Tag: Thinking globally

With Enbridge, or Against Us?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

The Environmental Assessment for the Northern Gateway pipeline project has started its public consultation stage. As is typical, the Harper Government has used this potentially-divisive event not to demonstrate leadership, but instead to draw sharp the divisions, and to demonstrate it doesn’t respect due process or the laws of the nation.

It started a few days ago when Steve declared that he was going to make sure radical groups with foreign funding don’t “hijack” the process. Now Steve may have his faults, but using language loosely is not one of them. Every message sent out by the PMO is carefully crafted to frame the discussion. Therefore, his choice to use the language of the War on Terror (“radical”,”foreign”,”hijack”) is designed to intentionally draw anyone who values environmental sustainability over the profits of Multi-national Oil Companies as non-Canadian, and not to be trusted. You are with Enbridge or you are against us.

Then he sent one of his less familiar minions, Joe Oliver, to sign a highly inappropriate and inflammatory “open letter”. The inflammatory part is obvious (read “radical ideological agenda”,”foreign special interest groups”, “radical groups”), but the inappropriate part comes from what he does for a living. As the Minister of Natural Resources and a member of the Conservative Cabinet, he is one of the people who will need to review and eventually approve or reject, this project: a job best done, in my humble opinion, after the data-gathering and the public hearings, and after the Joint Review Panel makes a recommendation. Actually it’s not just my opinion, it is the Law.

Given the nature of the open letter, how could anyone conclude the Joint Review Panel is anything but a sham process, when it is clear that the Federal Government as already made up its mind. You are with them, or you are against Enbridge.

Once again, Elizabeth May is the only one in Parliament standing up and speaking truth to power.

I keep on jumping on and off the Elizabeth May bandwagon, but with this open letter and her frighteningly frank comments coming out of Durban, I can see myself enjoying my current bandwagon seat for quite some time. I know many members of our Loyal Opposition feel the same way on this topic as May, but the realities of a large party system probably limit their ability to speak as clearly and truthfully as She does in response to John Oliver. Why, oh suffering Canadian Media, do we give Kevin O’Leary more air time than Elizabeth May? looking for inspiration in the vacuum left by Jack Layton? Read her blog. I digress…

Since he raised the spectre of “foreign special interest groups”, I might just agree with the concern expressed by Minister Oliver, except that all of those pejorative terms are so poorly defined. What is a “special interest group?”

Looking at the Joint Review Panel documents, one can actually see who is planning to hijack this process.

“Interveners” are interested stakeholders who are able to present written or oral evidence to the Panel, and to ask questions of other Interveners when they are presenting evidence. In essence, if you want to “hijack” the process, being an Intervener is the way to do it.

The Joint Review Panel lists 216 registered Interveners. Of those, 91 are private citizens, almost all from the northwest of British Columbia, or those most directly affected by both the positive and negative impacts of the proposed pipeline. There is really no way to know which of those are “for” and which are “against”, or which are just kind of curious. I suspect this group also includes small business owners who may have a vested interest one way or the other, or even journalists, bloggers, and local politico types who just want to take part in the conversation.

The Interveners list includes one labour union that has already expressed opposition to he project, and two academic institutes associated with Universities, who may be presenting evidence, or may just be interested in collecting data for research purposes.

Twelve of the Interveners are governments: BC, Saskatchewan, and a whole bunch of Municipalities. Except that, as Elizabeth May was quick to point out, the First Nations are also effectively governments, and there are no less than 48 First Nations groups listed as Interveners. I wonder if Minister Oliver suspects these as the source of “Foreign interference”?

If not, that leaves us with two more groups: Non-Profits (34) and Corporations and businesses (28). The first group is pretty diverse, including everyone from the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and the Douglas Channel Watch (whom I think we can safely say are opposed to the project) to oil-industry funded lobby groups like the Oil Sands Developers Group Association, the In Site Oil Sands Alliance, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whom we can be equally assured are in favour of the project. I will leave it to you to determine which Non-Profits are more likely to be well funded from abroad, and which are more likely to have the local community’s interests in mind.

Which leaves us with 28 Corporations and businesses. I am not going to presume that all of them are in favour of the pipeline, but seeing as they fall into two main categories: Oil Companies, and companies that contract to Oil Companies, I think the vast majority see oil pipelines as a good thing. Since Minister Oliver seemed specifically incensed by the untoward influence of foreign money, I am going to pass on calling out any Canadian companies (hey, they are Canadian, and Corporations are People too… give ‘em the voice!), and instead call attention to a few of the standouts:

