A Letter to my MP

Living in Alberta can be enormously emotionally draining at times. My Premier is organizing a letter writing drive, driven by fear mongering, trying to delay action on greening the Alberta grid.

I decided to write my MP to counter said letter campaign, insofar as I can. My frustration was perhaps too palpable as I wrote, but sometimes frustration is all you have.

“Honorable Mr. McCauley

You’ll get a lot of form letters driven by TellTheFeds.ca

This isn’t a form letter: This a letter to say the opposite: I am disgusted by our province’s attitude regarding climate change. By spending time and energy attempting to slow walk regulation rather than taking action on climate, our government shows they lack ambition or interest.

Climate change affects us today. It will affect my children enormously.

So far, all the Alberta government provides is excuses, rather than engaging with the demands of Albertans to decarbonize our future; don’t take the barrage of form letters as meaning that inaction is acceptable

Inaction on climate is unacceptable.”

I CC’d Steven Guilbeault as well.

On the Conservative Leadership Race

I chose to email my MP in order to put my feather on the scales of the conservative leadership race:

Mr. McCauley,

To the extent that you are looking for constituent feedback on the leadership race within your party let me make a single wishlist item:

The Conservative party must have a credible climate plan to win. Which means having a leader willing to put forward a credible climate plan. Erin O’Toole’s plan was a step forward, but insufficiently credible. It’s time for the conservatives to show us credibly how they drive Canada and the world to net zero.

Myself, and many of my generation simply will not vote for a party that ignores climate change. If you want to win, you need to be serious.

— Matt Gaudet

Every opportunity to remind politicians that climate matters.

Letter to the Editor: LNG Exports

To help minimize my feelings of hopelessness around climate change, I’ve been attending local meetings of the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL).

In collaboration with Edmonton CCL Chapter leader Victor Dorian I wrote a response to an opinion piece by Alberta pundit and former politician, Danielle Smith called “Best way for Canada to get to net zero is to export LNG”.

The response was published in today’s Letters section. Below is the version I submitted, along with two helpful hyperlinks that don’t really work in a newspaper’s editorial section.

In her column, “Best way for Canada to get to net zero is to export LNG”, Danielle Smith argues that massive export of LNG to fuel other countries coal-converted-to-gas power plants is the most effective way for Canada to hit its net zero goal.

The column rests on a tenuous assumption: Canada will be recognized with emission reduction credits for this export. She links to a discussion of the Paris agreement’s Article 6; however, she neglects to point out that Article 6 is controversial, complicated and far from guaranteed (as her link discusses!)

Even the aspects recently clarified in Glasgow suggest that this sort of export cannot be counted in Canada’s favour, as ultimately it would be considered double counting of emissions reduction: You cannot both reduce Canada’s emissions, and the emissions of another country!

At the end of the day, climate change only stops when we stop emitting. Period. Natural gas conversion may reduce emissions in the short term, but being “twice as good as coal” is still problematic when we have to hit zero.

Emission free technologies have to be the direction; Rather than push for a particular solution, the approach our government should follow is setting standards and pricing, to allow independent producers to figure out the road to net-zero: This means Carbon Pricing and flexible regulations that drive every sector in Canada to zero by 2050. Internationally, we should push for the world to take a similar or more stringent approach, using Carbon Border Adjustments to bring market signals to the world.

Danielle Smith hopes emissions markets allows Canada to look good; I hope instead we see a dedication to markets that drive us to zero, not just make Canada look good on paper.

-- Matthew Gaudet

I’ll continue writing, both letters to the editor and letters to elected officials: Any action is better than none.

Why Rooftop Solar?

We have Solar panels on our roof! They’re not even wired up yet, but I’ve been excited by this project for a long while. So I’ve got a backlog of blog posts, covering some of our journey of getting solar installed in Edmonton in 2021. Hopefully some of these posts will be helpful to others one day.

