https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/youre-all-hypocrites-why-its-a-colossal-cop-out-to-keep-blaming-canadas-sky-high-emissions-on-alberta
[The fossil fuel industry does not speak with a single homogeneous
voice, so it's not mandatory that a municipality or its residents do so.
Still, there is a bit more to this story. For example, Victoria might
decide to provide shore power from renewables to maintain all ship
services other than propulsion when docked, which would help reduce the
emissions produced from cruise ships. They might also choose to offer
only less offensive fuels in their local bunkering operations - e.g.
blended biofuel rather than straight heavy fuel oil (HFO). Finally,
having debarked in Victoria once from a cruise ship, it's pretty clear
the local economy is not dependent on cruise ships. Presumably the
traffic provides some economic benefit to some Victoria businesses, but
I did notice that most of the U.S. passengers did not go ashore in 'the
foreign country'.
The laundry list of current energy use practice factoids make it clear
we have work to do in making our daily living more sustainable, and
should be used to call out all our governments to be making
unsustainable practices less affordable (remove massive and growing
fossil fuel taxpayer subsidies like buying KMTM) and kick-starting more
sustainable practices (time-limited subsidies for things like electric
cars, lower energy consumption devices and biofuels).
links in online article]
Tristin Hopper
January 24, 2019
6:00 AM EST
This week, the city of Victoria, B.C. announced plans to launch a class
action lawsuit against the oil and gas sector. The idea is to tally up
the various damages done to the city by climate change and send the bill
to the likes of Suncor or CNRL.
It’s the latest salvo of a movement that seeks to singularly blame the
oil industry for climate change while conveniently ignoring the millions
of daily consumer choices, often made by activists themselves, that
contribute to Canada’s fossil fuel addiction.
Below, a quick primer on how some of Canada’s most anti-oil,
anti-pipeline corners seem to have no problem burning oceans of oil when
it’s for stuff they like.
Victoria is Canada’s busiest cruise ship port of call
At the same time that they’re itemizing damages they can expense to
ExxonMobil, Victoria is aggressively trying to attract more cruise
ships. Mayor Lisa Helps, in fact, has championed a campaign that would
make Victoria a home port for vessels. “It’s a great opportunity not
only from the room nights from a tourism perspective but also for the
spinoffs it would generate for the local economy,” she told local CBC.
Tourism is very important to the B.C. capital, and a lot of that is
indeed sustained by the estimated $130 million brought in by the city’s
more than 200 cruise ship visits per year. But it all comes at the cost
of enormous, heavy-oil-powered pleasure vessels idling just out of
sight. The size and efficiency of cruise ships vary, but an analysis by
the Global Sustainable Tourism Dashboard estimated that the average
cruise ship passenger is racking up a carbon bill of 0.82 tonnes of
carbon dioxide equivalent; roughly the same as a trans-Atlantic flight.
The European Committee on Transport and Tourism, meanwhile, has
estimated that a cruise ship passenger does about 36 cents of
environmental damage for every kilometre they travel. It’s essentially a
marine equivalent of Victoria’s economy being dependent on a sprawling
parking lot filled with constantly idling RVs. Oh, and Victoria also
just opened a dedicated marina for mega-yachts.
Vancouver is North America’s largest exporter of coal
Anybody boarding a B.C. Ferries vessel from the Lower Mainland to
Vancouver Island will pass directly by Westshore Terminals, the ranking
title-holder as the largest single coal export facility in North
America. In 2017, the port moved 29 million tonnes of coal, more than
the combined coal exports of the entire U.S. West Coast. Coal is
actually B.C.’s main export commodity, with $3.32 billion worth of the
stuff pulled out of the province in 2016. In the hierarchy of dirty
fuels, coal is the easy victor. One of the main reasons Ontario has been
able to bring down its emissions in recent years, in fact, is simply
because it swapped out its coal power plants for natural gas ones. A lot
of this coal is for steel production, although an increasing share in
recent years has “thermal coal” used for electricity production.
Regardless, it all eventually gets sent up a smokestack somewhere in
Asia. Per year, the coal sent out of Westshore Terminals represents a
carbon dioxide footprint larger than B.C. as a whole. The lifecycle
carbon dioxide emissions of a single year’s worth of Westshore coal
exports is about 99.8 million tonnes. In all of 2014, the 4.7 million
people in B.C. managed to emit only 64.5 million tonnes.
