Sunday, July 31, 2011

Australia Joins India, the EU & New Zealand by Introducing Carbon Taxes


Australia has recently imposed a national carbon tax, amounting to about $25 US dollars per ton of carbon emitted. To prevent disadvantaged and low-income households from being harmed by the carbon tax, over 50% of tax revenue will support low-income households. The remaining funds will be used towards supporting green energy projects across Australia. Through introducing a national carbon tax, Australia joins New Zealand, the EU, and India. The question that remains is when will Canada and the U.S. follow the leadership of the aforementioned nations through introducing carbon taxes?

Carbon taxes are controversial and opponents argue they pose two significant issues: first, they claim it reduces the economic competitiveness of a country; and second they claim it harms low-income households who would need to fork out a larger portion of their income. 

Unsurprisingly, Alberta is strongly opposed to implementing a national carbon as the province produces exorbitant carbon emissions from tar sands oil extraction. Consequently, Alberta would have to pay much more taxes to the federal government if carbon taxes were implemented nationally. Ironically though, Alberta does have somewhat of a provincial carbon tax for the worst emitters, whom are required to pay $15 per ton into an "energy innovation fund". Through this provincial carbon tax, tax revenue stays in Alberta and is used for Albertans. Fair? For Alberta, the answer seems to be yes.

Perhaps the solution to passing a carbon tax in Canada is for each individual province/territory to pass their own legislation.

What do you think is the best way to implement carbon taxes in Canada?

For further information on carbon taxes check out this link.

From Yan Yu.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

A Review of “Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie”, plus my thoughts on change

I recently watched "Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie". It serves both as a concise biography of Suzuki’s life, as well as another rallying call for environmental change.

In the movie, David made an interesting comparison. He compared the market economy we have today to the gods of the past. Both are not “real, natural forces” (like gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, etc), but figments of the human imagination. Yet both guide how humans act and feel. We are expected to conform to both, and to appease both. When the gods, or the markets, are doing well, humans are happy. When they’re not, humans become glum and blah.

But, asserts Suzuki, if the market economy is not a real force of nature, then if and when it doesn’t work anymore, we should change it!

The recent global recession, and the economy’s destruction of the Earth, is proving that many things aren’t working with our market economy. Problem is, no-one is looking to change it!

Ironically, the business leaders and politicians that Suzuki has met have all been telling him to be “realistic”, that the “economy is the bottom line”.

Ha, retorts Suzuki. As if the market can be more real than real forces of nature.

How do I see it? Well, of course there are generalizations and simplifications made in Suzuki’s argument. People who blindly follow free-market dogma may scoff at them. And they would be correct only in their astute observation that yes, there are simplifications.

But pointing out simplifications only serves to distract the public, and maybe also themselves, from Suzuki’s main point, which is valid.

Suzuki’s argument isn’t that the economic system we have right now is completely failing us. It’s that the long-run costs of the status-quo are far greater than the short-term benefits.

In exploiting the earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate now, we’re reducing the resources available for our survival years down the road. In messing with our climate patterns right now, the costs to future generations will be enormous and unthinkable. It’s just common sense.

And what short-term benefits have we achieved with our overconsumption and reliance on the traditional free-market?

The post-recession market growth (the “jobless recovery”) seems disconnected with people’s standard of living. Just ask the unemployed 10% of the US workforce.

Moreover, while the status of the economy (i.e. per capita GDP) can be a crude indicator of standard of living, it is far from a measure of “quality of life”. Does our overconsumption make us better off in the short run? Not really. A 2010 Princeton study of 1000 US residents showed that incomes above a certain level ($75,000) do not lead to increased happiness. The Happy Planet Index, a measure of people’s well-being and satisfaction over their ecological footprint, also ranked Costa Rica at number 1, and the USA at 114, in 2009.

So Suzuki is bang on. When our economic system does not make us any happier, something’s gotta change!

We in the western world are sacrificing future generations’ livelihoods to create more and more and more unneeded luxuries in our own lives, luxuries that do not even make us happier.

This philosophy is not only intuitively obtuse and morally corrupt, it’s also evolutionary suicide for us Homo sapiens.

I won’t attempt to present a comprehensive solution here – that would take pages and pages. But I’ll just talk about a few principles that I think should guide any changes we do make.

First, government and the economy need to redefine and re-prioritize the “long-term”. It shouldn’t just refer to the 4-5 year election cycles in the USA and Canada, and it shouldn’t even be defined as the 10+ years during which businesses can alter their fixed factors of production. The long-term should be an indefinite amount of time in the future, and its importance should be just as high on the priority list as the short-term. This way, society can avoid what Thomas Friedman calls the “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” mindset: irresponsibility for the future, which in large part caused both the great recession and the environmental crisis.