The first post topic is:

Why Rooftop Solar?

The most concrete reason for us to do rooftop solar is that it’s an expression of our family’s values: Climate Change is a global phenomenon that requires our society to change. Rooftop solar is a concrete investment with measurable impact on climate change. At the end of a given year, we will be able to say: our solar panels contributed N kWh to the grid, with zero emissions, displacing M tons of CO2 emissions. I’ll give some forecast estimates of N and M in later posts.

Furthermore, I am a big believer that an appreciable part of the solution to climate change will be electrification. Electrification means that household electricity use will climb appreciably as parts of our household energy use transitions from gasoline and natural gas to electricity. For example, if we were to replace our car with an electric (which we hope to do in the next year or two!), I’ve estimated that our household electricity consumption would climb by 33%. I’ve also estimated that replacing our natural gas usage with electricity would increase our household electricity usage by anywhere from 3.5x to 7.5x, depending on the efficiency of the replacing technologies. Multiply this through our entire society, and it's clear: We need more power generation, period.

While it currently doesn’t make sense for us to completely replace natural gas in our house with electricity, Canada’s carbon pricing regime will make it a closer call by 2030. Adding solar panels will make electrification more cost-effective sooner.

Let me say clearly before ending this post: A rooftop solar system is nothing without sincere political effort to address climate change. I’ve been happy to see small incremental steps on this, but we need bigger ones.

Next Time: Learning about Residential Solar Systems.

The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success

I spent a little over a week reading through Mark Jaccard's newest book, The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress. Notably, the book is Open Access, and so it's downloadable from that link (and it's even possible to send all the chapters to Kindle, which I find slightly surprising!)

Summary

In the book Dr. Jaccard discusses eleven myths which he argues prevent us from succeeding at addressing climate change. By describing the myths, and how they are unhelpful, he is trying to guide concerned citizens to what he sees as the most likely route to success, which is:

1. Transforming and decarbonizing a few key sectors of the economy first: Transportation and Electricity production. While he doesn't advocate ignoring other sectors, these are key sectors to target initially because they are domestic services, where we don't need to worry about competition from other countries, and we know this can be done because near-zero emissions technologies already exist at reasonable costs.
2. Decarbonizing other emissions intensive industries that are exposed to global trade, using 'climate clubs', where groups of countries cooperate to implement carbon tariffs imposed upon imported goods that vary based on the carbon emissions of production.
3. Assisting poorer countries in adopting low-emissions energy.

One theme that runs through the book is the need for flexibility on the part of campaigners to address climate change.

Indeed, we cannot be rigid about solutions. We must pay attention to technical, economic, political, and social feasibility, and be willing to shift our preference for a particular action or policy if one of these factors presents an insurmountable barrier to its contribution

For example, while economists see carbon taxation as the most cost-effective mechanism for reducing carbon emissions, they have become a political nightmare almost everywhere. As a result of this, a fixation on carbon taxation is counter-productive if the goal is decarbonization. In the book he discusses other policies: Cap-and-Trade and flexible regulations which have had a great impact in some areas, and are more politically feasible in many areas than carbon taxes. I found this to be particularly interesting. I know I have historically been heavily in favour of carbon taxation as a road to climate success, but after finishing the book I have to wonder if we haven't wasted a decade in Canada by choosing to argue and fight about Carbon Taxes rather than trying to find the most politically acceptable solution.

Politics is another very interesting theme that runs throughout the book. Dr. Jaccard has been working in this field for a long time, advising many different governments of many different stripes over a long period. This experience has obviously made it very clear to him that the only way we are going to decarbonize is through the effective use of our political power as citizens:

This leaves one last task on the simple path to climate success. We must be able to detect and elect climate-sincere politicians, and then pressure them to implement a few simple policies, such that any citizen can detect procrastination and evasion.