ExxonMobil (Irving, Texas, annual revenue $383 Billion), and their subsidiary Imperial Oil, are listed as two separate Interveners.
BritishPetroleum (London, UK, annual revenue $309 Billion);
Total E&P (Courbevois, France, annual revenue $203 Billion);
ConocoPhillips (Houston, Texas, annual revenue $198 Billion);
Sinopec (China, annual revenue $197 Billion) as “SinoCanada Petroleum”;
Koch Industries (Wichita, Kansas, annual revenue $100 Billion) as “Flint Hills Resources”;
Inpex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $16 Billion);
Daewoo International (Seoul, South Korea, annual revenue $13 Billion);
Kinder Morgan (Houston, Texas, annual revenues $12 Billion)
Japex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $2.6 Billion) as “Japan Canada Oil Sands”;

So Severn Cullis-Suzuki and the Fort St. James Sustainability Group are going up against an organized group of foreign-owned companies with $1.4 Trillion (with a ”T”) in combined revenue, and our Prime Minister is more concerned about where the Environmental Groups money is coming from? Surely, this is parody.

As an aside, this morning on the radio business news, I hear Chris Carter stating that the high gasoline prices we are seeing now are only partially caused by high crude prices. The biggest reason for high and fluctuating prices is a chronic lack of refining capacity in North America leading to difficult-to-manage inventories.

This is something to talk about. Why are we spending billions setting up systems to export raw crude, when we could use the money to build the needed refining capacity? This would provide way more jobs, would increase the “value added” we receive from the Bituminous Sands, and could potentially lead to more stable fuel prices for Canadian businesses.

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Lower and more stable fuel prices, producing jobs in a relatively expensive labour market, increasing domestic value form Canada’s natural resources: none of these serve the purposes of the real decision makers in Ottawa, the Multi-national Oil Companies with offices in Calgary.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Part 4: Moore and Nukes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I opened up my analogue version of the Walrus and on page 28, there is “Patrick Moore, Ph.D, Environmentalist and Greenpeace Co-Founder” staring back at me from a glossy full-page ad extolling the environmental responsibility of the Alberta tar sands. His most recent shill for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers got me thinking it has been a while since I picked up his book. My seemingly endless review continues.

After much of the history and basic philosophy is dispatched, Moore’s book becomes a rather disjointed discussion of various environmental topics, and his “sensible environmentalist” approach to these issues.

His discussion of Energy starts with a rather nonsensical statement:

Motion requires energy, so without energy, time would stand still. (pg. 204)

Which reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes comic where Calvin thought time had stopped, but it turned out his watch battery had died, but I digress.

His rather lengthy dismissal of most sustainable energy sources can be summarized into a few points: they are untested, unreliable and would require huge government subsidies to compete with what we have.

In many ways these very expensive technologies [wind and solar energy] are destroying wealth as they drain public and private investment away from more affordable and reliable energy-generating systems. (pg. 221)

I’m not sure how putting money into sustainable infrastructure constitutes “destroying wealth”, in fact I’m not even sure what “destroying wealth” means. He mixes this with even sillier arguments: solar panels are made of aluminum, and that takes energy to produce! How sustainable is that?

This is mostly preamble to his long argument about the wonders of Nuclear Power. Before I get too deep into it, I need to point out that I am not a reflexively “anti-nuclear” environmentalist. I think nuclear energy probably has a role in responsible energy policy, if it can be done safely with appropriate accounting for its waste streams. Those are, admittedly, very big “if”s.

I remember my first experiences writing reports and proposals in my life as a Consultant working for a major engineering firm. After interpreting some data, I wrote something along the lines of “the source of pollutant X cannot be determined”. My boss chuckled when reviewing it, and said “in Engineering, we never tell the client something cannot be done. It can always be done. We just need to outline for them the costs related to doing it, and they can decide if it should be done.” I asked what we do if the request really is impossible, and he remarked something along the lines of “impossible just means the technology isn’t there yet. So we budget the cost of developing the required technology”. I came to learn this is how engineers think. Bless them, the sorry bastards they are.

But along those lines, I do believe nuclear energy can be made safe (it is already way safer than getting energy from oil or coal), it is a question of costs and developing the appropriate technology. At this point, we have to decide whether that is a good investment in our money, or if the alternatives make more sense for our investment dollars.

However, this is where Dr. Moore’s argument falls apart. There hasn’t been a new nuclear plant built in the United States in decades, but it isn’t due to no-nukes fear mongering or radiation risks or a lack of political desire as Dr. Moore suggests, but due to something much more banal: economics.

Simply put, Nuclear Plants are too expensive to buildand too expensive to maintain. Currently, there is no business model to produce nuclear power capacity. Without significant government subsidies, like the ones Moore decries for truly sustainable energy alternatives like wind, geothermal and solar, there would be no nuclear industry at all. The people holding nuclear plants back are not environmentalists, they are accountants.

You wouldn’t know this from reading Moore’s book. On page 217, he decries Germany for subsidizing solar energy production to the order of $3 Billion, then, 33 pages later and seemingly unaware of the irony, Moore is extolling President Obama for providing more than $50 Billion in subsidies to Nuclear power industries. I guess you can’t “destroy wealth” by nuking it.

