What Did John Baird Know and When Did He Know It?

I'm not on a witch hunt, I'm just curious. There was this curious juxtaposition of news stories a week ago:

• December 12 2007 Baird unimpressed by Quebec's emission rules
• December 13 2007 Baird warm to Quebec emissions plan

Then from one day to the next Canadian Environment Minister John Baird, who was in Bali at the time, decides that having Quebec tie itself to the California regulations is a fine idea. Why the turnaround? Well a couple of days ago Washington announced that it was denying California permission to have these emissions standards for cars. Legally, California is allowed to enact auto emissions standards that are stronger than federal standards, but it needs a waiver from Washington. Over the years these waivers have been a formality. 50 waivers were requested, 50 waivers were granted, usually within a few weeks. In 2004 California asked for a waiver to regulate CO2 emissions; it already had the authority to regulate all other greenhouse gases and the courts said that CO2 was also fair game. Washington delayed and said they had to wait for other court cases that challenged the right to regulate CO2 emissions. California won all the court cases, including at the Supreme Court earlier this year. Legally it's pretty clear that Washington has no choice but to allow the California standards to be enacted. But this week it gave its decision: the waiver will not be granted.

Without being a political expert, its seems pretty clear that they had decided this a while ago, but didn't want to announce it until after the Bali conference. Bad PR. Better wait until everyone is off for Christmas. So the question is did Baird, while meeting with US administration officials in Bali, get wind of the fact that California standards were about to be killed and that therefore there was zero risk of Quebec actually being able to follow them? Just curious.

Tags: Greenhouse_Gases Kyoto Protocol Energy Energy Efficiency Politics

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Is the Pope For or Against Urgent Climate Change Action?

The Daily Mail ran a story, repeated by several newspapers, saying that the Pope critized what they called "climate change prophets of doom", and saying that "fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering." The story says the Pope said it was vital "that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement."

A bit surprising, since the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace hosted a conference on climate change in April, to which the Pope sent a message saying he wished to foster the "research and promotion of lifestyles and models of production and consumption that respect creation and the real demands of sustainable progress of peoples." But looking at the actual words of the Pope, it is clear that the press is reading in between the lines some things that are not actually there. Here is what he actually says:

We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves. Nor must we overlook the poor, who are excluded in many cases from the goods of creation destined for all. Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances. If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations. Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying.

In this regard, it is essential to "sense" that the earth is "our common home" and, in our stewardship and service to all, to choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions. Further international agencies may need to be established in order to confront together the stewardship of this "home" of ours; more important, however, is the need for ever greater conviction about the need for responsible cooperation. The problems looming on the horizon are complex and time is short. In order to face this situation effectively, there is a need to act in harmony. One area where there is a particular need to intensify dialogue between nations is that of the stewardship of the earth's energy resources. The technologically advanced countries are facing two pressing needs in this regard: on the one hand, to reassess the high levels of consumption due to the present model of development, and on the other hand to invest sufficient resources in the search for alternative sources of energy and for greater energy efficiency. The emerging countries are hungry for energy, but at times this hunger is met in a way harmful to poor countries which, due to their insufficient infrastructures, including their technological infrastructures, are forced to undersell the energy resources they do possess. At times, their very political freedom is compromised by forms of protectorate or, in any case, by forms of conditioning which appear clearly humiliating.

Now, this call prudence and for avoiding ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, is it aimed at environmentalists or at climate change deniers? Perhaps both, when their environmental conclusions magically align with their political beliefs? And the call to prudence, when both sides of the debate, or of what remains of the debate in the light of mounting evidence, find the positions of the other imprudent, who is it aimed at? "Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions," says the Pope.

When he refers to unilateral decisions rather than dialogue, is he referring to the majority who decided to act in concert to voluntarily contain their emissions or to the very few who decided not to? When he talks about setting up international agencies to confront the stewardship of earth, is it with a mandate to let each country do whatever it wants, in the absence of an international treaty or protocol? His message is very clear to me. Despite apparently not taking a side in the debate, the Pope states as fact that there is in fact an environmental crisis and that action is urgent. "The problems looming on the horizon are complex and time is short". He states that rich countries have a pressing need to reduce their level of energy consumption, and to invest in alternative energy and in energy efficiency.

Maybe the Pope who wrote that second paragraph is one of the the climate change fear-mongerers that the Pope who wrote the first paragraph is criticizing for being too hasty in declaring an urgency for action and for being dogmatic in the opinion that energy efficiency and alternative energy are required. Or maybe the conservative journalists who make him out to be a climate change denier are grasping at straws, wishing to have him seem support their point of view when he clearly does not. The Holy See has always supported the Kyoto Protocol and is well on its way to its objective of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral sovereign state.

Tags: Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Energy Energy Efficiency Pope Vatican Journalism

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Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize

It's a story that gets repeated in a lot of major cities. Retailers in a struggling downtown pin their hopes on a high-end condominium complex to bring them fresh new customers. Condo dwellers move in, but the customers never appear.

If the retailers were unable to attract the thousands of people already within walking distance, what makes them think that a few hundred others will be any different? Is it like Goldilocks, the potential customers that are nearby are too old or too young, but the new ones will be just right?