Second, instead of trying to protect nature by putting a price on it, perhaps we should use our own morals and scientific guidance as measures to determine how much we can sustainably take from the Earth. Why not put a price on nature? The first reason is that a price on nature will simply offer poachers (and the like) the incentive to destroy nature even further. The second reason is because we will never get the price “right”. As David Suzuki says in his movie: “our economics system prices the things that are most valuable to us as worthless”. He’s right - look at the classic microeconomics example of the “Paradox of Value”: a kilogram of diamonds is priced far greater than a kilo of water! Also, in the global ecological context, the role of any one species is extremely multidimensional. If one species became hunted to extinction, the consequences to the ecosystem could range from nothing all the way up to ecosystem collapse. Despite the best ecological science, there’s no way for humans to know exactly how valuable any one species is at any time, and thus the price per orangutan or some other species is practically impossible to deduce. It’s a lot easier, and a lot better, to just minimize our impacts on nature based on our societal morals and the Golden Rule, rather than to calculate in detail how much each part of nature is worth. As Suzuki says, prices are imaginary; morals and science are real.

Third, the developing world should leapfrog the unsustainable practices of the western world. Just like how almost everyone in China now has a mobile instead of a landline phone, developing countries could go straight to renewable sources of power instead of burning fossil fuels. Why would this be beneficial, given the high cost of renewables over fossil fuels? Well, the cost of renewable energy sources is steadily declining. And, once the up-front costs are paid off, renewables will be able to provide a steady supply of essentially free electricity. No need to make weekly payments of coal, or to waste time transporting it to where it is used. For a real-life example of the benefits of distributed renewable energy, check out this excellent NY Times article about rural households in Africa benefiting from their first taste of electricity, produced from individual solar panels.

Last but not least, we as a society need to regain our sense of sacrifice and value of delayed gratification. The market economy and the status-quo cannot be changed instantaneously, and changing it will entail tough compromises such as possibly higher taxes, temporarily increased energy prices (as fossil fuel energy sources transition to renewables), and declining industries (which must retrain workers and retool their factories for a low/zero-carbon economy). So overall, we need to be willing to do not just what is easy, but what is right, regardless of how hard it may be.

There you go. Definitely a thought-provoking documentary. I highly recommend you watch it.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Speculation over Ontario's Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program is now causing job loss

  • The FIT program was started by the Liberal Ontario government a few years ago, to ween Ontario off coal-fired electricity and enhance the renewable energy sector in Ontario. It covers ALL renewable power (not just solar photovoltaic cells), and pays industries/homes that feed renewable-electricity into the grid over 10 times the standard per-unit cost of electricity.
  • Now, with Ontario elections coming up in October, the Conservatives (who are leading in the polls) are threatening to gut the FIT program... this threat is causing solar companies to fire over half of their workers, such as the one described in this CBC news article!
  • The Conservatives do have a point - Solar may not be as well suited in Ontario as in the Arizona desert, and so may not be as economical in Ontario. Currently, Solar power is expensive and the industry wouldn't survive if not for expensive government subsidies.
  • But the FIT doesn't just apply to solar, it also applies to wind, geothermal, even tidal energy. And I think weening Ontario off coal-fired electricity is a noble goal, and would show other provinces that it can be done. Solar power can be made cheaper with larger scales of production. Not taking advantage of clean energy when it's there would just be a shameful waste.
  • What do you think?
FUN FACT: Just last year, our Queen's University took advantage of the FIT offer and made plans to lease out the majority the university's roof space for solar panel installation, which would earn Queen's hundreds of thousands of dollars per year over 20 years (the length of the FIT contract).

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Students in Serbia develop first public solar-powered mobile charger

Check out this fascinating BBC article on how a group of Serbian students from the University of Belgrade developed the first public solar-powered mobile charger.
It's truly an innovative concept and this short video demonstrates how it works.
As you can see below, the solar panels are the only source of energy. Since the equipment is public property anyone who needs to charge their phone can do so by connecting it to one of the 16 power chords. 
Image of The Public Tower



The chords used to charge cell phones. Each side has 4 chords for a total of 16.
The tower has had almost 20,000 charges to date and there is enough energy to sustain a month of demand if the sun disappears.
Bright ideas that use bright energy: what a concept! The group of students won the European Energy Award for their work making them the youngest group to win the prestigious award.
By Trevor S. (link contributed by Yan Yu.)