This pales in comparison to his silly arguments around radiation risk. I have written extensively on the poor understanding in the popular media of radiation risk, mostly around the unfounded local concern about impacts of Fukushima. Moore did not have the benefit of writing after Fukushima, but his argument around radiation risk is so Homer Simpsonian in it’s idiocy (and remember, I basically agree with him on Nuclear energy), all I can do is quote it verbatim from page 240:

…fire can be used to Burn down a City and kill Thousands of people. Should we ban fire for cooking and heating? Car bombs are made with fertilizer, diesel oil, and a car. Should we ban those three rather useful things? Guns can be used for hunting and for defending one’s country or for committing genocide?

Unfortunately, his argument for salmon farming is no more nuanced.

On Kyoto – the Accord, not the Block.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

At this point no one is surprised, but somehow, the lack of surprise makes the disappointment stronger. After nine years of avoidance, denial, accusation, obfuscation and stupidity, Canada has finally taken the plunge. We walked away from an international agreement because we want to keep profiteering from our own irresponsibility, but don’t want to pay the toll for doing so. So much for being an honest broker; so much for solemn commitments to our international partners

To all the countries that took serious effortsto deal with greenhouse gasses? Suckers! To those who were exempted from reductions because your per capita output was a minuscule percentage of Canada’s? Get Bent! To those low-lying countries that will become inhabitable due to our insatiable need to burn gas thirst for freedom of choice? Cry me a freaking river. This is Harper’s Canada now, so you can all suck eggs.

But hey! They said it was impossible, because of the Liberals’ lack of action. Let’s not mention that the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 2002, and Harper took office in 2006. Today is 2011. The goals set out for Kyoto have until 2020 to be met. Yeah, the Liberals were asses for sitting on their hands for four years, but you had one more year than the Liberals did, Harper, and we are still 9 years from 2020. Time to stop blaming them for your failure.

Kent is an embarrassment, but he was sent to Durban to be an embarrassment, so I guess he did his job. He whinged that Canada only produces 2% of the world’s GHG, so countries like China and India need to take the lead. Of course, China and India were signatories in Kyoto, and would now be developing reasonable targets for reductions if the agreement had survived Copenhagen and Durban. Telling the truth was not Kent’s game plan, though. He showed up with a plan to roadblock the whole thing, then took his ball and went home. Blocked the other guys at the party from talking the girl, then broke up with her by text message after he got home. Jerk.

The fact Canada, with 0.5% of the worlds population produces 2% of the GHG isn’t his problem. The fact we are #6 in the world overall in total emmissions though we are the #10 economy in the world is not relevant. That we are in the top 10 per capita emmitters in the world per capita is a non-issue. Somehow, Greenhouse gasses are everyone else’s problem.

Tearing up international agreements and punitively punishing the worlds poorest countries? It isn’t Harper’s fault: it is China’s, or Africa’s, or Obama’s or Chretien’s, or David Suzuki’s for getting us in this mess in the first place. or so I understand from watching Sun News.

Fuck.

This is, without a doubt, the most shameful point in Canada’s formerly-proud history as an international leader in common sense and good governance.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 3

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Sorry to be so slow, but life is really busy right now. We are in the middle of an election campaign, there were some family emergencies, and work has been crazy busy. On top of my evening blogging schedule, I haven’t had a lot of free time to read. Oh, to be bored for a change!

Once we got past some of the painful introductory materials, the book gains some steam as Dr. Moore outlines his storied career as a Greenpeace organizer and campaigner. The short versions is that these guys were “Type-A” with a seemingly complete lack of common sense. They thought nothing of buying an old fish boat, spending a few weeks (or months) patching the holes and getting the motor running, and sailing out in the Pacific Ocean! They dodged weather and ran directly towards trouble with the US Coast Guard, the Soviet Union, the French Navy, and Japanese whaling ships. The rented helicopters and, with a paucity of planning, flew out onto ice floes in the Atlantic to film seal hunters.

At the time, they created in Greenpeace a heroic mythos though very careful collection and distribution of pictures and film. Dr. Moore outlines how co-founder Bob Hunter developed the idea of the “Mindbomb” – that perfect combination of images and words that the media (and the media consumer) could not resist putting on the front page – a phenomenon the New Media calls “going viral”.

In essence, Greenpeace did not sail to Amchitka to stop a nuclear test, they went there to create a Mindbomb that would shift the public conversation so that more people took the idea of banning nuclear testing seriously. They didn’t race around the Russian Whaling Fleet in zodiacs to save any actual whales (in fact their efforts were clearly fruitless), they did it to create the images of a bunch of heroes racing around in big seas challenging the Great Soviet Fleet to get the pictures in the newspaper and bring light to the plight of the world’s cetaceans. Dr. Moore didn’t sit on a baby seal in Labrador to stop it from getting clubbed, he did it to get photographed being arrested for assaulting a seal, when he was the only thing between that cute little bastard getting clubbed and skinned.

