Tag Archives: National Climate Assessment

Practical Approaches to Climate Change

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One of the more remarkable facets of the political debate over climate change is the almost knee-jerk rejection among conservative skeptics of the science is that they abandon the same can-do spirit of capitalism that they would otherwise adopt when defending the ability of the private sector to solve other problems. Confronted with the necessity of worldwide action to reduce the global disturbances that are driving increased weather volatility and more powerful disasters, they suddenly are filled with doubt about the ability of either public or private sectors, or both together, to successfully shift our energy consumption to less carbon-intensive solutions. They become, in short, the “cannot-do” crowd. Suddenly, there are massive technological and economic obstacles to converting the world economy to solar energy, wind power, geothermal, and just about any energy solution that does not involve fossil fuels.

They suddenly cease to be the advocates of practical problem solving. They must then cover this logical inconsistency by insisting that there is no problem to solve. When science demonstrates otherwise, massive volumes of science such as reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment, and numerous other sources, walls of doubt are constructed that soon take on dimensions of absurdity. I even had one relative tell me that scientists find evidence of climate change because that is what funders want, and if we only stopped funding the research, perhaps the truth would emerge. He was not joking.

With a spate of executive orders on climate having been issued by President Joseph Biden’s White House since taking office, this seems like an ideal time to highlight a book I recently completed that focuses on practical solutions. I had intended to read and review Solved: How the World’s Great Cities Are Fixing the Climate Crisis (University of Toronto Press, 2020) before the holidays, but perhaps now, with the Biden inauguration behind us, is the best time to introduce this work by David Miller, former mayor of Toronto, the largest city in Canada.

Biden’s executive orders focus, of course, on federal actions he can take immediately without Congress, such as rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and reinstating EO 13690, an Obama executive order that established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which President Trump had rescinded in 2017. I am glad to see this guidance reestablished.

David Miller, former mayor of Toronto. Photo borrowed from Wikipedia.

But there is a much larger point that I wish to make by highlighting Miller’s book. It is that many of the solutions this nation and world so badly need as a means of reversing the deleterious impacts of climate change not only already exist but are actively being pursued or implemented by cities throughout the world. Municipal governments have in many cases become the can-do laboratories, often with the help of private-sector partners who are also committed to creating a sustainable economy, without necessarily waiting for more sluggish national governments to act. We do, of course, want the U.S. and other national governments to act because what they do matters. But the blueprint for solving many climate challenges with infrastructure initiatives is readily available.

Miller’s book follows a standard formula of briefly introducing us to what various cities, including Toronto, have been doing over the past two decades to reduce their carbon footprints while making urban areas more appealing and convenient places to live. In separate chapters describing creative local initiatives around energy and electricity; existing and new buildings; public transportation; personal and other transportation; and waste management, Miller walks us through major projects undertaken in a variety of cities around the world.

But he starts with a chapter about the importance of plans and why they matter, for which the answer in part is that they demonstrate commitment on the part of city leadership to articulate climate challenges and then outline solutions with target dates for meaningful accomplishments. He notes that, in a two-week period in April 2019, Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver all launched climate plans “whose ambitions matched the requirements of science” but also, in the first two cases, recognized that climate change is “inherently unjust” and that “issues of equity and inclusion must be addressed by the plan if it is to succeed.” The importance of cities is that planning is integral to the role of city governments, which manage numerous functions that are both close to the ground and require integrated strategies to ensure that the work moves forward in a cohesive fashion. As an example, he cities the need in Toronto at one point to alter a particular bylaw to ensure the issuance of permits for solar thermal heating installations. Attention to details of a highly practical nature is the essence of success. They are what cities do, or should, anyway.

That attention to detail, however, can help create a roadmap for federal and state or provincial initiatives, which is one reason that presidents like Biden often recruit mayors for cabinet and other programmatic positions where such practical experience can help shape success at a larger scale. They are not the only people who can provide a practical perspective, and not all do, but those who have experimented in addressing practical climate-related problems can be valuable problem solvers.