He includes in the book a diagram he titles the "Guide to citizen behaviour for climate success"

As you can see, there's an important set of bars we can apply to our politicians to help drive climate success: Targets, Policies, and the stringency therein. I think perhaps that is the most important takeaway from the book: We as citizens must exercise our political muscles to make action on climate change happen. There are huge benefits to political careers in dilly-dallying and paying lip-service, but we as citizens are the only people who can really hold politicians to this course of action.

In any case, it’s time to stop feeling guilty about ourselves as consumers and start feeling guilty about ourselves as citizens. As consumers, there is little we can do with the guilt in those cases where we have no realistic options to reduce GHGs. As citizens, however, there is a lot we can do. There is a lot we must do. But it won’t always be comfortable

Other Notes

I think this book is likely an excellent resource to share with people who want to effect change on climate. I found Dr. Jaccard's style in the book to be very interesting: He wrote the entire book in extremely plain language. You can feel throughout his aversion to overly technical jargon. While the book is excellently notated with citations for various assertions he makes, the actual style is extremely plainspoken throughout. It made reading the book very low cognitive effort.

As someone who was a believer in some of the myths he deconstructs ("We Must Price Carbon Emissions", "Energy Efficiency is Profitable", "Renewables Have Won") I found this book to be an extremely helpful corrective.

Quotes

I'd like to leave with some of the quotes I highlighted on my read through, because I found them valuable:

Demanding that the global climate agreement only happen if it is seen as equitable by every country on the planet is to ensure that it won’t happen. Those who demand this need to look in the mirror when it comes to allocating blame for a continued global failure that is now especially harming the poorest people on the planet.

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If we allow the fossil fuel industry to paint our domestic efforts as globally futile, these efforts will be thwarted.

When they say, “Our oil, coal, or gas is ethical because when you buy from us your money doesn’t go to terrorists,” Steve now wonders, “How ethical is it to harm current and future generations with climate change simply to enrich yourself?”

These are just some of the justifications for continuing on our high-risk path. The false logic and biased evidence are easily refuted, but informing the public is not easy. This is why people who understand the need to act quickly on the climate threat must lobby for and support compulsory policies, domestically and globally, and actively help their neighbours, friends, and family achieve this same understanding.

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The fossil fuel industry and insincere politicians would like nothing better than to delay compulsory decarbonization policies by claiming that we need behavioral change. We must not play into their hands. Instead, we should prioritize the one behavioral change that can make a big difference: changing our behavior as citizens and voters to more forcefully pursue deep decarbonization policies.

Provincial Investment in Oil and Gas

I am extremely angry right now with my provincial premier. So angry, I’ve taken time out of my work day to write and send the following letter (and post this blog post) to him, CC’d to my MLA.

I am extremely angry to see today’s article where Premier Kenney proposes investing public dollars into Oil and Gas.

As an Albertan, I don’t want to see my provincial dollars supporting a private industry who could totally operate successfully on private capital markets if only our provincial leadership would listen to those markets about what is demanded before investment: It has become increasingly clear that first and foremost, capital markets are demanding control of climate emissions.

For example: Larry Fink of BlackRock investments:

The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations – including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk – is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.

It’s time the Alberta Government stop being a laggard on Climate: Become a leader and the money will follow.

You want to support Alberta oil and gas? Don’t throw public money at it: Build policies and legislation that will demonstrate to the world and investments that put Alberta’s assertion that we can have climate action and resource development to the test.

Mr. Kenney: You believe in Alberta: then lead us to the future the rest of the world already sees coming. Quit lollygagging and throwing good dollars after bad.

— Mathew Gaudet

Of course, I was so freaking annoyed, that I both spelled my own name wrong, spliced a sentence and forgot a salutation.

You hear from so many right wing politicians that we can have resource development and action on Climate Change too. If they truly believe that, then they need to demonstrate that by backing up their words with legislation that will enforce success on climate change.

I don't believe a word my premier says on climate change, because their actions aren't nearly enough.