I found one interesting link behind all of the campaigns Dr. Moore took part in during those early days of Greenpeace. None of them are really about environmental sustainability as we think about it today. Besides his first trip to Amchitka to call attention to nuclear testing, all of his campaigns were centred around animal rights.

Although the entire anti-whaling campaign was around protecting several species of whales that had been hunted to the brink of extinction, Dr. Moore does not talk at all about this as a sustainability issue (as we talk about shark finning or the Bluefin Tuna fishery today), he talks about the majesty of the beasts, the intelligence of the animals, and the cruelty of hunting them.

“There is no way to kill a whale in a humane manner. Among the tens of whales we witnessed being harpooned over the years, most died slowly, spouting blood and gasping desperately” [pg. 70]

” With two Zodiacs and a rough sea we tried desperately to shield the whales during the next two hours as they were gunned down one after the other. The crew watched from the deck of the James Bay as blood filled the sea around us, whales screaming and writhing in agony until all was quiet… It was a gruesome scene and ironically it worked very much in our favour.” [pg. 94]

The anti-sealing campaign was more of the same, much about saving these cute fuzzy animals, with no discussion at all about whether the hunt was sustainable, economically important, socially significant. Greenpeace flew in movie stars to create “mind bombs” in the defence of defenceless (and cute) animals. Greenpeace of 1975 is not like SPEC of 2010, it is like PETA of 2011.

Notably, this was all before the Bruntland Report, and therefore before the modern concepts of environmental sustainability had really been developed, so the ideas were not well known outside of rather obscure schools of development and economics. Suggestions of future resource depletion were usually brushed aside by claims of people being too “Malthusian” or not having enough respect for engineering (see discussion of Ehrlich vs. Borlaug in this very book, pp.56-57).

This brings us to 1984 -1986 – the Second Act in Dr. Moore’s story – when he began stepping away from Greenpeace. This was a tumultuous time, with him raising a family, getting a real job, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. But it was also the time that Greenpeace began to campaign for sustainable development in industries that were close to Dr. Moore’s roots and his family. After all, he was the son of a rain forest logger who was setting up one of the first salmon farms on the west coast.

He claims it was the Greenpeace initiative to “Ban Chlorine” that was the final straw, as he thought it wasn’t science based thinking. Problem is, no-one in Greenpeace seems to recall them saying they want to ban all chlorine from the planet. Greenpeace did take a strong stand then (and still do now) on the spilling of organochlorines related to paper bleaching, and the use of toxic chlorine-based substances when non-chlorine-based substitutes are available. That has extended to the modern practice of using PVC in places where environmentally-less damaging alternatives are practical. Considering how much of my time I spend at my work dealing with contaminated sites featuring hard-to manage carcinogenic, mutagenic and acutely toxic chlorinated solvents organochlorines, I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask questions about whether the money we save over using the less toxic alternatives is really money saved at all.

Or maybe Greenpeace was just using the idea of “banning chlorine” as a “Mindbomb” to get a few headlines and point the media to the real issues of chlorine in our environment. “Ban Chlorine” and “Devil Element” are much more compelling than “Organochlorides in our environment increase cancers and impact marine wildlife”. It is telling that Dr. Moore’s biggest conflict when he left Greenpeace is the guy who invented the “Mindbomb”. Dr. Moore himself admits there was no way he could save the seal pup he sat on, but he wanted to be filmed losing that fight – Mindbombs were rarely science-based.

It seems the nuance of this argument is lost to Dr. Moore, as he again dismissively waves away any concerns about the chlorine industry or the hazards of organochlorines by creating this long-winded false dichotomy argument and telling us that chlorine is the 11th most abundant element on Earth and table salt is 2/3rds chlorine, so how can that be bad?

On page 142 he goes off on a diatribe about the wonders of chlorine that includes a huge strawman argument (“[long list of potentially toxic metals]…all have important uses in health, technology, energy production and lighting”); a non-sequitor (“we have been bombarded into thinking lead is deadly, yet many of us drive around with 30 pounds of it in the battery of our cars.”); rank hyperbole (“chlorine is the most important element for public health”); the naturalistic fallacy (“Even herbal medicine is partly based on using plants that contain chemicals that are toxic”); and a long false dichotomy I won’t bore you with here. He even decries that although he was the lone scientist in the discussion, none of the other Greenpeace crew respected his scientific prowess. He follows this by describing Renate Kroesa (who, being a chemist, would qualify as a scientist to most of us) as “fanatical”. Page 142 is one of those pages of this book that I have marginal-marked the hell out of in red ink. It is just a bad argument, poorly supported, and it leads us into the wonders of his approach to fish farming, but I will blog about that in a later post.