From speaking to retailers in areas that have both highrise condos and other forms of housing in the vicinity, the people in the condos are not their best customers. It's mostly the ones in the ground-oriented housing, the ones with families and/or roots in the area, that frequent local stores. Is the condo lifestyle with an underground garage not conducive to picking up some groceries from the local butcher and fruit store, or is there something about ground-oriented housing that is more likely to make people grounded, loyal to the small retailers within a few blocks of them?

It's not just the fact of plopping a certain number of persons in one place that animates the street, and arranging them vertically does not guarantee that a large proportion of them will walk the street and animate it in search of who knows what destination. A prerequisite is to provide these destinations: parks, schools, community centres, skating rinks, and so forth. Half of these are destinations mostly for households with children, so having family housing as part of a diversity of housing types helps ensure that people are walking down the street and interacting. The area of course has to be made walkable, with a scale and feel that lends itself to that mode of transportation.

Condos do very little of any of that. Downtown condos interact with the street through video cameras, a sign of mutual hostility and suspicion. They can be part of the mix, and once you get a mix of ages giving life to the street, and giving subsistence and permanence to the retailers who serve them, condos can be additional, a way to get a shot at the big-ticket items that the condo crowd may notice while walking from the newsstand to the coffee shop on those days where they don't just go from the underground garage to their apartment without any interaction with the street. But they can't be the mainstay of the retailers who are holding out for a better class of customers.

This is one of the flaws behind "new" mixed use: the thought that having buildings with both retail and residential ingredients on the same lot will magically ignite the flame of commerce. Retail has to stand on its own two feet with the customers that are already there in single-use buildings within walking distance. Having more customers an elevator ride away doesn't contribute to retail success. The key to successful mixed use? Put retail where retail wants to go, near where people already live and can walk. Let them put a few affordable apartments above the stores, walkups only if at all possible.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Walkable Downtown Revitalization

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Carbon Offsets in Ontario

There is an interesting note in the Law Times about a new carbon offset program in Ontario. This program was announced in September, during the election campaign, and was ignored by the media. I'm with Howard Hampton on this one, the media really ignored a lot of important issues during the campaign. It had nothing to do with ignoring his party, all parties were ignored when they spoke about the environment.

The government announcement and the subsequent article in the Law Times are puzzling by the parts that they leave out. Offsets as a mechanism are part and parcel of a cap-and-trade system, except for those that are for entertainment purposes only. You buy a credit to offset the amount by which you exceed the cap that has been imposed on you. You sell an offset or credit when you are well below your cap.

So starting with agriculture and forestry implies that Ontario is imposing GHG gas emissions caps on the agricultural and forestry industries. That could be good. Where are those caps? Are they actual caps or are they just intensity-based? Why are the farmers not out there debating this? This could be a good way for the hard-pressed beef cattle industry to ease out of that production which emits so much GHG.

It could be a way to promote low-till and no-till agriculture, to improve manure management, and to reduce the amount of fertilizer used. Calculated correctly, it will kill off the silly 5% biofuel target unless the farming and transformation is done in a way that at least breaks even in terms of GHG emission.

With cap-and trade, farmers could keep on using old high-till and manure handling methods, or stay in the beef business, but then have to buy offsets from the manufacturing sector or from Ontario Power Generation, who have so far led the way to GHG reduction. Or you could reward those farmers who can prove their entire supply chain is 100% Syncrude-free.

All right, I admit I don't really believe it. The program sounds voluntary. A farmer does something good and gets a credit while his neighbour steps in to adopt the bad practice to fill the void and gets no disincentive. To me, starting with farming and land use is a sure sign that the credits are for show only. Canada has tried for a long time to fool itself into thinking that replanting a forest reduces GHG. Most forests are really relatively carbon neutral. Environment Canada tried that and found out that land use, despite all the work of Mother Nature, doesn't lower our emissions on paper it increases them. Not counting them Canada has the seventh worst record on emission levels, but counting the forests it's the third worst. The only country with cooperative trees is Latvia, whose emissions are negative. Bad luck, reducing our GHGs is not in Mother Nature's mission statement, nature is designed to keep them about constant. For every tree you plant you get a million bugs eager to release whatever carbon the tree fixes.

But planting a tree is such a lovely symbolic gesture, surely that is worth money. And composting is so righteous! Sorry, nature has been capturing and releasing carbon for many millenia without a significant effect on GHG levels. You actually have to extract and burn less fossil fuels and limestone in total, or stop generating so much methane and NOx. This seems like just a feel-good PR program. Please prove me wrong.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Energy Carbon Offset Environment Ontario

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Is Carbon Sequestration Completely Useless?

I have been giving Mark Jaccard and other carbon sequestration enthusiasts a hard time, but does that mean that carbon sequestration is a complete waste of time? Not necessarily, but you have to be aware of the costs and of the niches where the technology is a good fit. At the very least it is a good way to hoist the coal industry on its own petard. They say sequestration will make them as green as other fuels? Fine, you can still sell coal as a fuel as long as you reduce emissions to the level of natural gas. We're not putting you out of business, we just believe you're telling the truth about sequestration, wink, wink.