You want my support for the oil sands Mr. Premier?

1. Legislate the 100MT emissions cap.
2. Mandate that the emissions cap drop by an appreciable fraction every year. Let's say by 4MT per year: That brings the emissions cap to zero by 2045.

If you can't do that, then you don't believe in what you're saying, that we can succeed at climate and have resource extraction.

How to solve climate change and make life more awesome

I listened to this podcast the other day, based loosely on this article by Saul Griffith. I highly recommend giving it a listen (the article has sources, but is less of a good read than the interview is a good listen). One thing that is worth calling out from the article, is the discussion of Carbon Tax as a fairly weak measure. I tend to agree with it, despite supporting carbon taxation.

A second thing I want to call out, that I really believe is key, from this podcast is the same pull quote used on the Vox page:

I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination. We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great.

Let’s plan to get aggressive about this next year. Let’s get louder. Let’s all get more involved.

I plan to.

OK Doomer

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a blog post trying to articulate some of my feelings about a pair of pieces published in the Tyee that ruined my whole damn day. (Honestly, maybe don't even read them, they might ruin your day too).

A good chunk of my feelings were actually covered by a rebuttal piece called OK Doomer, from which I will quote liberally.

On being realistic:

We need to switch from being “realistic,” implying the need to accept defeat, to being ambitious, bringing a determination to do whatever it takes. We need to stop spreading the fear that the energy descent needed to tackle the climate emergency will wreck people’s comfortable lives, or that it is something “for which our civilization doesn’t have an ethos or a vocabulary.”

This bit echos some of my own thoughts

Item six calls for retraining the workforce for constructive employment in “the new survival economy.” Retraining, absolutely. We need to provide income security to every fossil-fuel worker during the transition. But “the new survival economy”? That suggests training in how to light a fire in a cave, not how to build a Passive House.

When we frame our thoughts around the negative language of “energy descent” and “deliberate contraction,” we confirm people’s fear that solutions to the climate and ecological emergencies will wreck their comfortable lives. This is so harmful. It’s like a sports coach telling her athlete that winning a medal will ruin her family life, and besides, it’s impossible. Is this really the message we want to deliver to the millions of young climate strikers who are packing the streets demanding urgent climate action?

In my first post in my Climate Change category I said this:

Climate Change scares the shit out of me. It should scare the shit out of you too. But, sometimes I spot some good news stories that help me keep the hope up.

I want to expand on this a bit.

I am scared by climate change. More than anything, I'm terrified that I did a disservice to my daughter by bringing her into this world. I am scared that I have resigned her to a life that will be so much worse than my own. Beyond my own family, I'm also scared that it will be climate induced pressures that will bring great violence back to the world.

I'm scared that we'll all have to watch the world fall to pieces, in the name of "our economy". I'm scared that capitalism cannot be harnessed for good in the final throes of an ecological challenge, and that all we will be able to do is watch as our political and economic systems drive us over the cliff, paralyzed by those who will profit in the short term by our fall.

I'm scared that no amount of work I could do on this issue can change the course of the juggernaught that rolls towards us daily.

I'm horrified that because my family has a reasonably high income, living in a first world nation, fairly far north, far from coastal shores, there is a good chance that we will be able to dodge the worst outcomes. We live a climate privileged life.

Despite all this fear though: I wonder about the value of our media's obsession with doom. I don't want a propagandistic media that puts yellow smiley faces on the front page every day and says "All is Well". Yet, surely we needn't live in a world where all we read is "We are totally fucked!".

In my darkest moments, where I feel least sure we can fix the world, I feel a powerful urge to go forth and ruin it more. To really dive into international travel; do some doom-tourism. See the places in the world that will be lost as the seas rise. I'll bet I'm not alone in this. We need people to see the world as continuing past their own lives, past their children's lives, and getting better.

I really wish we could figure out how to tell a hopeful story, without falling down to the level of mere propaganda.