Dr. Moore says he is proud of his work at Greenpeace, proud enough to engage in a bit of hyperbole:

“We got many things right in the early years of the movement: We stopped the Bomb, saved the whales, and ended toxic discharge into water and air.” [Pg.141]

Um, last time I checked we still have nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation is an increasing risk in the world; whales still face serious threats from habitat loss and pollution, and are still being actively hunted by several nations; and toxic discharges in to the air and water seem to continue world wide.

However, I am not going to take away from Dr. Moore the achievements of Greenpeace during his time there. He took a rag-tag groups of hippies on a fishboat and spun it into a multi-million dollar international organization that spoke truth to power on many fronts, often powered by little more than a string and a prayer. From reading his accounts of those early years, there were more than enough internal and external forces that could have torn it apart, and too many strong personalities and personal agendas (Paul Watson, anyone?). It should not have lasted, but pretty much everything we know in 2011 about the environmental movement, the good parts and the bad, can be traced back to the early efforts of Dr. Moore and Greenpeace.

Without him, I imagine this blog would have a different name!

Becquerels and Sieverts, Oh My!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

For some reason, the Georgia Straight keeps writing articles about the radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear plant causing us harm here in British Columbia, and the massive conspiracy involving several governments and hundreds of scientists, working to cover it up.

My cynicism makes me suspect the large number of Georgia Straight advertisers selling bogus “Cleansing” and “detoxifying” services may be influencing their editorial decisions. But what is the source of my skepticism? Perhaps it is their dishonest use of technical terms, without explaining what the terms mean.

Look at this story from last week’s edition. There are many scary statistics there: 0.69 Becquerel per Litre (Bq/l) of radiation in Vancouver rainwater, 8.18 Bq/l as an average in Calgary, 13 Bq/l as a spike in Burnaby! But no-where does it put that number into context. I guess it is expected anyone will think any Becquerel in our water is a Becquerel too much!

Part of the problem with radiation is that the science and the numbers are pretty technical and are often really big or really small, so we have a hard time wrapping out minds around them in a physical sense. It is the job of “journalist” to translate this information to the public, not to fear monger by throwing out terns you know your audience doesn’t understand. So let’s talk about Becquerels.

“Becquerel” is the “metric” measure, and it is easy to visualise: 1 Bq is one atom of radioactive material decaying (and therefore releasing one “unit” of radioactivity) per second. That is the smallest possible amount of radiation per second, so we usually think in terms of millions or billions of Bq, which sometimes makes the number cumbersome. The more common unit is the Curie (Ci), which is equal to 37 billion Bq (37,000,000,000Bq = 1 Ci).

So that is the technical meaning, but what do the numbers really mean in the real world? A good way to look at them is to think about the element potassium (K). The world is full of potassium, it is the “K” in NPK, the Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potassium ratings for fertilizers. However, a small proportion of it (about 0.012%) is a naturally radioactive isotope Potassium 40. You can’t easily separate the two without advanced lab equipment, so it is randomly mixed in with normal potassium and in all chemical terms, acts exactly like “normal” potassium. So of the ~150 grams of potassium in your bones, teeth, and cellular nuclei, about 0.018 grams is Potassium 40. Atoms are really small, so that that 0.018 grams of Potassium 40 represents about 280 quintillion atoms, that is 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Radioactive atoms. In your bones. These are not “toxins” that you can cleanse yourself of, unless you cleanse yourself of all the potassium in your body, which would be very, very bad for your continued existence.

Potassium 40 has a half-life of about a billion years. So over a billion years, about half of those 280 quintillion atoms will decay, releasing a single unit of radiation each. 140 quintillion decays over 1 billion years equals about 4,400 decays per second. So the normal radiation level of a healthy human body from potassium alone is about 4,400Bq. Every second of your adult life you are exposed to 4,400 Bq of radiation from your own cells.

Notably, your body also contains about 13kg of Carbon, about 1partp er trillion of which is Carbon 14, resulting in another 3,700 Bq of exposure. You also get much smaller doses from the iodine, radium, and other trace radioactive substances in your body.

We also take in and excrete radioactive nuclides all day, and they exist (naturally) in our food, especially things like bananas that have lots of minerals (and are therefore good for you!). Banana contain enough potassium to provide about 130Bq per kilogram, and enough carbon for another 100bq.

It stands to reason that 1 kg of drinking water containing 1Bq or radiation is not going to change our environmental exposure to radiation. It is, in effect, much lower than our “Background” exposure.

This story draws some alarm over vanishingly small measurements of airborne radiation:

“The level of iodine-131 in Sidney, B.C., rose to a high of 3.63 millibecquerels per cubic metre in the air on March 20. That’s over 300 times higher than the background level of 0.01 millibecquerels per cubic metre or less.”