In the arena of energy, Miller cites the example of Austin, Texas, which plans by 2022 to end the use of coal for electric power production, but needs energy that is “flexible, reliable, and predictable,” which has meant expanding renewable sources but also looking at storage mechanisms ranging from batteries to thermal storage to compressed air. Subsidies and incentives for residential homeowners support installation of rooftop solar energy, but Austin Energy is also helping the city meet its goal of 65 percent generation from renewables by 2025 with industrial-scale solar installations and wind energy. Municipal utilities such as that in Los Angeles have additional latitude to help cities meet such commitments.

Cities vary, as does the mixture of their greenhouse gas emissions. In a city as dense as New York, for example, transportation becomes a smaller proportional contributor because so many people rely on mass transit or simply walk. Buildings, on the other hand, which are often massive consumers of electricity and natural gas, contribute 73 percent of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 21 percent for transportation and 5 percent for waste. But building upgrades such as more efficient water heaters, heating systems, and insulation make a huge difference. Miller details how New York, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, tapped market forces, including disclosure and training to make inefficiencies more visible, and mandates through permitting systems, to drive positive change. The goal, he says, is net zero emissions by 2050 and a 40 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

One could go on with numerous examples from the transportation and waste management sectors, and Miller does, but the point is that, despite the need to reverse much of the negative policy direction of the Trump years and set bold climate goals for the future, many of the solutions already exist. In many cases, national governments, including the U.S. federal government, can closely study what their cities are already accomplishing, or have accomplished, and adapt those solutions to a larger scale, making the results and their feasibility clearer and more visible.

Still, this is not subject matter for Pollyanna types, but for pragmatists willing to roll up their sleeves. As Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, home of the Paris Climate Accord, notes in her afterword, “We have shown the world the potential for city-based action to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions and get the world on track to halve emissions by 2030. However, we must be realistic: our goals will take significant time and effort to achieve.”

No better time to start than now. That part, at least, seems perfectly clear to the new Biden administration. Little more than a week into his term, they seem to be moving quickly.

Jim Schwab

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

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Summarizing the major points from a densely factual book like Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik (Island Press, 2018), is about as challenging as understanding precisely what is happening in the midst of a rapidly moving massive wildfire. While California is not the focus of Struzik’s book, I might note that confronting such fires in November, such as we have seen on the news in recent weeks, ought to prod more interest in the recent National Climate Assessment and similar climate change science. The wildfire season most decidedly used to be shorter in California, a point Gov. Jerry Brown has made repeatedly. Put more bluntly, it is time to drop the political knee-jerk reactions and study the findings.

Horse Fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016. Photo from Wikipedia

In Firestorm, Struzik takes us north, much farther north. He starts his story by focusing on the utterly hellish nightmare of the May 2016 scene surrounding Fort McMurray, Alberta, during what became known as the Horse Fire, or among firefighters simply as “The Beast.” People with moderately long news memories may recall following this fire for several days and nights on television, as the fire swept through an area dominated by oil sands development, the heart of Canada’s energy sector. As Struzik notes, megafires (defined as exceeding 100,000 acres in size) are nothing new or unusual in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Three fires bigger than The Beast had occurred in Canada since 1950.

Not so long ago in human history, however, the consequences would have seemed less catastrophic because of the lack of large human settlements in the area, which is not to say that such fires would not have affected native villages and smaller towns. But energy development has brought urban development, and Fort McMurray in 2016 was a city of 88,000 people. As the wildfire attacked and surged through the area, generating massive confusion, it destroyed an estimated 2,800 homes and buildings, burned nearly 1.5 million acres, and produced nearly $9 billion in total losses, including predicted insurance losses of $3.77 billion. The book does not state whether these are U.S. or Canadian dollars (worth about 10 percent less), but I am assuming U.S. given its publication in the states. Either way, it is a massive impact. It is certainly a staggering economic impact on a province like Alberta, home to such facilities as the Imperial Oil plant, which according to Struzik produces 220,000 barrels per day of the bitumen that helps fuel Canadian energy exports.

