Wood Heat in Southeast Manitoba

When the South Eastman Transition Initiative met last week to discuss “How do we keep Warm” we did not know Lac du Bonnet would have a 6 hour power outage later that same week. Nevertheless, I suspect the possibility of such an outage was lurking in the mind of those attending the meeting.

Let's face it. As long as our faith is in Manitoba Hydro: that it will supply reliable electricity forever, why should we be concerned about power outages? Nothing will ever be more convenient that simply moving the thermostat up if we want more heat. But is such faith reasonable or justified?

Our focus at our meeting was wood heat. We had a good discussion. As Gabriel Gagne told us about his experiences with wood heat, it struck me how, in the wooded parts of Quebec, Ontario and the Northeast USA, there is a strong culture of wood heat. Because of this the manufacturers of modern wood stoves are situated there, there are many certified installers of masonry stoves there, and there is a culture of woodlot management. All of this is absent here on the prairies.

Because of the absence of forest on the prairies, wood heating has always been a challenge here, so when coal became available, the shift to coal, even for rural residents occurred quickly. Later when cheap hydro and natural gas became available, this too was quickly embraced. Here in southeastern Manitoba, we have the forest, but we are so much a part of the prairies, that we adopted the prairie culture.

Of course it is true that we can never heat the world with biomass. There simply is not enough biomass. But there is also no way we can continue to heat the world with natural gas or coal. One size won't fit all, and for us, living adjacent to a significant forest, wood heat is something many of us need to take seriously.

At our meeting, we heard that modern EPA certified wood stoves, not only burn significantly cleaner than non-certified stoves, they also get up to 50% more heat out of wood fuel than basic wood stoves. A good stove is expected to do two things well. First of all it is to combust the fuel as completely as possible. The only thing coming out of the chimney should be water vapour and carbon dioxide – no soot and no carbon monoxide. Both are signs of incomplete combustion. The hotter the fire, the better combustion occurs, so a stove needs to be designed to burn hot. The stove is also expected to transfer the heat generated by combustion to the room. This can only be done by cooling the hot gases. So the second function works against the first function. This is why a well designed stove separates the two functions.

Evident from our meeting was that there is also a lot of interest in solar energy. Our next meeting will be devoted to harnessing solar energy. Mark February 21 on your calendar and check our website for more, up-to-date information.

Eric Rempel

Canada's Image

World leaders recently met in Cancun for United Nations climate change negotiations, and once again Canada was one of the few countries actively working against a climate agreement. This may come as a surprise; after all, Canada is known around the world as a nation of beautiful, unspoiled nature, full of people who are in touch with the soil and the forests, where wildlife flourishes and fish are plentiful. Growing up, that was the image I had of Canada, and it was a point of pride for me. Canada, I thought, was one of the last places on earth that remained pure and wild, and it would stay that way because Canadians value nature like no others. That is what I thought.

Our actual record of protecting the environment is far from the ideal I thought I knew as a child. Even though we committed to the Kyoto Protocol, we’ve spent most of our time since then trying to get out of it. The Kyoto Protocol was the result of a climate conference in which all of the nations involved pledged to take concrete steps to meet solid targets for environmental progress, particularly in regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The pledges made there were to be binding, yet Canada has actually increased greenhouse gas emissions dramatically since the Kyoto agreement, and nobody has held our government accountable. Who can? At the climate talks in Copenhagen last year, Canada was the recipient of the “fossil award”: we were the least willing, of all of the nations involved, to take climate action. The fossil award is an international embarrassment. Is there any way we can now reclaim our international image? And finally, at the talks in Cancun, Canada was one of only three nations who attempted to block an extension of the Kyoto protocol. On the train of international progress, Canada is leaning on the brake lever. But if the (supposedly) binding requirements of the Kyoto Protocol aren’t enforced by the UN, and international embarrassment isn’t enough to get our government’s attention, then who can hold them accountable?

We can. Our government is ultimately only accountable to us, the citizens. This is our country, and taking care of the environment is our responsibility – and that includes what the government does in our name. Canada’s tar sands are one of the largest devastations of nature in the world, and the oil money they provide is the main reason our government keeps trying to shirk its environmental obligations. Write your representative to let them know that you’re not okay with expanding the tar sands at the expense of not only Canada’s environment, but of the global climate. And at the same time, make changes in your own consumption: the less oil we use, the less we’ll need the tar sands. Invest in renewable energy, rather than oil companies. Educate yourself. After all, the only difference between the beautiful image of Canada I grew up with and our current international image as the world’s biggest “fossil” is human behaviour.

Jeff Wheeldon

How do we Keep Warm

I am of an age when I can remember a rural community where wood heat was the norm. Every year my father would hire a local youth, provide him with an axe, and send him into the bush ½ mile away to cut the next winter's firewood supply.

In 1956 my parents built a new house. In this house they installed an oil burning furnace. I don't recall the rational that justified this shift from wood heat to oil heat, but I expect it was considered a sound decision, based on economics. On the one hand there was the time and cost that went into felling the trees, getting them to the yard, cutting them to length, getting the dried wood into the house, and stoking the fire. On the other hand, all that was needed was a call for the fuel delivery truck, and the fuel would be pumped into the storage tank. Marvellously, a thermostat controlled the room temperature. Viewed that way, the fuel oil option made sense. But I do not think my parents even considered, at that time, that they were substituting a non-renewable, fossil energy, transported thousands of miles for a renewable, local energy source.

But that was the beginning. That was followed by the Trans-Canada Gas pipeline in 1958, and in 1967 the Nelson River power stations were first connected to the provincial power system.

Today we are more or less dependant on Alberta natural gas and hydro electricity generated in northern Manitoba for our home heating. Were either of these energy sources to be seriously disrupted during cold weather, people in southern Manitoba would die! Is it that hard to envision an accident, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster that would result in such a disruption? Is it reasonable to expect gas from Alberta to keep flowing for ever?

But we don't need to be that vulnerable. Last week I wrote here about an energy policy of Fee and Dividend. Such a policy would significantly increase the cost of energy from distant sources, but it would also put money into our pocket that we could choose to use to improve energy efficiency. I find it exciting just thinking about where that might lead.

But it seems unlikely that we are going to get the political leadership that will give us a rational energy policy. So what can we do? Ought we to go back to the way things were being done 75 years ago? No! We have learned a great deal about many aspects of energy efficient design since then.

There is much that our local government could do to encourage preparedness. 95% of homes being built today are built with today's energy picture in mind, rather than a reasonable projection towards the future. Visionary local government leadership could give us building codes that would provide an incentive (both negative and positive) to builders and developers to orient houses for solar gain.

And there are things we can do as individuals. Join us for a discussion of this on January 18 at Steinbach 55 Plus. For more information check our web site.

Eric Rempel

This column is prepared by the South Eastman Transition Initiative, advocating sustainable lifestyles in southeastern Manitoba. Go to southeasttransition.com.

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