This also benefits from a bit of math. 3.6 mBq is 0.0036 Bq, per cubic metre of air. The average person breathes about 11,000L of air a day. That means a person breathing at Sidney would be exposed to 0.04 Bq of radiation per day. That is less than one ten-thousandth of the radiation you are exposed to from your own bones.

Now ask yourself, why does the Georgia Strait reporter never, in his multiple articles on the Fukushima incident, mention what a Becquerel is?

I would be remit to mention that Bequerel are not the entire story. The number you want to calculate when analysing environmental exposure to radiation is the Sievert: which is a measure of dose exposure. That is a relatively complicated measure to take, as it involves the medium delivering the radiation, and the media receiving it. I have already gone on way too long here, so Will not get into that in this post.

Now compare this to . this story in the Georgia Straight which jumps from Becquerel to Sieverts without putting either number in context.

But which is worse? The “Main Stream Media” have reported nothing, so people have no access to better information. Why can’t our media educate and inform?

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.
About a month ago, fellow New Westminster Blogger David Brett provided an intriguing review of Dr. Patrick Moore’s book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout”. Part autobiography of one of the founders of Greenpeace, and part manifesto for a new, “sensible” environmentalism, this book is a first-person account of how Dr. Moore helped found Greenpeace, became disillusioned by it, and forged his own path towards a more pragmatic form of environmentalism. Moving away from protest, he worked to engage government, business and industry to help them become more sustainable.

As I commented to Dave at the time, being a “sensible” (and by that, I mean skeptical and science-based) environmentalist, and engagement with stakeholders (as opposed to protest) has been my goal, so Dr. Moore’s story is interesting to me. Since I reviewed the autobiography-manifesto-vanity project movie on David Suzuki last year, I will do the same with this book.

The advantage of the book is that I have it in front of me and can discuss it at length. I am currently about 4 chapters in, and have very little time to read these days, so the review may take some time and several posts.

I promised Dave that I would read with an open mind, and I have not read any other reviews than his (and the blurbs on the back of the book!), but my openness was challenged in the first chapter of the book. It just doesn’t start well.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Moore starts off by defining “sustainable development”. This is a good idea, as it is a term bandied about too much by people with little understanding of what it means. It is currently a sexy buzz phrase used by a lot of people who have never understood (or cared about) the definition.

The problem is, Dr. Moore immediately dismisses the definition used by people who work in sustainability: the standard-model definition and, unfortunately, the one most commonly ignored by people who are misusing the term. That being the definition from Brundtland Report. Dr. Moore immediately tosses it aside and replaces it with a definition that fits his needs.

Compare this:

Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

To this:

Dr. Moore: “Sustainable development requires that we continue to obtain the food, energy, and materials necessary for our civilization, and perhaps even increase these resources in developing countries, while at the same time working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes in behaviour and changes in our technologies” (Pg. 14)

The second definition is fine, full of great ideas and feelings, but it is, unfortunately, not a definition of sustainability.

It is like I start my book about American actresses by describing Uma Thurman as the greatest actress of our generation. Then I decide the definition of Uma Thurman as “the star of the Kill Bill Films” is not a very good definition. Instead, I like to define Uma Thurman as “That woman from Kramer vs. Kramer and the Bridges of Madison County who has 2 Academy Awards from 16 nominations”. That definition makes my argument that Uma is the greatest actress of our time much more compelling, doesn’t it?

Although Dr. Moore’s definition contains many soft environmental ideals that we should probably strive towards (as loaded with weasel words as it is), it does not define “sustainable development” the way it is used by anyone other than Dr. Moore. At best, it is one small aspect of “sustainable development”; at worst, it is a dodge of the real issues raised by limited resources on a consumption-growth based economy. It also completely misses the point that sustainability is not an “environmental” concept any more than it is a social and economic one.

I don’t think the problem with “sustainable” is its overuse, but rather its common use in a way that does not relate to the actual definition of the word. As such, it is indistinguishable from “green” or “environmentally friendly” or “clean” or other popular marketing words. I am a believer (as are most scientists) that strict definition of terms is as important to political discussion as it is to technical discussion. Dr. Moore makes the problem of fuzzy definition worse in Chapter 1 when he invents a new definition for the term.

New West Doc Fest – Day 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It was quite the full day! Besides taking tickets, helping promote the NWEP at the booth, and visiting with folks, I still got to see most of the films, although I did not get to spend as much time in the Q&A sessions as I would have liked.

The day began with a short called “The Most Livable City”, which talked about one of those little social development topics most people just don’t think of – where to the City’s homeless, and those living in run-down decrepit SROs, go to get a drink of water? The City has few operating fountains in the summer, and even fewer in the winter. Public washroom facilities are few and far between. Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer raises the point that the City has purposely removed these types of things to discourage drug use… how’s that working out?