Much of Struzik’s book, which often starts chapters with quotes from Dante’s Inferno, tours us through the ground-level experience of the fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May 2016. We follow police who worry about family members evacuating, police who work door to door warning people to evacuate, hospital workers preparing for incoming casualties, and highways filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic including people in SUVs abandoning their vehicles in ditches after running out of gas, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ensuring that such people found alternative rides to safe destinations. Air tankers fly low over the fire to drop their loads of retardant, and helicopters scoop water from nearby lakes in 180-gallon buckets to disperse as strategically as possible. Wildfire response is no less sophisticated or expensive than in the U.S., although Struzik notes some Canadian pride in protecting firefighter safety and eschewing the “hotshot” approach that can lead to heroic but tragic deaths. He paints a realistic but deeply troubling portrait of the human elements of confronting a massive wildfire.

RCMP responding to wildfire in northern British Columbia. Photo from RCMP website

If such fires in the far north are not new, then what, if anything, is the impact of climate change? As has been pointed out many times, it is folly to link any one event directly to climate change, tempting though it may be for many people. The reality is more profound and concerning. Since the 1970s, in Canada, the area burned has doubled, with the prediction that it may double again by mid-century and possibly triple by 2100. In short, the connection to climate change is not any one fire, a natural phenomenon in a fire-adapted environment, but in increased frequency.

Ashes and devastation after the fire at Fort McMurray. From RCMP website

As California has learned, that frequency can also be abetted by a longer fire season, itself a product of climate change. Struzik explains the fire triangle, a combination of heat, dryness or low humidity, and oxygen. On May 3, 2016, the temperature around Fort McMurray was 91°F. The humidity was only 13 percent. For those unfamiliar with the boreal forest, it may be surprising to learn that such temperatures are not entirely unusual in the summer, even in Alaska, with much longer days than in southern latitudes, just as winter brings deeper freezes and very short days. It is a climate of extremes. But climate change is warming the far north faster than almost anywhere else, producing the loss of polar ice caps and the melting of glaciers. Montana, Struzik says, may see average temperatures rise by 5° F., and Montana has major wildfire issues already. Melting ice caps and glaciers are factors in sea level rise, which in turn affects major cities like New York and Miami much farther south, but Struzik notes that we are all connected in other ways to the fate of the northern forest. In a major wildfire like that in Alberta, air quality has been shown to suffer in places like Chicago because of the upper atmospheric drift of ashes and pollution. Northern Alberta may seem a world away, but it will never be distant enough to have no impact below the border.

Personally, I find the science behind all this intriguing, at all levels. Most people, for instance, may not know the origin of the term “firestorm,” which grew out of the cataclysmic 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which took more than 1,500 lives, the deadliest in American history. The term refers to the behavior of lightning storms in pyrocumulonimbus clouds (aka pyroCBs), which involve an updraft “that sucks smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapor” high into the sky. As these cool, they perform like classic thunder clouds. But a chemical reaction forestalls any rainfall, allowing the lightning strikes to stoke and expand the fire. The phenomenon remains a mystery and subject of intense study for meteorologists. It is also obviously terrifying and deadly for those beneath it.

Ultimately, in such a book, the question is what we are going to do about the problem. Both the U.S. and Canada have struggled to find appropriate ways to fund wildfire response and suppression, although it is clear also that more money needs to be directed to mitigation and preparation. Firefighting by itself is a completely futile approach. Struzik emphasizes a need in both nations to invest more in scientific research and in developing a “holistic plan” to deal with wildfires when they occur. The price of not developing a better approach, he says, includes the loss of clean water, of birds and animals who will lose their habitat as the problem intensifies, and the loss of jobs afforded by the forest environment. That research must inevitably account for the impacts of humanly generated climate change in coming decades, a task that should never be underestimated because, as one scientist notes in Struzik’s last chapter, keeping up with climate literature is like “drinking from a fire hose,” a curious metaphor in light of the problem. We must also be realistic. Nature has always provided for natural recovery because fire is a natural phenomenon, but it is the pattern of recovery that may change significantly in a changing natural environment.

Jim Schwab