10 12 30 Fee and Dividend

It is urgent that we break our addiction to oil. We can, each of us, reduce our use of oil with decisions we make individually, but in order to truly change, we will need policies that will affect the behaviour of everyone. Various policies have been suggested.

Two weeks ago I described a Carbon Tax in this column. Conservatives are very uneasy about such a plan because they fear that as government sees all this new revenue, it is more likely to find new ways of spending it, rather than reducing taxes elsewhere. We saw the Carbon Tax proposal played out in the last Canadian election. Stephane Dion proposed it, and the Conservatives effectively campaigned against it

Last week I described Cap-and-trade. This policy heavily supported by big business, but is unlikely to produce meaningful emission reductions, but will require the creation of a massive regulatory bureaucracy and provide a rent-seeking bonanza for special interests.  In place of cap-and-trade, an alternative is proposed: Fee-and-Dividend.

Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse. . . .

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbour to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

Businesses would seek out more opportunities to improve their energy efficiency. Other businesses would sell products and services that enable them to do so. Low-carbon energy sources would be more competitive with high-carbon sources.

If this makes sense to you, let your politicians know how you feel. For more information on this check our web site.

Eric Rempel

10 12 23 Cap and Trade

Readers following the Climate Change dialogue often hear about Cap and Trade as a policy response to concern about greenhouse gas emissions. What is Cap and Trade?

The “Cap” part of such a policy would target the big CO₂ emitters, such as thermal electricity plants. A cap would be placed on the amount of greenhouse gas these polluters would be allowed to emit into the atmosphere, and this Cap would be lowered over a period of time, slowly enough to allow these plants to make adjustments in the way they do things. To make things easier, these enterprises would also be allowed to “Trade” their right to emit CO₂, so that a plant that is below its Cap or limit would be able to sell that surplus of emission rights to another plant which was over its Cap. The market would determine the price of this right to emit CO₂, and each plant would make a business decision as to whether it would be a better strategy to emit more and pay for that right, or to change how it does things and sell the surplus under the Cap as a source of revenue.

A Cap and Trade policy to deal with greenhouse gases has appeal to many because a similar policy was used to deal with sulphur emissions that resulted in acid rain. It was relatively painless then, and it worked. Acid rain is no longer the problem it was 20 and 30 years ago!

The Manitoba Government is currently considering implementing a Cap and Trade Policy, and is seeking the public's input in an online consultation. If you have an interest in responding to such a consultation, go to our website and click on the “What can I do” tab.

In my mind, Cap and Trade has several serious flaws as an effective tool to deal with the challenges we face as a civilization:

1. It ignores the fact that in addition to spewing carbon dioxide into the air, we are also using up scarce resources, primarily oil, at an alarming rate. It does little to encourage all of us to find energy saving ways of living.
2. It will require a vast, costly bureaucracy to implement. Think of it. Someone will need to assign a Cap to every CO₂ producing plant (can you imagine the negotiation that would go into assigning that?), and the CO₂ emissions of every one of these plants will need to be monitored.
3. A huge industry would spring up whose function would be to find ways of getting Caps raised, arrange Trades, and find loopholes in the legislation that would effectively allow higher Caps.

There is much more. I am only scratching the surface.

Compare this with the Carbon Tax I described last week. The Carbon Tax is much simpler to apply, much harder to avoid, and creates a real incentive for everyone to begin searching for ways of living with less fossil energy.

If you don't like the idea of a tax, consider the Fee and Dividend proposal I will describe next week.

Eric Rempel

10 12 13 Carbon Tax

I suspect that many of us regard taxes as a necessary evil. Our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has said that in his opinion, all taxes are bad. In this column I want to challenge that notion.

I agree that there is something ill-fitting about taxes on property or income. We feel property and income is something that belongs to us. We have worked for this; it is ours. We feel government is imposing on what is rightfully ours when it applies a tax on our property or earnings. And in some shape or other, these are the most common taxes we pay.

But there are other taxes. We already have our tire and battery levies and our taxes on tobacco and liquor. These taxes recognize that some of our actions affect others or the environment negatively, and that government intervention is needed to ensure “that the polluter pays.”

What about the consumption of non-renewable resources? Doesn't government have some responsibility in transferring the cost of dealing with dwindling resources from future generations to the consuming generation? Doesn't government have some responsibility in discouraging the consumption of a scarce resource? I believe it does, and it really is not that difficult!

Let's assume that my household pays $20,000 a year in taxes: primarily property tax and income tax. That's a lot of money, and I am motivated to try to reduce the amount of tax I pay. I will be motivated to avoid or hide doing things to my property that will increase its tax evaluation, and I may be motivated to hire a good accountant in order to help me reduce my income tax. But it is hard to see how anything I do to reduce my tax bill makes the world a better place.

But now let's assume that the whole tax regime were changed. Let's assume that the taxes I pay are based on the energy I consume. The amount of tax I pay is the same, and the tax revenue to the government is the same. But the whole world has changed. If I now want to reduce the amount of my tax, I will be motivated to find ways of using less energy. And as I do that, the world becomes a better place, a healthier place.

