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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