As I have mentioned before, the concentration of CO₂ in flue gas is so low, and the cost of separating it out is so high both in terms of money and in terms of GHG emissions that it is not worth tackling that problem and probably will never be. It's much better value for money to just stay away from high-carbon fuels as much as possible. It's like the problem with extracting fuel from the tar sands. Right now extracting uses large quantities of natural gas as feedstock and other energy sources to move the stuff and heat it up. You could then add more energy and use it to sequester some of the carbon. But when you do all the math a much simpler solution is staring you in the face: rather than using natural gas to process the tar sand into a fuel, use the natural gas as a fuel directly and leave the tar in the ground. You get to deliver a cleaner fuel to markets, at lower cost and with much lower GHG emissions. And you avoid destroying the entire Athabaska basin. Everybody wins.

Back to carbon sequestration. There are plenty of processes where CO₂ is produced in higher concentration, where the separation cost is much lower. Right now that CO₂ is usually just being released into the air. There are also plenty of processes that consume CO₂ and where customers are willing to pay good money to get a source of it. So much so that there is a market for the drilling of underground CO₂ wells, taking naturally sequestered CO₂ out of the ground to satisfy a market demand. The low-hanging fruit is to bring the two together, to make sure that CO₂ in the ground stays in the ground, and then to make sure that everyone captures the easily captured CO₂ and that any excess that can not be used gets buried.

Some of the easily captured sources of CO₂ include ammonia production for fertilizer, fermentation, lime calcination, detergents, and natural gas wells. Oddly enough, when producing "clean energy" like fuel ethanol or natural gas, a lot of CO₂ get dumped into the atmosphere. Most gas wells contain a lot of CO₂. The industrial processes for preparing the gas for market does the separation of practically pure CO₂ at virtually no additional cost. Don't release it, capture it and make gas even greener. If possible, sell it. If not, back in the ground it goes.

Fermentation, particularly for alcohol, produces a lot of CO₂. That's why beer has bubbles. Actually, that used to be the reason. Often the CO₂ produced is released into the air during fermentation, and other CO₂ is pumped into the beer at the end. Remember that for every molecule of ethanol that you drink or put in your car, a molecule of CO₂ escapes into the atmosphere. Catch it and use it.

Various chemical processes generate CO₂. In some cases, petrochemical plants are already capturing it. There is the famous example of the ethylene glycol plant of Shell Chemicals in Scotford selling CO₂ to Air Liquide, which processes it for the soft drink industry. But larger-scale processes could also capture their CO₂, including the production of ammonia and the calcination of carbonates in lime kilns to make cement. Again, the gas is produced in high concentrations and is easily captured.

Various processes use CO₂. Some use it and sequester it, and some use it and release it, so the same argument applies to them: catch it and recycle it. It's used in the beverage industry. Huge waste - it necessarily gets released into the air. It's used in refrigeration as dry ice or to replace freon. Well, it's better than freon anyway but it is still released into the air. Is it better in terms of CO₂ to use dry ice in refrigeration rather than portable refrigeration units? Not sure. It's used in some chemical processes: urea and ethanol. It's used in enhanced oil recovery. It's pumped into the ground as a solvent. That has the potential to be sequestered, but in actual fact it gets pumped right back out once it's done its job underground and tends to be released into the air. Close but not quite there. It can also be used in greenhouses, for two purposes - as a pesticide since it is after all a poison in high concentration, and to enrich the air. Plants convert it into sugars and such things. Give them a little more in their atmosphere and it replaces some fertilizer, and allows cold countries to reduce their food imports a bit. The processes that use CO₂ already get it in part from the process that produce it, and in part from CO₂ wells. Let's at least put the wells out of business. In relative terms it's not a major part of our total GHG emissions that are affected, but it's a start and it's cheap to do compared to alternatives.

All of this is to say that carbon capture has a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly by co-locating producers and consumers of CO₂. And you can also often use the synergy to make use of waste heat. Carbon storage also has a role, when all the CO₂ that is easily captured has saturated the market for industrial uses and can be buried relatively cheaply. But extracting it from flue gas to bury it? Only when through conservation and efficiency we have eliminated all the high-carbon fuel use (coal, tar sand, heavy oil, biofuels) that we can. Then when carbon taxes reach $150 a ton it becomes worthwhile to consider extracting CO₂ from flue gas. But that's really a last resort. There is no good reason to ever choose carbon capture and storage over other alternatives, say the experts. Wind, solar, and conservation are a lot cheaper for the same effect.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Kyoto Protocol Climate Change Energy Carbon Capture Environment

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Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal

As soon as it came out, I read "Hot Air - Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge", by Jeffrey Simpson, Mark Jaccard, and Nic Rivers. It's an interesting writing style. The first part is historical fiction, without the constraints of chronological presentation, and the second part is fantasy.

The reason why there are three authors is, presumably, because this is the list of people he is in agreement with. This makes for an odd selection of material. The purpose of the book is so that Jaccard, the archetypal one-handed economist, can expound on how everyone else is wrong, even those who claim to agree with him, how they have all been wrong for decades and how they will all fail miserably in the future unless they do precisely what he says. On the other hand, Simpson's journalistic instincts probably made him slip in the facts that prove the opposite point of view, unredacted. I don't know whether Simpson is responsible for the various gratuitous negative comments about Quebeckers, or whether he was the one that toned them down. The book judges harshly any politicians and public servants that don't do what he says, which is to say all of them. Except for anonymous ones who they claim privately agree with him but never say so. It dismisses most studies and consultations on the subject of climate change as wastes of time, presumably with the exception of when the government consults him or pays him for a study.