The main morning feature was “Tapped” – about the bottled water industry. A topic I have mentioned here in the past. If I was to review the movie (um… which I guess I am doing), it was about 20% new and quite interesting information (in the States, the bottled water industry is regulated by the FDA, unless the water is bottled in the same state it is consumed. Since most of it is filtered city water sold locally, more than 80% of the bottled water industry is completely unregulated), 60% was info well known to anyone who has been awake for the last decade (billions of discarded PET bottles are mucking up marine ecosystems around the entire Pacific Ocean; buying bottled water is a ridiculous consumer choice, 2000x the cost of safer tap water), and 20% is unfortunate hyperbole (PET is made using a substance in the same family as benzene, which causes cancer! well, if the same family you mean aromatic hydrocarbons, you are right, but PET does not cause cancer, and no-one seems to be concerned about all the benzene we are consuming every day breathing car exhaust).

In the end, the message was on track, and if they drifted occasionally into hyperbole, it may be a cause for people to do their own research. Like most exposes of Corporate America, the best moments were the “caught-ya” moments when the corporate spokesflak realizes he is in over his head when says something like “There has never been a bottled water recall in America”, or “We are not in competition with tap water”, then are confronted with their own press releases that say the exact opposite. The lingering camera on the silenced spokesflak is always good for a chuckle.

I think the movie “65_redroses” is well known to most New West folks. Although I was familiar with Eva Markvoort’s story, I had never seen the movie. If you have not seen it, you should, mostly because the filmmakers did an excellent job accentuating the positive side of organ donation and how this young woman gained her life back through science, through good luck, and through the immense support she received from friends, family and strangers. In the end, they do not dwell on the sadness of the end, but on the hope and happiness of the brief life Eva had.

Before 65_Redroses was a short, “Corona Station”, also about love and loss. Beyond being a humorous theme, the short is remarkably well filmed, easy to forget these are film students!

The “Vanishing of the Bees” is a very smart and insightful look at Colony Collapse Disorder, and issue impacting commercial honey bees across the world. Although the movie emphasises the strongly suspected link between systemic pesticide use and CCD, it also explores how the way we manage bees is likely the main issue, with the systemic pesticides one very large hammer in drawer full of other nasty tools. We ship bees around in the backs of trucks from mono-culture crop to mono-culture crop, even in the bellied of airliners from Australia to California, completely messing with their natural rhythms. We keep them in massive crowded populations, one beekeeper managing 40,000 hives, where parasites and diseases can prosper. We artificially inseminate the queens (yes, they show the not-so-romantic procedure!), then kill them off after the eggs are laid and replace then with surrogates. We take their honey and feed them refined sugars. When hives start to die off, we split them in half and introduce new queens (in cages to keep the bees from killing the interloper), potentially spreading diseases around. All this to keep a pollinating population alive for the fruit and nut industries, as the market for honey production has been eroded by cheaper imports (often containing “honey blends” with corn syrup or lactose syrup).

With all this stacked up against them, it would be more shocking if 30% of the bees weren’t dying off! Although the film starts with gloom and doom, it is clear that the scientists, policy makers (in Europe at least), and the farmers are starting to realize what the issues are, and are working towards reforming the way the beekeeping industry is managed.

On the topic of pollinators, don’t get me started on mosquitoes and larvicides.

The final film, “H2Oil” I had seen before. All I can say is that the way Canada has mis-handled the Athabasca Tar/Oil Sands is criminal, no less than an act of war against our own country. If anyone can see how a nation responsibly manages a dumb-luck oil find, look at the case of Norway. Then ask yourself, how have the Tar/Oil sands benefited you? How does the rapid expansion and export of raw bitumen and the linking of the Canadian dollar to the cost of oil help any other sector of Canada’s economy?

I was unfortunately too busy to sit in on the post-film chat with local MPs Fin Donnelly and Peter Julian. If someone out there in blogland wants to write up a quick review, please let me know!

The Doc Fest itself was seamlessly run. The NWEP basically provided volunteer time and a little logistic support (our budget could not have bought our members tickets!), but it was Andrew Murray and the ladies from the Green Ideas Network who did most of the heavy lifting. Tireless volunteer Kathleen did a bunch of fundraising, and found a wide range of sponsors, all interested in building this community – they need to be thanked, and supported!

The good news is that for a first year- they pulled it off. Everything went smoothly, the films were on time, the extra entertainment (musicians, poets, artists) were entertaining, the venue worked out great. The early report is that the fest broke even with a little bit of a profit, to be reinvested in next year’s show. The foundations have been laid, and next year will be bigger and better.

New West Doc Fest – Day 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

Tonight was the first night of the First Annual New West Doc Fest.

The turn out was pretty good, including the Mayor and Councillors Cote, Williams, and Harper. After a bit of mingling with the sultry tones of the Redrick Sultan Jazz Trio, the main event began.

There were three short films before the feature documentary of the night.