Everybody (except Alberta) is emitting more carbon than they assume
Alberta is indeed responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of
Canadian greenhouse gas emissions. In per capita terms, Albertans have a
carbon footprint of 67 tonnes per year, compared to only 13 tonnes for
the average Ontarian and 10 tonnes for the average Quebecer. This is
largely because of oil and gas production. Running giant facilities in
Northern Alberta that remove bitumen from sand require an awful lot of
emissions, which all gets added to the Alberta total. However, it’s
somewhat unfair to slap all the oil sands emissions on Alberta
considering that most of the petroleum they’re producing is getting used
somewhere else. A unique analysis by the University of Calgary recently
recalculated provincial emissions so that provinces were placed on the
hook for the emissions that it had taken to produce their gasoline for
them. If, say, B.C. consumed 10 per cent of Alberta’s oil production,
they were credited for 10 per cent of Alberta’s oil production
emissions. Under this model, Alberta’s per-capita emissions drop to 39.5
tonnes while Ontario’s rises to 17.6 tonnes and Quebec’s to 15 tonnes.
Why are Alberta’s per capita emissions still incredibly high even when
oil sands emissions are downloaded to other provinces? Coal-powered
electricity is a major reason, although it is scheduled to be phased out
by 2030. Albertans also have bigger cars, bigger homes, bigger malls,
more construction and colder weather.
Canadians (and Quebecers) are driving more and bigger cars
The good news is that car engines are getting more efficient. The bad
news is that the vehicles they’re carrying are getting heavier and
Canadians are buying more of them. A mere 10 years ago, heavier vehicles
such as trucks, vans or SUVs represented only 45 per cent of Canadian
private vehicle sales. By 2017, that had risen to 69 per cent. Canadians
are also buying more cars, with the rate of vehicle ownership rising
from 70 per cent to 88 per cent in only the last 20 years. “Canadians
are embracing vehicle ownership faster than any other nation that we
know of,” auto sales analyst Dennis DesRosier said in a 2018 post for
the Canadian Fuels Association. This trend is even true in Quebec, the
most consistent political opponent of new Alberta oil infrastructure.
Between 1990 and 2013, sales of “light passenger trucks” in La Belle
Province rose by 195 per cent, according to a report by HEC Montreal.
Overall, Quebecers were increasingly favouring “heavy vehicles that use
more fuel, produce more emissions and are difficult to electrify,” found
the report. This relentless push towards larger vehicles has helped to
boost Quebec’s gasoline demand by 13 per cent since 2013. Speaking of
Quebec, at the same time its government was bad-mouthing the Energy East
pipeline, they ponied up $350 million to build a cement plant that now
ranks as the single most high-emission facility in the province.
Whistler’s economy runs on car and plane trips
In November, Whistler mayor Jack Crompton wrote letters to more than 20
oil companies officially asking them for money. Specifically, to pay
their “fair share” of the costs of climate change, such as revenue
losses due to shorter ski seasons. But Whistler is far from a model of
carbon neutrality. The municipality hosts more than three million
visitors per year, a rate that has risen by more than 40 per cent since
the 2010 Olympics. Naturally, getting all these extra visitors to a
remote mountain community comes at an epic cost in fuel. More than
22,000 cars travel the Sea to Sky Highway each day, and Whistler
actively promotes itself to international visitors, all of whom must
presumably get there by jet aircraft. Whistler has one of the country’s
highest rates of non-resident property ownership, with 15.5 per cent of
their residential property owned by people who must travel vast
distances to occupy it. Whistler is also a world centre for heli-skiing,
easily one of the more carbon-intensive leisure activities in existence.
As Whistler’s official tourism literature has boasted, 90 per cent of
the world’s heli-skiing happens in British Columbia.
Canadian Amazon orders are rising precipitously
Just after Christmas, Amazon boasted that they had sold and shipped more
items over the holiday season than ever before. In Canada alone, the
rate of packages ordered with “free one-day shipping” jumped more than
100 per cent. It’s hard to quantity Amazon’s effect on the climate,
largely because the company refuses to publish a sustainability report
or disclose data on their carbon emissions. But given the small orders,
the heavy use of air freight, the larger-than-average size of delivery
vehicles and the sometimes-obscene quantities of packaging, it’s safe to
assume that an Amazon enthusiast is probably a bit harder on the climate
than the shopper making a weekly trip to the mall. According to U.S.
data, more than one quarter of the country’s transportation emissions
are from “medium and heavy-duty trucks,” the precise kind of vehicle
that is increasingly being dispatched into residential neighbourhoods to
deliver Amazon packages. Meanwhile, a lot of those products have hidden
carbon footprints all their own. The manufacturing of an average iPhone
X emits about 60 kg of greenhouse gases; the rough equivalent of burning
a water cooler jug filled with gasoline. But those emissions all
happened in China, so they aren’t counted towards the Canadian total.