It would take a while to go through the list of flaws and contradictions in the book, but I will just focus on the two principal ones: First, Jaccard says that there are four possible policy tools available to governments, command-and-control regulations, market-oriented regulations, subsidies, and information, and of those the last two are guaranteed to have no effect. Now, if we start counting the policy tools that have no effect, there are a lot more than two. But seriously, Jaccard is quick to dismiss the non-economic policy tools without a shred of evidence to support his claims (as he admits at one point). He even puts his assumptions that subsidies don't work into his CIMS model, which, reduced to the status of a ventriloquist's dummy, dutifully spits out this assumption as an output.

But the major flaw in this work is the comfortable fantasy that underlies everything he has worked on recently - that we can and should continue increasing our reliance on fossil fuels, and trust in some magic technology to capture it and bury it underground. I wish I had time to examine his figures and sources and compare them to what most people understand to be reality: this idea of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide together is simply not feasible now, and probably it will never be feasible. Not only economics rules it out but so do the inexorable laws of thermodynamics.

The concentration of CO₂ in flue gas is really quite low, about 10%. Before you can consider pumping it underground and hoping that it doesn't some day come back up and wipe out most forms of life, you have to expend considerable energy in separating it out from the other gases. As a result, the CO₂ that you will be burying will have cost you $100 a tonne, not counting the fact that you have consumed nearly as much energy in processing the CO₂ as you generated when you burned the coal in the first place, meaning the efficiency of production using capture-and-storage approaches zero.

Now this is the secret to Jaccard's results: the inefficiencies that he introduces into the energy production cycle by adding his imagined carbon sequestration scheme and through the more inefficient biofuels is subtracted from the efficiencies that are gained through various advances in energy efficiency and conservation. In his model, he is essentially sabotaging the energy efficiency figures by adding inefficiencies that nobody asked for, and then saying See? Energy efficiency doesn't help!

But even if we accept that people are never going to consume less energy willingly (reality begs to differ - in 2005 in Canada people consumed less energy, and the UK has made huge strides), and even accepting that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to determined economists, there are two options before us: either we consume more energy and invest in sequestration technology, literally pouring our money into a hole in the ground, or we decide to use less energy for the same or equivalent economic results. The first gives us greater environmental impacts as we struggle to increase our energy production ever more, and increases the amount of money that we spend on energy. The second reduces our input costs, eliminates or greatly alleviates several environmental problems, and makes us more competitive on the world market. Now, Mr. Jaccard is quite right when he talks about the effect of carbon taxes and of cap-and-trade systems. They are extremely effective and relatively cheap. His figures show significant improvements with a carbon tax of merely $15 a ton of CO₂. Imagine, all those people who wouldn't take the one-tonne challenge doing so if it means saving fifteen bucks.

There is a lot of willingness to change in Canada, if people had the means at their disposal. What do they need? Information. Maybe subsidies. Contrary to what the book says those have been proven to work. And yes, carbon taxes and mandatory regulations also work well, particularly for those companies that are motivated only by money. Are you listening, oil industry, and companies that make ammonia, fermentation, and adipic acid, and so forth? Controlling your emissions is cheap and now you'll have a reason to do it. As to electricity production, the idea of the utilities and the governments that own them taxing themselves into compliance was a bit silly. Here, politics is the key - people will vote for those that will shut down the fossil fuel plants. It worked in Ontario and Quebec, and it's catching on.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Carbon Tax Kyoto Protocol Climate Change Canada Energy Carbon Capture Environment Economics

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Congestion Pricing, Privacy, and Mesh Wireless Networking

One of the top innovators in the field of wireless networking is also one of the top innovators in sustainable transportation. And now, Zipcar founder Robin Chase brings both together to address the two biggest problems in the implementation of congestion pricing: cost and privacy.

Transportation is definitely a big producer of economically unnecessary GHGs, by which I mean the type that takes away our money without increasing our standard of living. Our use of vehicles could be cut down significantly without making us any poorer, but the right economic signals are required so that people not only don't lose money but actually make money by cutting down their emissions. One way to do this is through road pricing and congestion pricing. These are ways to encourage environmentally sensible behaviours and investments by making the use of roads, particularly at peak times, pay for the transportation infrastructure in general, but particularly to make transit investments pay off.

Congestion pricing has worked for years in Singapore, and London's experience has been positive. Those that drive finally get the benefit of less congestion and those that don't will get improvements in transit infrastructure. The downsides are that two-thirds of the money collected goes to paying the cost of the fee collection itself, and that it requires that the government keep track of who is where.

One of the reasons for the cost is that congestion pricing and toll collection tends to be based on proprietary technology. Someone has to set up separate frequencies, closed networks, proprietary protocols, and then distribute the equipment on hundreds of thousands if not millions of vehicles. In addition to that, the man must have cameras recording your whereabouts so that those without the equipment or not cooperating can be nabbed. All of this equipment is single-purpose, unless you count the benefits to the people that have other reasons for wanting to know who is where.

Instead, Chase proposes a system where the communication equipment is low-cost, standard-part hardware with open software. The users themselves would finance the major part of the hardware investment in exchange for a break on tolls. Most of the communication would be mesh networks, which is to say ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks. Since these wireless devices have relatively low power and work over low distances, like the wireless network in your house, your wireless device relays its information to my wireless device, and so on until we reach a device which is close enough to a "base station" that it can transmit it to the fixed network, and vice-versa. The bandwidth is free; I don't charge you and you don't charge me for the use of our tiny bit of the network. Oh, and everyone gets free internet access as a bonus.