The first was “Meathead”, a strangely funny 3-minute short made by students at Pull Focus Film School. It was strangely funny, because you could see most of the jokes coming, but the actor managed to sell the punchlines with a turn of expression that made you laugh. Quick, irreverent, with a message, student film-making at it’s best.

Two documentary shorts were on the subject of the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline to Kitimat. The animated talk-piece “Cetaceans of the Great Bear” told of the threat to cetaceans represented by increased tanker traffic. Although the animation and graphic treatments were at times quite compelling, the message came across a little too strident and wrapped in over-the-top rhetoric to be effective as a message to anyone but the true believer. Let’s just say Dave Brett might not approve. The second, “Oil in Eden” is a little richer in actual content, and tells a much more complete story about the reasons for the oil pipeline, the potential risks, and the groups (especially first nations) who are against the idea.

The main feature was “Burning Water”, a story about a couple of farmers in the outskirts of Calgary with the little problem of flammable drinking water. Although the trailer makes it look like this is about a pissed-off farmer who won’t take it any more, the reality of the story is much more nuanced. This is because of the approach the owners of Valhalla Farm, Fiona and John Lauridsen, take to the issue.

Their problems started when energy giant Encana created a few “coal bed methane” gas wells on their property using “hydraulic fracturing”. Fiona takes a rational approach of asking Encana to do something about it, until Encana determined it wasn’t their fault. She ten takes the rational approach of going to the Government, who do something worse than doing nothing: they are actively indifferent to her plight. John takes the non-confrontational approach of just dealing with it and trying to move on, much to Fiona’s frustration, until he finally decides to strike back at Encana in a rather humorous way.

What makes this more than a simple David-vs-Goliath story is the fact the town in which the Lauridsens live relies on grant money from Encana for their community theatre (a major economic driver), their library, their parks. The Lauridsens even rely on EnCana for non-farm income: from the land-use settlement for the wells and Fiona for her part-time job in the community theatre. They are acutely aware that Encana is an important part of their economy; they just want to be able to continue living on their farm, seemingly made unliveable by Encana’s activity. In the end, all they want is Encana to respect their issue, and Encana, for their own reasons, cannot.

Unfortunately, the story arc is left unfinished, we don’t really know what the solution is, nor are we left with a hint of what the solution will be. But you are not left with the feeling that Fiona’s simple dream of living on her Prairie Valhalla is a sustainable one.

The Doc was followed by a brief but informative Q&A session with the Pembina Institute’s Matt Horne. It seemed the only positive way forward was to assure that we compel our government to develop and enforce a regulatory regime that protects the environment, to counter the forces behind run-away exploration and development of oil and gas, especially in BC’s north-east. However, between BC’s inability to modernize it’s Water Act, the weakness of our groundwater regulation, the fact the Oil and Gas Commission can overrule any BC law, and our current government’s commitment to “reduce red tape” for resource extraction, I am not left filled with confidence.

But hey, tomorrow’s four documentary films have a chance to lift my spirits!

Doc Fest this Weekend!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Whoo Hoo!
New Westminster is having it’s first film fest this coming weekend.

Through the efforts of the indefatigable Andrew Murray, the NWEP is working with the Green Ideas Network to bring the first annual New West Doc Fest.

Although this is the freshman year for the event, the line-up of Documentaries, Shorts, and special Events are pretty spectacular, and Douglas College is providing a great venue.

Many of the films have a “Green / Sustainability” theme, but this is not really an “environmentalist” event. There are films on various topics that will interest many people for different reasons.

I think the biggest draw will be a Saturday showing of 65_RedRoses, the story of New Westminster’s own Eva Markvoort, whose inspirational struggle with Cystic Fibrosis became an international story. The Screening will be followed by a Q&A with Eva’s friend and one of the Directors of the film, Nimisha Mukerji. It should be a thought-provoking and inspirational afternoon for everyone.

Friday Night will feature a showing of Burning Water, about some farmers in Alberta who are having a small problem with the flammability of their drinking water:

Yikes!

There will be a panel discussion after the film with Matt Horne from the Pembina Institute.

There will be three more feature-length documentaries on the weekend, one on the subject of Bottled Water (might be of interest to our current Board of Education Candidates?), one on the mysterious issues affecting honey bees in North America, and the third on the topic of the Athabaska Oil Sands and their impacts on the ground and surface water supply of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Each Film will have a Q&A session after, including with a couple of Members of Parliament after one film!

Plus, just like when you were a kid, there will be shorts shown before each full-length Doc, all made by students at Pull Focus Film School. There will be other events happening over the weekend in the lobby, and at the films.

You can get tickets on-line right now, or at the door. I highly recommend the Festival Pass to make sure you don’t miss any of the extras – all the cool kids are getting them. For only $20, you get to see a gaggle of great documentaries, and you can support a new initiative in New Westminster so it can grow in the future. And hold onto that pass, 20 years from now, you will be able to tell your kids you were there when it all started.