Even in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, most commutes are by car
Downtown Toronto can proudly boast Canada’s lowest-emission
neighbourhoods. Walkable communities, ample transit and it’s all powered
by clean electricity from Pickering Nuclear Generating Plant. But this
wonderfully green urban existence is also one of Canada’s most
expensive. For most everyone else, an affordable life in Toronto is
probably going to require a lot of time in a car. Of Toronto commuters,
57.5 per cent still drive to work. This is the lowest rate of car
commuters in Canada, but it’s still not all that different from
Calgary’s rate of 68 per cent. Meanwhile, with the average Toronto
commuter spending 47 hours a year stuck in congestion, it’s reasonable
to assume that many of those car commuters are spending more time on the
road than anyone else in the country. Auto-dependent suburbs are one of
the fastest growing segments of Canadian cities. According to research
out of Queen’s University, only 14 per cent of residents in major
Canadian cities live in an “active core neighbourhood.” From 2006 to
2016, an incredible 85 per cent of population growth in Canadian cities
happened in auto-dependent suburbs. The housing affordability crisis
hasn’t made this problem any better. It’s also exacerbated by urbanites
who actively shut out development in core neighbourhoods, pushing new
builds to the car-dependent suburbs. When Cabbagetown can’t even
tolerate a new daycare in its midst, there is a carbon price to be paid.
More and more Canadians are flying
By far the number one way that a Canadian can send their carbon
footprint soaring is by flying. A single roundtrip flight in economy
class from Vancouver to Toronto adds an incredible 500 kilograms of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the equivalent of burning a large
rain barrel filled with gasoline. That single flight, in fact, spews
more carbon dioxide into the air than the average Ghanaian can manage in
an entire year. Thanks in part to the rise of low-cost airlines such as
Swoop or Flair Air, more and more Canadians than ever before are jetting
off to Mexico, Las Vegas or Nunavut, where a booming tourist trade is
allowing visitors to witness a melting Arctic firsthand. From 2013 to
2017, the number of passengers processed through Canadian airports rose
from 123.9 million to 149.6 million – a rise of more than 20 per cent.
One of the only major airports that didn’t see a precipitous rise in
traffic, in fact, is right in the middle of oil country: Edmonton only
added an extra 68,000 passengers during that period, compared to an
extra 5.8 million moved through Vancouver International Airport.
Swimming pools full of diesel are burned daily to sustain your hippie island
Saanich Gulf Islands, the riding of Green Party leader Elizabeth May,
contains five ferry-dependent island communities. Salt Spring Island
alone has three terminals managing roughly 20 ferry arrivals per day.
With only 10,000 inhabitants, this works out to an annual average of one
ferry trip for every two Salt Springers. And a ferry puts even the most
obnoxious Hummer to shame for fuel consumption. Salish Orca, one of the
newest and most efficient vessels serving Salt Spring Island, still
weighs 8,728 tonnes even before it’s packed with 140 cars. Bowen Island,
just outside Vancouver, is suspected of having one of Canada’s largest
carbon footprints due largely to its high number of daily ferry
commuters. And with B.C. Ferries ridership higher than ever, the Salish
Sea is set to feature even more ferries. Granted, B.C. Ferries has been
working hard to reduce its fuel consumption. The fleet is also being
converted to liquid natural gas, which will reduce emissions by up to 25
per cent. Regardless, in 2017 alone, B.C.’s island and coastal
communities required a climate tithe of 116.4 million litres of diesel.
For context, the Burnaby Refinery (the only refinery in the Lower
Mainland) cranks out about eight million litres of fuel per day. At that
rate, it would need to work for two weeks straight just to provide a
year’s worth of fuel for B.C.’s ferry fleet.
Basically every anti-oil sands activist uses eye-watering quantities of
fossil fuels
If someone has ever been introduced to a crowd as a “climate activist,”
chances are strangely good that they consume fossil fuels at an
infinitely higher rate than the average Westerner. Neil Young has a
weakness for high-polluting vintage cars. David Suzuki pays to offset
his personal emissions as a frequent flier, but isn’t as keen on
reducing them. Al Gore made $70 million by selling Current TV to Qatar,
a country whose GDP comes almost exclusively from fossil fuels. A common
activist response to these kinds of criticisms is that they are merely
victims to malevolent forces who have built a world dependent on fossil
fuels. “Corrupt subsidies, unjustified wars and corrupt legislation …
have all made it impossible to do anything other than what oil companies
tell us to do,” reads a 2018 blog post by the environmental group
350Vancouver. It is indeed impossible to live on the 21st century planet
earth without unwittingly participating in the carbon economy in some
way, but chances are good that Shell didn’t force actor and climate
change activist Leonardo DiCaprio to rent the world’s fifth largest
yacht in order to watch the World Cup.