The location of cars would be based on GPS and triangulation from fixed nodes. The pricing system could have more flexibility that other systems, because changing the location of cordons, or basing pricing on actual congestion, or even complex cordons with buffer zones.

Chase also proposes a locational privacy method that prevents unauthorized snoopers from tracking where you are. Essentially it works like those who pay cash rather than using credit cards. People can pre-pay the tolls and deposit untraceable (nearly) electronic tokens at the toll booth. What will be known is how much you paid for tolls, but where and when is more difficult.

The details have been revealed in individual blog posts on her Network Musings blog over the past month. It's definitely worthwhile reading.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Congestion Pricing Wireless Network Privacy

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Cycling Will Kill You, But Not Cycling Will Kill You More

An interesting story in Gristmill. You are 3 times more likely to be killed on a bike than in a car. However, on a per-mile basis walking from the building to your car is even more dangerous and using public transit is 10 times safer than a car. If only the safety-conscious drivers of reinforced SUVs knew, the auto salesman in the showroom would be upselling them on a bus pass instead.

But, the article continues, the risk of death by violent collision is only one way of dying. Noncyclists are 40 percent more likely to die from a heart attack from lack of exercise. So cycling significantly reduces risk of death. On average, for every year of life lost in accidents, 20 years are gained in extra longevity.

Not even counting the others you take with you. If you die in a car crash, the odds are you are taking other people with you. If you die in a bicycle crash, you are likely the only casualty. The car or truck that hit you (or more likely some other inanimate object) may need a new coat of paint, but its occupant is likely unhurt.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Cycling

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Sprawl as Linear Population Density

I've been staring at this graph for days, trying to figure out what it's telling me. The graph is from the paper "Intake fraction of nonreactive vehicle emissions in US urban areas" from Atmospheric Environment. 39 (7), by J D. Marshall, S K. Teoh, and William W. Nazaroff.

What drew me to it is a more recent paper by University of Minnesota civil engineering assistant professor Julian Marshall, that further develops some strange and beautiful mathematical properties of how cities develop. Having such a lovely straight line such as the one on the left is unusual in urban studies, knowing that each city develops in its own unique way. Each point on the graph is a city. The x axis is the population of the city as measured by the US Census. The y axis is something completely new. The paper calls it "linear population density", or the number of people living along an imaginary straight line. It is actually the population of the entire city divided by the square root of the area of the city. Since the area is measured in square metres, its square root is measured in metres, hence the unit of people per metre.

This paper stumbles upon the fact that there is a log-log linear relationship between the population of a town and its "linear population density". With the slope of the graph it means that the linear population density is proportional to p^0.59, where p is the population. Forgive my rusty math, but this tells me that you can solve for the area of the city

p^0.59 = k p a^-0.5
p^1.18 = k² p² a^-1
a = k² p^0.82

That should mean that the area of cities goes up a little bit more slowly than population, that is to say that cities get relatively more compact as they get bigger.

But in a later article, in the September 2007 issue of Urban Studies, Julian Marshall shows that in fact the historical growth path of most cities over the past 50 years is not along that line, but rather as they grow the "linear population density" remains roughly constant. Redoing my calculation above with an exponent of 0 rather than 0.59, that would mean that the area of a city grows with the square of its population. Big difference. Double the population and quadruple its size. But extrapolating a bit, and I don't know whether the model allows this, if a city starts out with a uniform population density, then as it grows it will maintain that uniform density, but if it starts out with a large gradient from high to low density, then as it expands it will maintain that gradient and sprawl more and more.

There is a limit to how the data can be used that way. This analysis is based on US census data that considers a census tract to be urban if it is over a given density threshold. So if a city sprawls quite a lot, the edges will have such low density that they won't even be considered urban at all according to the data, making the city seem smaller, and therefore less dense, than it actually is. But the Brookings Institution study "Who Sprawls Most" corrected for that and came up with similar conclusions: cities with dense cores sprawl most, and cities with more uniform densities sprawl least.

Tags: Housing Sprawl Population Density Urban Planning Smart Growth

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Give the Peace a Chance

All on the same day: BC announced it was reviving the controversial "Site C" proposed hydroelectric dam on the Peace River. Energy Alberta announced that it was applying to build a nuclear power plant in Peace River, Alberta (downstream, not upstream from the dam - this isn't going to be an underwater nuclear reactor). And several oil companies announced that they were acquiring land for oil and gas wells in between the two. Why does Peace River need so much electricity? Well, tar sand extraction takes a lot of energy and water, and besides the Athabaska tar sands there is the lesser known Peace River tar sands deposits, right there near where the nuclear plant is planned. Are tar sands companies the ones buying that power? No, they say, the province lets them burn as much fossil fuels as they want (I'm paraphrasing but that's the essence) so why should they try to reduce their emissions?

So much for the peaceful farming communities of the Peace River. I wonder if changes to the water level, like those that resulted from previous dams on the Peace River, will remove so much water from the river that it affects the nuclear power plant.

Tags: Oil Hydro Nuclear Energy

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Does LEED Mean Anything?

