On Line 9 and Torontos climate in the 2040s

The reversal of Enbridge Line 9 was approved by the National Energy Board on Thursday. The 40 year-old pipeline is the first to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands en masse to Ontario and Quebec. Line 9 has been the focus of climate activism in Toronto for the past two years. Image courtesy of Environmental Defence.

There is much to be desired in the mainstream medias coverage of energy politics and climate change, but perhaps the single most important fact that gets consistently overlooked that is scarcely apprehended by the general public and yet comes to mind for me every time a new pipeline or oil field gets approved is that greenhouse-driven warming operates on an extremely delayed timescale. As with several aspects of climate science, that timescale is impossible to deduce with perfect accuracy, but NASA climatologist James Hansen estimates that 60 percent of the total climatic response to a shift in greenhouse gas levels occurs after 25-50 years.1 This leaves us with the daunting reality that the increasing intensity of heat waves, storms, and ecological disruption that we have seen in association with rising temperatures can be attributed simply to the elevated levels of greenhouse gases emitted by the mid-20th century, or perhaps even earlier. Even if GHG emissions which, mind you, have increased sixfold since then2 were to halt today, the climate will nonetheless continue to warm for hundreds and by some estimates thousands of years into the future.3 We have only quite recently
1

Hansen http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html 3 Senes

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reached a CO2 concentration of 400 p.p.m. thats up from under 320 p.p.m. in 19604 but we do not yet know what a 400 p.p.m. atmosphere really looks like. Whereas we often assume that we are experiencing climate change in real time, we are in fact experiencing a climate augmented by previous generations, while we augment it even further for the next ones. There is, in other words, no system of justice or accountability built into the Earths climate. This reality was encapsulated in the findings of a 2011 report from the Torontobased environmental research firm Specialists in Energy, Nuclear, and Environmental Sciences (SENES): No plausible future scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions produce a cooling of the earth. These results mean we can be confident that the Earths climate will continue to warm throughout the 21st century. What we can control is by how much the climate warms.5 That report, entitled Torontos Future Weather & Climate Driver Study, is by far the most comprehensive assessment of the future impact of climate change on Toronto and indeed is among the most detailed local assessments ever. Working from an exhaustive climate model known as the HADCM3, (which has been cited extensively by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,) SENES built a regional model to estimate the climatic patterns the City of Toronto can expect to face in the decade 2040-2049 a time when me and most of my friends will only be in our fifties. To summarize the findings: The average temperature will increase by 4.4 C, (5.7 C in the winter, 3.8 C in the summer). Overall precipitation will increase, with the month of July seeing an 80 percent increase in rainfall compared to the decade from 2000-2009. Extreme weather events will decrease in their frequency but increase in their intensity. Whereas the maximum amount of rain in one day has been 66mm, it is anticipated to jump to 166mm. The number of days with a Humidex greater than 40 C will jump from 9 to 39, while the maximum Humidex will rise to 57 C. (Yup, you read that right. 57 degrees Celsius.) The number of days in which the temperature does not fall below 24 C will increase sixfold, to 180 days of the year, and heat waves will be about five times more frequent.6

In other words, the city will experience a more tropical climate: more comfort in the winter but less in the summer,7 as the authors put it.

4 5

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ SENES vol. 1, ES-23 http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2012/pe/bgrd/backgroundfile51664.pdf 6 SENES Outcomes Report 12-13 http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2012/pe/bgrd/ backgroundfile-51653.pdf 7 SENES vol 1. ES-13 http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2012/pe/bgrd/backgroundfile51664.pdf

Trading frigid winters for sweltering summers may not sound like such a raw deal, but it will be costly for Toronto, which is precisely why the report was commissioned to begin with. Our drainage system is already failing in heavy rainfalls, and the increased energy needed to cool buildings down in extreme heat is likely to strain our electrical grid. The real problem is that the report will only be used, if at all, to help guide a few of these infrastructural changes not by any means to advise Toronto or Ontario on what we can do to help avert changes in the climate that by the middle of the century will certainly be worsening access to food and water in many of the worlds most populous regions on an unprecedented scale. 8 And, given the shifts in energy production that are ongoing in Canada today, its clear that we have a lot to contribute or, at least, to prevent. But not one word about the climate was mentioned at the National Energy Boards hearings on Enbridge Line 9 last fall. The Board would only hear testimony from persons who, in the Boards opinion, are directly affected by the project,9 thus forcing all of the critical discourse on the project into the important but limited subject of possible ruptures. It is important enough for those of us in the general public and in the environmental movement to educate ourselves about the science and ramifications of climate change, and yet we are confronting a system in which even the decision-makers themselves have been institutionally separated from the very information that might help them understand the consequences of their actions. There were, in fact, several reasons to question the process from the outset, and even on its own terms it should be seen as a failure and a face. To begin with, six of the seven members of the NEB themselves come from high-level corporate positions in the energy sector.10 For these particular hearings, new bureaucratic regulations were implemented to make it extremely difficult for almost anyone to testify. The Board also demonstrated no interest in gaining the consent of First Nations which actually would be directly impacted by a spill.11 On top of all this, the federal government, the government of Ontario,12 and the government of Quebec all support the project.13 And so, throughout the past year there has indeed been a feeling that the game was rigged. Our marches through the streets, the signs on our front lawns, and even the six-day occupation of Enbridges facility in Hamilton14 were hardly acknowledged, because it was all too easy
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http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/international.html http://www.neb-one.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rthnb/nws/nwsrls/2013/nwsrls07-eng.html 10 http://www.neb-one.gc.ca/clf-nsi/rthnb/whwrndrgvrnnc/rgnztnndstrctr/brdmmbr/brdmmbreng.html#s3 11 http://you.leadnow.ca/petitions/line-9-pledge-of-resistance 12 http://globalnews.ca/news/930295/province-wont-conduct-environmental-assessment-ofline-9-pipeline/ 13 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/ marois-upbeat-about-enbridges-west-to-east-pipeline-project/article14028888/ 14 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/video-protest-at-enbridge-s-hamilton-siteends-with-18-arrests-1.1308470