In practice things would be a little more complicated. Were we to shift our tax burden from income and property to energy consumption, the tax burden would be re distributed. No doubt there would be winners and losers, and the losers would hurt. This would need to be taken into account. Some adjustments would be necessary.

But a lot of accountants would be looking for work. The administration of a carbon tax at the point of extraction or import would be a lot simpler to administer than our current tax structure.

A carbon tax is one form of a resource tax. The sooner our governments shift from the current taxes to a carbon tax, the healthier our planet will be. Perhaps our survival depends on it.

Eric Rempel

Throw-Away Plastic – What About It?

Do you ever, when you use a single use plastic product, think about the implications of your action? Single use plastic products – styrofoam cups and plates, plastic eating utensils, plastic drinking bottles, plastic bags and plastic packaging – are ubiquitous. Plastic to throw away is everywhere. We love the convenience of it.

But what is entailed in the making of the plastic? Basically all plastic is made from either crude oil or natural gas. That's energy! Given our addiction to energy in all aspects of our lifestyle, the energy that goes into the plastics we consume is relatively small, nevertheless it is significant.

More significant is what happens to the plastic after we are done using it, after we throw it away? Well it goes either into recycling or the land fill. Since a major reason we like plastic is because it is durable, we should not be surprised that it does not bio-degrade readily. Plastic that goes to the landfill or ends up in our waterways will be there for decades, perhaps even longer. Our plastic waste should not go to the landfill, it needs to be recycled.

To that end we have our Blue Box program. Eastman Recycling, which runs our blue box program processed enough paper, plastic, glass, aluminum and steel last year to fill 160 semi-trailers. For Eastman Recycling that's a substantial accomplishment. But what does that say about the rest of us?

Collecting plastics in blue boxes fosters the belief that, like aluminum and glass, these will be converted into new similar objects. From one glass bottle we can make another glass bottle of similar quality, in an economic manner. However this is not the case with plastic. The best we can hope for plastics is that these will be turned into other products such as doormats, textiles, plastic lumber, etc.. These products will still end at some point in the landfill – and do NOT stem the need for more virgin petroleum product. This is NOT recycling, but down-cycling.

Were there no alternatives to plastic for these applications, this situation would be tolerable (although we need to question whether landfilling them is fair to future generations). But there are alternatives. In most cases the plastics are convenient but not necessary. We can do our shopping with a reusable bag. The utensils we choose for eating can be washed and reused. If we need to carry water with us, we can use a stainless steel bottle.

Our leaders at every level have a responsibility to foster a healthy environment for all of us to live in. Unfortunately too many politicians have a limited view of what that means. Earlier this year the Steinbach City Council received two letters asking it to take action to discourage the use of plastic bags in Steinbach. Council decided then, it was not their responsibility.

So, for now at least, we are left with individual action. There are so many places where we do have a choice. So what do we chose?

For more insight into the effect of this insidious invasion of plastic into our lives join in the viewing of the film “Addicted to Plastics”. Tuesday, December 14, 7:00PM at the Fireside Room, Steinbach 55 Plus. Everyone welcome. A donation to defray costs will be requested. More information at southeasttransition.com.

Eric Rempel

Toward Authentic and Sustainable Funerals

I would like to report briefly on the November 16^th public forum in Steinbach sponsored by the South Eastman Transition Initiative. Our speaker for the evening, Rick Zerbe Cornelson of Winnipeg, refers to himself as “The Village CasketMaker.” The bio-degradable casket he brought with him for display garnered a lot of attention from those who attended.

Rick Zerbe Cornelson displays his “green” casket.

Rick began by tracing the historical developments of the modern funeral system as we know it. He noted that a hundred years ago most funerals were “undertaken” by the immediate families of the deceased supported by local communities. Gradually local carpenters who built coffins began to offer their services to make funeral arrangements and so became known as “Undertakers.” After a few generations, these “professional” services became the standard way of undertaking funerals. Now, instead of being integrally involved, families simply pay for services rendered.

The first professional Funeral Home in Steinbach was owned by the Loewen family. By 2002, the chain of funeral homes Loewns had acquired was sold to its competitor for 1.2 billion dollars. Most funeral homes in North America today operate with the goal of maximizing profits. Our local Birchwood Funeral Chapel is an exception to the rule.

Because of this reality, as well as emerging concerns of about environmental footprints we leave behind, many people have begun to rethink funerals from the ground up.

In speaking about the values and themes that should drive our funeral culture, Rick suggested that we need a balance between hope and comfort on the one hand, and the reality of death on the other. A modern temptation is avoid the pain and loss that inevitably comes with death. In order to find a good balance he suggested we follow four principles: honesty, simplicity, community and freedom.

Honesty allows us to deal with the pain of death authentically. Simplicity exudes confidence about our place in the cycle of life and death while being environmentally friendly. Community involvement helps to reduce the distance between the deceased and those remaining behind. And freedom permits us to do funerals the way we think best, even while departing from standard practices.

Rick concluded his address by noting some emerging alternative practices related to funerals. These include re-involving children in funerals, keeping the body at home for a “wake,” funeral co-ops, cremation, natural burials, and using locally made products.