More and more architects are coming out and saying out loud what a lot of people have thought all along. Getting LEED certification is good PR but not necessarily a good way to preserve the environment. An article in Fast Company explains that developers reach for easy solutions but not effective ones when it comes to being seen as one of the good guys. Like the people who drive a hybrid Hummer to the corner store.

There are all sorts of simple and inexpensive ways to get LEED points and some of them are very visible to potential tenants. The fact that the building is of a form that wastes huge amounts of energy is not a big deal as long as you have a long enough list of things that save energy, like bicycle racks. Having solar panels is a huge publicity boost and LEED point getter, even though it make less impact to the energy use than, say, the design of windows. Building two ordinary four-storey buildings is a lot more environmentally friendly than one 8-storey one, but it doesn't get you LEED certification. You get that by building the inefficient building then adding gimmicks until you collect enough points.

Tags: Urban Design Green Buildings LEED Energy

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London should ban cars altogether to reach targets

In a study published this week in The Lancet, epidemiologists from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have calculated that in order to reach the Mayor of London's ambitious Climate Change Action Plan, London should go beyond its current restrictions on cars in the inner city and ban cars from the inner and outer boroughs, and promote walking and cycling.

By doing so, along with public transint and with occasional taxi trips, London's residents would lose an average of 4.5 kg of fat per year, women would reduce risk of breast cancer by 25% and increase life expectancy by between 1 and 2 years, while men would enjoy a 20-40% reduction in the risk of premature mortality and around a 30% reduction in risk of type 2 diabetes.

Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Climate Change London

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What's Best for Renewables, Merton Rule or Feed-In Tariff?

A debate is on in Britain, which invented the Merton Rule, as to whether a feed-in tariff is better at improving the supply of renewables.

A few definitions. The Merton rule is a planning law, first introduced in the London suburban borough of Merton, that says that all new larger-scale development must provide at least 10% of its energy using onsite renewable sources. This typically means solar, but sometimes wind or geothermal. Because this technology can get expensive, developers also do their best to reduce energy use, so that the renewables portion is 10% of a smaller number. A large number of jurisdictions in Britain have gotten on this bandwagon. Since 2005, 90 have adopted the Merton Rule in draft or final Local Development Framework documents.

But more recently, some believe that a better instrument to promote renewables is a feed-in tariff, which promotes larger-scale economically viable projects. A feed-in tariff is essentially an agreement for a utility to purchase renewable electricity at a price that is a lot higher and conditions that are a lot looser than when they buy other sorts of electricity. Essentially, someone with a small generation capacity can sell their surplus power to the public utility when they have too much and buy some back from the utility when they have too little.

Ontario has feed-in tariffs and their system for connecting micro power generating sources and for net metering is quite sophisticated and successful. It has the advantage that the powers-that-be need not worry about financing and approving anything beyond the interconnection to the grid. Of course, everyone realizes that the utility is buying power at a high price when it least needs is and that they can not count on it being a reliable source, but that is not the point of it. The point is that these small producers are using their own power and so the utility does not need to produce as much, even at peak. The purchase of surplus power is just a way to help with the financing, but without putting in any money up front.

This is different from the Merton Rule. The Merton rule does not require any interconnection. For a feed-in tariff to be effective, a project should provide at least 100% of its own electricity, give or take, so that it has a surplus. Then and only then is there an incentive. At 10% as the Merton rule says, the project is financed by its own energy savings alone. It is more of a stick than a carrot, but it is a cheap way to get architects thinking and for developers to have to care. In the end, it's not that difficult. Canadian Tire sells solar or solar-wind kits that can easily supply 10% of your power for a few thousand dollars, and 100% for $20,000 and there are tax incentives to make it even more attractive. They even have a cool ROI calculator for grid-connected systems.

The two types of policy instruments are completely different. One can not replace the other. Is 10% a little arbitrary? Yes, but it's a practical way to force development into an appropriate mindset, at little cost to anyone. As for feed-in tariffs, they are essential to a burgeoning renewable strategy. Once renewable micro-generators become a larger percentage of the mix, other tools must be added to preserve the stability of the grid, like vehicle-to-grid systems that take advantage of the big batteries in hybrid and electric cars.

Tags: Energy Electricity Renewables Housing

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GHG: Doing More Than Your Neighbour

There was a discussion earlier on this blog as to which countries are doing better than others at reducing GHG emissions, and why. There are various possible ways to do the analysis when trying to determine whether differences are because of this or that policy or this or that economic structure. But when you look at the changes in GHG emissions from the base year for different countries (see chart from the unfccc.int web site, click for a closer view) it is clear that one factor predominates: geography.

Starting from the bottom of the chart, it is pretty obvious that a country's stay behind the iron curtain is a good predictor of major reductions. Several countries have even negotiated for base years earlier than 1990, which makes the change even bigger. At the top of the chart, being in southern Europe seems to be a good predictor for major increases. Various English-speaking countries are also well represented up there. Being Scandinavian also places the country above average, well that one is a surprise to me, I thought the Scandinavians were doing well. Some of them are more difficult to classify. Germany is partly northern and partly eastern. France is partly southern. How do you judge whether the country has developed a national will to change its ways or whether it is being dragged along up or down by the regional economy and the "maturity" of its own economic system?

