago. At the time, we were just about to close on our first home purchase, and were three weeks away from moving from Toronto to Ottawa.

Here I am again, two years later, just about to move from Ottawa to Edmonton. I don’t think I would have predicted that two years ago.

A lot has changed in the last two years. First and foremost, we welcomed our daughter into the world in December. She’s been an amazing child, and has warmed my life in ways I literally could not have imagined before her. Second, I started working remotely full time.

The combination really made us start to question our life in Ottawa. We love parts of Ottawa: Our house, our friends, the canal — it’s a lovely city. However, with a baby you really do start to think a lot more about family connection. With work no longer acting as an anchor to Ottawa, the question of moving really started to bubble up at the beginning of this year.

In May, we made a trip to Edmonton, and stayed in an AirBnB for a week with my parents. By the end of that week had decided: It’s worth it to move back to Edmonton. Last time when we moved from Toronto to Ottawa, we moved very quickly — from the day we decided to move, to the day we took possession of the new house was only about three months.

This move has been similarly paced. After deciding to move mid-May, we had our house on the market about two weeks after we got home. We then had a house-hunting week in Edmonton in mid-June.

We’re fortunate in a sense, moving from Ottawa to Edmonton: the housing markets are largely opposites. Where Ottawa is seeing strong price growth, Edmonton has seen prices falling. Despite having this arbitrage opportunity, the house hunting trip was irksome. One of the first houses we saw, we liked. However, by waiting until the next morning, we missed it. Crazily, despite having been on the market for over a month, it sold after two offers came in the day we saw it. After that, we had a couple of rough unsuccessful days. We didn’t see much we liked, and we learned a lot about our what we are willing to compromise on, and what we weren’t (turns out, I’m way more sensitive to road noise than I thought). On the last possible day of house hunting, at least for that trip, we found something we both really liked. It was a clear winner, despite some hemming and hawing on our part.

Irksomely, we ended up having competition on our offer for that house. Fortunately, we put in the winning offer.

Our own house sold on its eighth day on the market, while we were in the middle of the house hunt. That was nice.

So here we are again. Sitting on the cliff of change. We’re slowly putting the final pieces together on our move. We’ve held our goodbye party, and are just waiting to see how Edmonton treats us.

I hope it goes swimmingly.

Spring is Coming

The sun is coming back, the thaw is beginning.  

I am so excited. 

Better than Bad News on Climate: Volume III

Just one link this time. I don’t have a great selection right now, and this one is too good too sit on any longer: “How to decarbonize America — and the world” by Ramez Naam.

Two parts of this piece stand out for me. The first is that it talks about agriculture, where much talk about decarbonization focuses only on electricity and transport. The second is his discussion of electricity grids; This is something I think we should be talking more about in Canada. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but Canada’s Really Big. To me this hints that there is access to renewable energy across the country, but a nation wide high voltage electrical grid would allow us to move the generation to where it’s least environmentally impactful, and best deployed (What do the wind patterns look like in the middle of Hudson’s Bay? I legitimately don’t know, but I wonder if it would make an excellent home for deep water wind farms), and then transmit that energy to Canada’s urban centres (and perhaps export!)