Following the key-note address, Gerry Dubé of La Broquerie made a short presentation about composting as an alternative to standard burials. While the thought seems abhorent to some, he noted, so did cremation a generation ago. He suggested that composting could give real meaning to the notion of returning to the ground from which we came, and composting would break down the toxins we have ingested during our lifetime that remain present in our body when we die.

All this input generated a lot of dialogue during the panel discussion that involved both speakers, as well as Todd Harder of Birchwood Funeral Chapel. It is fair to say that we have begun rethinking funerals here in the Southeast.

Jack Heppner

Your Voice in Cancun

Guess what? Next Monday marks the beginning of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) in Cancún, Mexico. The purpose of this conference is for our world leaders to come to an agreement on how to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions through the curbing of their own countries’ output. 

The greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect is carbon dioxide (CO2). Without such an effect, life would be much harsher. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently at 388 ppm (parts per million) and still rising. This means that if the air above our heads was divided into a million cubes, 388 of those cubes would be filled with CO2. 

Carbon dioxide gets into our atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels and from widespread deforestation. Fossil fuels are mainly composed of carbon. The loss of virgin land means the release into the atmosphere of carbon stored in plants. This carbon then teams up with oxygen molecules to create CO2.

This is where it gets to be too much. We have gone from a pre-Industrial Revolution level of 275 ppm to an unsustainable 388 ppm of atmospheric CO2. This concentration is causing lasting damage to our planet and its inhabitants.
That is why the ideal agreement between participating countries at the UNCCC will be a reduction of atmospheric CO2 to a stable number below 350 ppm. That is the safest upper limit that we can live with. Anything higher than 350 ppm will bring about drought, rising sea levels, the disappearance of fertile coastal farmland, the destruction of coral reefs, extinctions, decreased crop yields, melting glaciers, more intense natural disasters, and higher global temperatures. These consequences are already being felt in parts of the world. 

Last year’s International Day of Climate Action was created by an organization called “350”. This organization’s goal is to have citizens’ voices heard by the decision-makers. Timed in accordance with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, the International Day of Climate Action saw people from all around the world stage events of public environmental awareness. Pictures from these events, sent to the 350.org website, were presented by the organization to the decision-makers in Copenhagen. 

This year, 350 has created a new plan to make the political leaders in Cancún sit up and take note. Their project, 350 eARTh (Earth Art), takes place from November 20th-28th. The objective is to create a work of art that will send a strong message to our leaders. Pictures of these events will once again be delivered to our heads of state. Anyone can do this! I encourage you to plan your own events; get together with friends and family to create an expression of your voice to the government. There are many ideas you can choose from on 350’s website; http://earth.350.org/get-involved/make-your-own-art/ . 

I am planning an aerial/land art event in the schoolyard of Ecole Saint-Joachin in La Broquerie for the morning of Saturday, November 27th, and I welcome any ideas you have. If you are interested, please contact me at lab350@hotmail.com or search “La Broquerie 350” on Facebook.

Lacey Lord

Work Less, Live More

Remembrance Day serves to remind us all of the horrific nature of war, as well as the heavy cost of the freedom and lifestyles we enjoy. But for many, Remembrance Day is also a much-appreciated day off, a day to enjoy freedom of a different kind: freedom from work. In a recent article for the New Internationalist, Zoe Cormier reflected on the images we saw in 2008 of people laid off from the failed financial firm, Lehman Brothers, smiling as they left the office for the last time. Why were they so happy?

The question of why we enjoy getting a day off of work raises another question: why do we work in the first place? It seems like a silly question: we work to make money to pay the bills so we can continue to live. But do we work to live, or live to work? 

Canadians are working longer hours than ever before, in spite of all of the advances in efficiency and technology that make us more productive. Are we truly any richer than we were before? Typically, when we have more disposable income we simply dispose of it more quickly (in fact, our economy depends on it!). Despite all of the time-saving devices invented in the past century, the average person spends more time on housework now than they did in 1925; our houses have just become larger. The more we work, the more gadgets we buy to save us time – but we spend that time working anyway.

This is called the Jevons Paradox, named after British economist William Stanley Jevons: efficiency and lower prices serve to raise consumption rates. We will never truly get ahead. Surely this pattern of working more to consume more is not sustainable!

But not everyone is caught up in it. Europeans work an average of 300 hours per year less than Americans, and workers in Denmark recently went on a general strike to raise their paid vacation time from five weeks per year to six. A British study called 21 Hours suggested that the normal work week should be 21 hours, and when the state of Utah brought in a mandatory 4-day work week to avoid layoffs they discovered a savings not only of millions of dollars but also of 4,535 tonnes of carbon emissions and 744,000 gallons of fuel. Some are concerned that if we stopped growing as an economy, jobs would be lost; perhaps the solution is for us all to work less…and live more.

Think of the things you could do with extra time at home: many of them are things you may currently need to pay someone else to do. How much unpaid work are we able to accomplish with a shorter work week? How much time spent with our families rather than sending kids to daycare? How many skills can we acquire to not only save ourselves money but also to become more resilient? 

Do we work to live, or live to work? “Work less, live more.”

Jeff Wheeldon