One way I find useful is to see whether a country is outperforming the countries it borders with. With that unrigorous analytical tool in mind, some interesting insight comes out, and some countries stand out. Germany, for instance, inherited the highly polluting East German economy in 1990, and its emissions went down, but much less than its eastern fellow Soviet bloc neighbours, while its western neighbours kept their emissions relatively steady. So, good for Germany but it's not any better than the average of its neighbours.

The UK definitely stands out as one that does much better than all its neighbours. It cut its emissions significantly, while Ireland is through the roof, the Benelux countries are almost holding the line and France is down but not as much. France is actually outperforming all its neighbours except for the UK and Germany. France is caught between extremes. It has an eastern hybrid to the right, southern economies below (Spain and Portugal are the worst performers and Italy's emissions are also growing), the British GHG-cutting champion across the channel and small economies holding the line to the east.

Italy is a southern country, but all of its neighbours including Slovenia and Croatia are doing significantly better than it, except for Austria. What's with Austria? It also stands out as a country doing much worse than all its neighbours. Australia and New Zealand are difficult to compare to anything. On the surface, they are both doing badly, but to be fair Australia is not a signatory and its Kyoto target is 10% above 1990 level, while New Zealand's is 0%, so New Zealand is doing much worse.

Canada. Sigh. Worse than the US. Worse than just about every comparable country. It ratified the Protocol. It's a little better than the graph says, there was an error in that year's data, but it's still pretty bad.

The winners, relative to their neighbours: the UK, Sweden, France. The losers: Austria, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, and Italy.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas UK Kyoto Protocol

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Zero-Carbon by 2050

Britain's Liberal Democrats are the current leaders in the one-upmanship between political parties in the UK for who will most reduce GHG emissions, criticizing Labour's planned 60% cut as too timid. But their plan to bring Britain's net emissions to zero, by 2050, and non-nuclear to boot, was barely noticed. It's almost expected. You can view their plan here

Their plan for post-Kyoto includes allocation of per-capita targets for all countries. Interesting. They plan to use enforcement mechanisms so that economies that do not have or reach their target can not undercut those that do. Also they talk about auctioning emission allowances rather than distributing caps, and taxing fuels as they enter the economy rather than when they are consumed. They also want nothing but zero-carbon cars by 2040, and all new houses to use no fossil fuels for space heating by 2011. They plan to tax road freight and use it to subsidize rail. They want to speed up planning permissions for wind farms but they would like them to be mostly in the sea. Here they walk a tightrope between casting the planning process as the villain without telling local communities taht listening to their concerns is a waste of time. They want microgenerators to receive a return four times greater than the cost of electricity imported from the grid. Oddly enough they complain about how many trees in UK forests go unharvested. Individuals would be given personal carbon caps and trade in allowances and offsets. There is a little paragraph about the fact that the poorest people have the least efficient housing stock and can't afford to upgrade it, but little is said about what, besides making it even more expensive for them, they would do about it.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Carbon Tax UK Kyoto Protocol Housing

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US Legislators Consider Taxes on Gasoline, Carbon, and McMansions

House of Representatives member John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, plans to introduce comprehensive climate change reform legislation. This new law would cut off mortgage-interest tax deductions for houses over 3000 square feet, presumably just on the portion of the house exceeding that area. In the US, interest on your mortgage is tax deductible. By changing the deduction, most homeowners will still get the popular tax deduction, but it also gives the housing market a little nudge away from the enormous energy-guzzling houses. Real estate groups instantly complained that the measure would bring down house prices by 4%, which is bad for lenders about to foreclose. Apparently, about 15 percent of all houses are over 3000 square feet. Unbelievable. In 1950 the average new house was 1,000 square feet. Now the average is about 2500, but there are signs the average may have peaked.

Dingell first floated the idea at a town hall meeting in Ann Arbor where he also talked about a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions, a $100 per ton carbon tax, and a 50-cents-a-gallon tax on gasoline, with money for research on renewable energy.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Carbon Tax CCX McMansions Housing

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First Kyoto Carbon Trade in the US

Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) launched its futures contracts on Certified Emission Reductions yesterday, with a contract of 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent changing hands. The Certified Emission Reductions (CER) futures contract is the first time that hedging tools for CERs, a Kyoto Protocol compliant emissions instrument, was traded in an exchange in North America.

These trades, already popular in Europe, are becoming the new "carbon standard" currency among civilized countries that support the UN Clean Development Mechanism for approved and verified greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction and sequestration projects undertaken in developing countries, and link domestic GHG markets with international ones.

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Would Reducing Energy Use Yield a Green Dividend?

I'm just a few recent stories together under the theme of the "green dividend".

The Canadian government, forced by law to present a plan that respects the Kyoto Protocol, has instead tabled essentially the same old plan, with a section arguing that respecting the GHG reductions in the protocol would damage the economy and drive up energy costs. They predict that by 2012, GHG emissions will be only slightly less than those of 2005. That is a neat trick, because the trend in GHG emissions 2003-2005 was already down, not up. This means that they believe that their more recent programs will actually reverse that downward trend and bring emissions back up. Sad part is, they may well be right.

"The Government's analysis, broadly endorsed by some of Canada's leading economists, indicates that Canadian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would decline by more than 6.5% relative to current projections in 2008 as a result of strict adherence to the Kyoto Protocol's emission reduction target for Canada."