for our government at every level to point to the NEB and remind us that these unelected, highly intelligent experts probably have a better grasp of the public interest than the public itself. But discussions of the climate have not merely been absent from federal stationary; they have also been sorely lacking in the mainstream media. Part, but not all, of this has to do with the growing financial vulnerability of the media to oil interests in Canada. Given the relatively small domestic market for Canadian media and the swelling size of the energy sector, it has seemed lately as though our own national discourse is especially susceptible to the sinister spell of corporate patronage. This tends to happen in ways that are opaque and often very subtle, but are currently extending well beyond the conventional though already compromising relationship between publishers and advertisers. As Jonathan Sas at The Tyee has pointed out, the Globe and Mail has published a disturbing number of boosteristic special information sections about the tar sands in the past few years whole sections of advertorial disguised as content, but paid for in full by corporate sponsors.15 Another, even more odious example of this trend was revealed last month when the Vancouver Observer published a leaked presentation about a new agreement between the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and Postmedia the consortium that owns the National Post, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Vancouver Sun, among others. The agreement completely eliminates the line between content and advertisement: control of the Financial Posts extensive energy section has now been forfeited entirely to CAPP, and Postmedias newspapers are mandated to print special Joint Venture sections in which topics are to be directed by CAPP and written by Postmedia.16 And then of course there is Qubecor and its coast-to-coast web of Sun Media tabloids, which one would hardly expect to ever support the granola crowd to begin with, but, for the record, is very close both to the federal Conservatives as well as tar sands shills like Ethical Oil.17 There, is however, another reason that climate change has been totally ignored in the media, and that has to do with the completely irreverent, jerkoff attitude that has been expressed by the federal government at every stage of the tar sands debate: we are exploiting the tar sands whether you like it or not, they say. If we cant use pipelines well use trains and even trucks to bring the oil to market. It is as though theyre holding us hostage without even demanding a ransom. Even Barack Obama, ostensibly the most powerful person on Earth, has, in the more despondent moments of his interminable musings about Keystone XL, said that Canada will probably move forward with tar sands extraction regardless of what we do.

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http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2012/10/22/Globe-Oil-Sands-Advertorial/ http://www.vancouverobserver.com/news/postmedia-prezi-reveals-intimate-relationship-oilindustry-lays-de-souza 17 http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alex/2012/01/harper-government-ethical-oil-and-sun-mediaconnection

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But that particular comment from the president back in 2012 did elicit one important response in the media an op-ed by James Hansen in the New York Times, which has probably coloured my view of the issue more than anything else. In Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate, he wrote. Canadas tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planets species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. Hansen later elaborates on the science at work here: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon 240 gigatons to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. a level that would, as earths history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.18 Even when they emerge from one of the most respected climatologists in the world, these predictions can still smack of apocalyptic crackpottery, and perhaps a third reason that commercial media usually avoid this kind of stuff is that it is at once too substantial and too taboo for the average reader. Perhaps we do not have the attention span for climate science, or perhaps we dont want to feel like sinners for driving a car or buying an avocado, or perhaps now that its out there, it doesnt exactly bear recapitulation. How much can one even stand to hear about such doom and gloom? But I seriously doubt this is really the problem, that human beings are congenitally incapable of solving big problems. For one thing, a 500 p.p.m. climate is certainly something we can avoid at this point, which means that we (probably) still have the opportunity to avoid the totally out-of-control scenario Hansen describes. The subject is taboo not because we hate thinking about the
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?_r=1&

future, but because conversations about the future have been systematically shut out of the permissible discourse on important issues such as Line 9, and to such an extent that even the most ecologically-minded among us are bound to feel powerless and frustrated by them. Naomi Klein recently wrote an essay for the New Statesman called How science is telling us all to revolt, in which she suggests that it is becoming increasingly incumbent upon the capitalist establishment to destroy the natural sciences. There are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science, she writes. Its why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations scientists. And certainly, as she suggests, the Harper government has been very effective at dismantling public-interest environmental sciences.19 But this dynamic works in the opposite direction as well; it can sometimes be difficult for the media, both mainstream and independent, to demand that we alter our course when the government has demonstrated such sociopathic intransigence. Discussions about the current and anticipated reality of climate change daunting though it may be already I doubt would even be difficult to face if we, as a society, were actually doing something about it.

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http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/science-says-revolt