Electricity and Resilience

I have been thinking recently about how reliable our electrical power supply really is.

It started while reading the Kindle Book, “Farming 101: Transitions.” In this short novel, Gary Martens of the University of Manitoba is making a case for Natural Systems Agriculture. He does not have much success until he interjects into the plot a major, electrical power outage in the middle of winter.

The power failure embraces all of North America and the electricity simply does not come on again. And it is in that context that some enterprising farmers rediscover a more natural and sustainable way of farming.

“How ridiculous!” I hear someone say. Power always comes back on within a few hours or days at the most. But what if it didn’t? I began asking people what they would do if the power went off in mid-winter and didn’t come back on. A look of incredulity usually was followed by some statement like, “I just don’t want to go there.”

I googled for information about the massive power failure in the Eastern USA and Canada in 2003. I discovered that at least 50 million people lost power, some of them for 33 days. Reading through the government report about that event was not encouraging. It revealed dozens of weak links in the electrical grid and documented how, because of the integration of multiple systems, one part can affect another to bring down the whole. In the end the report made 46 recommendations to improve the system. Yes, forty-six.

Hmm! This led me to a book I found at the U. of M. library; “Brittle Power,” by Amory and Hunter Lovins (1982). It is a major work outlining the vulnerability of all of North America’s energy sector, including its electrical systems. They document how all the systems society depends upon for survival are vulnerable to major disruption because of internal flaws, human error, natural disasters and sabotage of various kinds.

The authors point out that because all the energy systems are so interconnected, both within each sector and with each other, it would not take much to bring down all the systems at one time.

Some people tell me to be quiet about such things. This kind of “fear-mongering” is not helpful, they say. But why was it okay to consider the fearful possibility of Winnipeg being totally flooded once in 700 years, which led to our building a massive floodway at huge expense? Just to be prepared.  But to anticipate an inevitable collapse of the electrical grid is off limits.

The Lovins leave us with something to ponder. “It is not pleasant to have in the back of one’s mind that the next time the lights blink out, they may take an exceedingly long time to come back on again (140). Personally, I think a responsible society needs to think about such things. Especially in mid-winter.

In future articles we will explore possible ways to be better prepared for major electrical outages.

Jack Heppner 

The Keystone XL Pipeline is Rejected: So?

So President Obama has rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline. I think the President must feel good since he has finally lived up to the spirit of his election promises, environmentalists in the US are celebrating a victory, the Republicans seem to think they have an issue to take to the fall election, and Canadians, by and large, don’t know what to think.

The stance of our present Conservative government in this respect is puzzling. Apparently it is acceptable to this government (as it has been to previous liberal governments) to treat our oil sands as a renewable resource that will go on yielding oil forever. For a government to take this stance is not new – it seems to have been the government stance of choice all over the world again and again and again. However, such a stance can hardly be considered a conservative approach to resource management.

One hardly needs data to support an argument that all non-renewable resources will diminish and become harder to get if such a resource is consumed in large quantities. Nevertheless, here is some data. The oil Alberta was pumping in the 1930s required the input of one unit of energy to get 100 units of energy [for the powering of cars and the heating of homes]. The oil was close to the surface; easy to get at. Conventional oil in 1970 yielded about 30 units of energy for every unit of energy expended. The oil sands today deliver only five units of energy for every energy unit expended.

Clearly we are witnessing the depletion of a non-renewable resource. Why would a rational, conservative government try to sell this resource as rapidly as possible? It makes no sense to me.

What we are hearing from those touting the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline as well as the Northern Gateway pipeline is that the sale of oil derived from the oil sands will bring jobs to Canadians. That seems likely. However, a pertinent question is whether jobs in the oil patch are indeed the kind of jobs we want if quality of life is our goal.  Furthermore, there are other ways of generating jobs. The easiest way of creating jobs is to move away from a cheap energy policy, to a policy that would reward those with the creativity to find ways of living with less energy. A fee and dividend energy policy would transfer wealth from those intent on consuming energy to those committed to conserving energy, and would put money into the hands of Canada’s true innovators.

Without a strong and deliberate policy to reduce Canada’s dependency on fossil energy and the income derived from energy sales, we will be no better off when the oil deposited in the Athabascan sand is gone. We see feeble attempts with mandates for light bulbs and policies to encourage biofuels, but that is greenwash. As long as the government avoids full cost accounting, and promotes oil sales without considering the cost of those sales to future generations and the environment, Canadians, sadly, will not make a serious move towards renewable energy.

Eric Rempel

Globalization and Resilience

Globalization is what we call the process of the world becoming a smaller place. This is happening more and more and in many different ways, with results both good and bad: people move around more than ever; our society is increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse; we have instant access to information from anywhere in the world via satellite television and the internet; we're increasingly governed by international organizations and trade agreements rather than national governments; and most of our goods, and even many of our services, come from the other side of the world.

It's this last form of globalization - economic globalization - that is the most controversial.  Unemployment is high in North America, while manufacturing jobs are continually outsourced to the developing world.  Technical jobs and support services are increasingly moving to India and Southeast Asia.  And endless boatloads of cheap goods, often produced in sweatshops in a modern equivalent of serfdom or even slave labour, flood into our stores at low prices.  But even beyond the ethical arguments against sweatshop labour, I would argue that economic globalization is neither sustainable nor resilient.

Economic globalization as we know it depends on free-market economics, a competition-driven system in which only the strong (and highly specialized) survive.  A company with only one product can produce it more efficiently than a company that tries to produce many; this leads to a high degree of specialization, which requires interdependence (after all, if I only grow beans, I'll need to get my bacon from you).  Soon, entire regions specialize (corn in America, electronics in Asia, etc.), and we all depend on shipping to move these products around rather than grow or build them ourselves at home.  But while it may be more efficient to grow a pineapple in Hawaii than in Manitoba, shipping perishables across the world is not efficient, and it is certainly not sustainable!  If we were behaving as though we had a limited quantity of oil, we would not be spending it on shipping things from China that we could build at home.

This interconnected web of global economics is not resilient.  We recently had a shortage of diesel fuel here in Canada; if we had actually run out and the delivery trucks stopped, it would only take 3 days for all of our grocery stores to run out of food.  Could we survive on hogs and grain?  If we are not able to sustain ourselves by providing our own food and products, a simple fuel shortage could result in starvation. 

This principle is easily seen in agriculture.  Monoculture (a single crop) is more vulnerable to pests, which also specialize; it's how a simple potato blight wiped out Ireland.  Our global economic system amounts to a network of monocultures, all vulnerable on their own, and connected by the burning thread of fossil fuels.  As we see today, instability in the American housing market has rocked the global economy.

Join us at the Eastman Education Centre as Dennis Hiebert, Professor of Sociology at Providence College speaks about globalization. Thursday Jan 28, 7pm.

Jeff Wheeldon

An Ode to Walking (Part Two)

(without a mention of high gas prices)

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car…The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his own two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine …The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given…Of course if a man hates space and wants it annihilated that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once. There is little enough space there. (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy).

Last week I suggested that there is merit in walking because it takes the world on its terms.  That is, there is merit in needing to acknowledge the hills, the weather, the mosquitoes, the aromas, the distance.

Walking also takes people seriously. When I walk, I take people seriously. Walking to church, for example, I pass through a real human community. I find people digging dandelions in their front yard. I see people reading their paper with the morning coffee. I step around hopscotch on the sidewalk. The neighbor’s dog frightens me from the other side of the fence. I am a real person in a real human community.

When I drive, I paratroop into the church from nowhere. I am worshipping in No-Place. In most cities, churches have literally become the church of no-Place. Situated far from where anyone calls home, you can’t get there except by car and the church’s neighborhood matters not a whit.

This can be confirmed by the fact that, as far as I know, there is no such thing as sidewalk rage. Why is it that, Layton Friesen, otherwise calm, cool and collected, when he gets behind the wheel of a car, will fly into a fit of rage at other drivers? Two reasons: As the barber in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow says about his recent car purchase, “Ease of going was translated with our pause into a principled unwillingness to stop.”

My speed of travel seems directly proportionate to my annoyance at being interrupted. And besides, to a walker an interruption is a rest.

However, more importantly, I get angry with other drivers because those beings sitting in other cars are not real human beings. The glass and steel and the speed at which we drive have made them into an abstractions. The minute they become real, I am mortally embarrassed for having become so angry. Have you ever shaken your fist at another driver, only to discover that she is your next-door neighbor?

When I walk, people become people and I have the possibility of relating to them, human to human. No one can love abstractions. There is good reason for the Bible telling us to love our neighbor. When I walk I have moved from being something analogous to a pornographer (degrading others by dehumanizing them into abstractions) to being a neighbor (relating to people who present themselves to me in all their uniqueness).

By Layton Friesen 

An Ode to Walking (Part 0ne)

(Without a mention of high gas prices)

A thoughtful essay lifting the merits of walking recently came to my attention. As written, it is too long for this column so it will be presented in  three columns. ER

What follows is the kind of congratulations-to-self that occasionally sits in my mind when I find myself walking while others drive. Nevertheless, it might serve as a kind of proposal for enshrining walking as a Christian form of transportation.

It may strike you as odd that such a primal and common means of transport should need a defense. But by now, mostly, it is really only the young and the poor who still use walking as a means of transport. Others will occasionally “go for a walk” but for the most part, we think and live by the terms of the automobile.

If the tone here seems exaggerated and overstated it is because I have set out to tangle with a tyrant; the automobile has such a grip on our minds that only drastic measures can put it on the defensive.

When I walk, I take the world on its own terms. A rule of stewardship says that what is stewarded needs to be taken with a measure of seriousness and attentions. When I walk, the puddle, the steep hill, the sub-zero temperature, the mosquitoes, the lilac bush, begin to mean something to me, they have become a part of my world. In other words, my neighborhood has become a place, not just a space to move through.

Driving, on the other hand, flattens the world into non-existence. The steep hill is as flat as the plain, the puddle causes me not a moment’s thought. The lilacs I see from afar, insulated from their aroma. This elimination of the world is obvious when the weather plunges below -25C.

It is not the walkers who complain of the cold, it is the drivers. When I walk, the cold becomes something to be defied; I dress and exert myself to elude its grip. The icy world around me has become a formidable other to be taken seriously (hence the satisfaction of coming in from a cold walk). When I drive, the best I can do is sit helplessly shivering and curse, hoping my car warms up before I arrive at my destination.

This, it seems to me, is where stewardship and incarnation meet. God, in order to save the world, did not transcend it but moved into the neighborhood. He became a particular Jewish man who never ventured far from the village of his birth; he got about as far as he could walk. He took one place very seriously and thereby delivered the cosmos.

By staying close to home and committing himself to one place seriously, the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, and seeds of the path, the figs on the tree and the foxes in the holes meant something. They were lifted up as the stuff of salvation. They were noticed because Jesus the walker had the time and the opportunity to live in the place where he was.

By Layton Friesen  The rest of Layton’s essay will follow in future weeks.