However, I think that even the modest 6.5% GDP reduction in the catastrophe scenario is probably off. Economics has trouble predicting the future, it can only use models that account for changes in the past. And in the past, there was a strong correlation between GDP and energy use. But which is the cause and which is the effect? If you have no reduction targets, then an extra unit of production costs an extra unit of energy. And domestic GDP is based on consumption. As Shumacher tells us, GDP is not a measure of how well off we are in the sense of how happy we are with our lives, it is a measure of how much money changes hands. If you consume more, the GDP goes up. Put more gas in your car and GDP rises. But will GDP fall if we consume less energy? Not necessarily. Although rises in GDP usually accompany increases in energy use, many economies including our own have experienced reductions of GHG emissions and of energy use without a decline GDP. The models may very well presume that the two go hand in hand simply because most data point in the past had the two linked, back when reducing production was a major reason for reducing energy use.

A white paper from CEOs for Cities, "Portland's Green Dividend," argues (unfortunately from misleading data, which does not change the value of the qualitative argument) that cities where investments in urban planning may have resulted in less driving, people can simply take the time and money they save by driving less and spend it on things of more benefit to the local economy than foreign oil and foreign cars. An interesting argument. I think it's a metaphor more than the fact that people suddenly find their gas money accumilating in their pocket and decide to spend it on local organic cuisine or other things whose price remains constant.

But these simplistic arguments may well hold when using a more defensible model of the economy. For every economically and environmentally expensive Alberta job lost as a result of this economic shift away from fossil fuels, new jobs will appear in B.C. and Ontario and Quebec who see a benefit in being at the forefront of a greener economy. The cost of energy will go up, yes, but not only will we consume less of it but it makes all sorts of other labour-intensive and knowledge-intensive parts of our economy perform better, and it also insulates them from the inevitable rise in energy prices that will fell economies that did not shift gears soon enough.

So which is right? I suspect that there would indeed be short-term economic disruption. A carbon tax, imposed even on exports, would move money around in the economy and displace some oil workers and truck drivers. However this adjustment would not be as painful as some of the other economic transformations from de-regulation and globalization, since those oil workers and truck drivers were not doing that job a few years ago: they are mobile, enterprising, and had other skills before going there. They won't all be making windmills, but our economy has a range of sectors, some energy intensive and some not. If they were to switch to green construction and transit drivers, the carbon tax could probably make their transition easier than, say, a employee of a suddenly defunct dot com in 2000.

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The Skype is Falling! The Skype is Falling!

Last week's Skype outage shows the fragility of peer-to-peer networks once they reach a certain size. To be fair, not all peer-to-peer networks. Skype has based its network's invulnerability on a set of horcruxes (what, don't you read?) known as supernodes, which it has hidden among its customers's computers.

Skype does not provide its own servers to perform most of its critical services. Instead, whenever it notices that one of its customers has lots of bandwidth and no pesky firewall, that computer is pressed into service as a critical server on the Skype network. It sets up a little sign on the internet saying it works for Skype and other computers wishing to make Skype calls should connect through it.

As it happens Windows machines with automatic Windows Update are prominent among the machines that can be secretly promoted to supernode because of their large bandwidth budget and permissive security. So when Microsoft made a lot of those machines reboot at the same time on August 16-17, Skype eventually went down, unable to find new "volunteer" servers quickly enough. I think that the secrecy and unwitting outsourcing of the supernode role is a throwback to the Skype developers' Kazaa past, where they thought this was a good defense against being shut down by the authorities.

Now wouldn't it be better if the supernodes were conscious of the fact that they were being used that way? They could maybe take some steps to make sure that Skype wasn't caught short every time they turn off their computer, maybe agreeing to giving Skype a 60-second heads-up to start moving customers to a different supernode temporarily.

More telling than the network failure, though, was the fact that it took several days for the network to recover, long after the root cause had disappeared. That shows singular lack of foresight in the design. I've had that happen to my servers before. When running a particularly popular internet service, I had to restart some server components at one point. Users of the service, seeing a delay in response time, of course just hit reload over and over again, queueing a huge number of requests. But while a service is being restored, not all components come back instantly. The database checks itself out, new database connections are set up, errors are logged, and all sorts of components are all yelling at each other if you could just hang on a few seconds I'm busy here. The backlog of requests gets bigger and bigger until the whole thing comes crashing down again, not neatly at all but each with its own timeouts and each filling out its error logs with cryptic and misleading messages.

Thus with the Skype network. It had been brought up to full volume over a period of years. It doesn't have a good mechanism for restarting from zero with everyone waiting. This isn't Windows, where reboots are frequent and the system knows in what order things have to be restored, and users know when to quietly drum their fingers. Since it's distributed, you can't go over the web's intercom and say would everyone please stop trying to connect for 5 minutes, OK?

If Skype is going to become respectable, with its billions from eBay, it's going to have to be more open about relying on its users for its service. Maybe give them a freebie in exchange for a service level agreement. Maybe even provide some of its own superdupernodes on its own hardware. It can't assume that people won't have firewall rules to keep them out. Skype also has to learn to compartmentalize damage to its network.

Tags: computers Skype P2P internet Skype

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National Inventory Report on Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks, 1990-2005

The annual National Inventory Report on Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada 1990–2005, required under the Kyoto Protocol, will be out soon. I asked for and received a copy last week, in advance of the full report being made available on the Environment Canada web site.

The good news: