06.05.07
Posted in Transportation, Politics
at 12:07 pm
I was startled to see the figure on the right in a recent Economist article. Canada is not only going in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s actually doing worse than the rest of the G8, including the United States.
One interesting aspect of Kyoto is that it isn’t indexed to population growth, so countries that accept large number of immigrants (e.g., Canada) are penalised relative to nations that have limited population growth (e.g., western Europe). Ultimately, I suspect this makes sense: the immigrants that Canada accepts are largely from low-carbon nations, and are likely to adopt high-carbon lifestyles upon arrival, so migration is not simply a redistribution of existing emissions. Nevertheless, it does leave Canada at a further disadvantage. Mind you, as the Economist figure shows, the European nations are striving for higher targets than Kyoto anyways - their internal burden-sharing agreement allocates more reduction burden onto high-emission nations.
Looking a little closer (with a little help from an Environment Canada report), we can see the breakdown of the growth in the figure above. I’d like to see this in a little more detail, breaking down energy and transportation a little more finely. Canada’s GHG emissions grew by 26.5% from 1990-2004 (from 599MT to 758MT), and I’ve expressed the 1990-2004 GHG increases in each category as a percentage of 599MT, to show how each sector contributes to the 26.5% growth.
- 8.5%: fossil fuel industries, pipelines and “fugitive sources” (coal, oil, natural gas)
- 7.8%: road and off-road transportation
- 5.8%: electricity generation
- 2.0%: commercial/institutional
- 1.7%: agriculture
- 1.5%: mining
- 0.3%: domestic marine transportation
- 0.2%: domestic aviation
- 0.2%: industrial processes
- -0.2%: rail
- -1.3%: other
- 26.5%: total
This puts in context some of the recent politicking about GHGs. Yes, the fossil fuel industries are a large part of the problem: the oilsands are a major source of carbon emissions, and the growth of exports in Alberta is clearly a big part of our emissions (8.5/26.5 = 32% of growth in GHGs). But, road/off-road transportation (29% of growth) and electricity (22% of growth) have also contributed significantly to our recent increases in emissions.
Breaking down the 7.8% from road and off-road transportation further:
- 3.6%: heavy-duty trucks (gasoline & diesel)
- 2.9%: cars and light-duty trucks (gasoline, diesel, propane and natural gas)
- 1.5%: off-road transportation (construction, agriculture, snowmobiles, ATVs)
- 7.8%: total
Heavy-duty trucks are a significant part of road transportation growth. Keep in mind that this is part of other changes in the freight industry, including a 0.3% increase in marine emissions and a 0.2% decrease in rail emissions, giving a 3.7% net increase for freight. The switch from cars to SUVs, the ongoing decline of transit usage, and the ongoing rise in kilometres travelled per person contributed to the 2.9% contribution by cars and light-duty trucks. Off-road usage is a bit weird, and I haven’t looked into how they measure this distinction.
Now I have a sense of how my new field fits into the bigger GHG picture: passenger transport makes up over 10% of Canada’s growth in GHG emissions. Stopping that growth is clearly an important start towards stabilizing national (and global) emissions, but that’s just the beginning - the latest negotiations are talking about a 50% reduction in global emissions relative to 1990. If developing countries are allowed to increase their per capita emissions, Canada would need something closer to a 75-80% reduction in emissions for a net 50% reduction globally.
Phew. I’m sure that’ll be a cinch.
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03.05.07
Posted in Politics
at 10:13 pm
I’ve been writing a short report on open source transportation software, and I ran across an interesting website along the way. Apparently, the Creative Commons people are trying to kickstart a new Science Commons for factual information. Unlike creative content, facts are not covered by copyright protection, but collections of facts (i.e., databases) fall into a grey area and are generally covered.
If you’re intrigued, start with this brief article on the subject. I think it motivates the idea of a Science Commons quite well, particularly the need for machine-readable metadata and broad searchable databases. Back when I worked in computer science, I was really spoiled by the excellent Citeseer article database - there’s no equivalent for transportation/urban planning. While I’m still in university I have good access to databases, but some journals still don’t even have the table of contents online, let alone the articles themselves. (I’m talking about you, Transportation Research Record.)
I’m not naïve enough to think that “data wants to be free!” There are clearly many datasets that will not be collected or maintained without commercial incentives. But there is also a lot of data that is only locked up due to historical quirks in the publishing industry, or political trends in the academic sector to prefer commercialisation and patents to the tradition of open science. Bring on the Neurocommons… but dear god, please find a better name for it.
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02.27.07
Posted in Politics
at 11:00 am
Reading week came and went and I sadly spent most of it reading. There was enough time for one cross-country ski trip up at Hardwood Hills, a worthwhile sortie.
This past weekend, I ploughed through nine papers on transport/land use connections and sustainability. Two papers stuck out: a U.C. Berkeley paper by Robert Cervero with a very cool path model, which I won’t bore you with here. The other more blogworthy paper covered a bit of the history of the American reaction to the 1992 Rio conference on sustainability, where the Kyoto targets were first floated. There are a few famous quotes scattered through the paper, and some very entertaining ones:
- “The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.” - George Bush Sr.
- “America’s position on the environmental protection is second to none, so I did not come here to apologize.” - George Bush Sr.
- Earth Day should actually be called ‘Anti-Human Day,’ because the environmentalists behind such events believe nature ought to be revered “for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man”… “Housing, commerce and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrified to the ‘rights’ of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the ‘rights’ of trees.” - Michael S. Berliner, director of Ayn Rand Institute
Anti-Human Day. That captures the spirit.
I don’t agree with some of the portrayals of the right wing, particularly gratuitous quotes from Pat Buchanan etc., but I thought the article made some interesting points about the midwestern mistrust of both the free trade and environmental élites, linking globalisation with environmentalism - rather like the decisively élite-targeted agenda in the Economist.
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11.19.06
Posted in Politics
at 11:55 am
No, that’s not a typo. I spent the last three days at the North American Regional Science Conference (NARSC), here in Toronto at the Royal York hotel. It’s probably not the type of conference I would normally attend - the focus is more on regional economic models than transportation or land use - but it was in town, cheap, and a good chance to get a feel for conferences in my new field of study.
My points of reference are the last two academic conferences I attended: SIGGRAPH and Eurographics. Computer science tends to treat conferences as a discussion of published results after peer review is complete. NARSC was more conventional, serving more as a place to discuss works in progress prior to submission to a journal. The cultural differences were large: while the computer science conferences (especially Eurographics) are dominated by under-35s, there were few under 40 here. Supervisors often presented their students’ papers, instead of the other way around. The dress code was a little stiffer than SIGGRAPH: souvenir T-shirts from past conferences would not go over well; suits and ties were the order of the day.
Anyways, it was interesting. I don’t really buy into some of the regional economic models that are used, but it was refreshing to see some people using spatial statistics rigorously, at a level far beyond many papers from urban planning journals. One of these days, I should learn something about these hedonic methods I keep hearing about in econometrics.
I also tried to get some less-techie sessions to balance my mathed-out semester. There was one session discussing the impact of Jane Jacobs, particulary her influence on economists. One presenter argued that Jacobs was really very conservative, an argument that I didn’t entirely buy. He argued correctly that Jacobs was often opposed to government intervention in markets, and large public sector projects in general, often arguing for privatization. This puts her in the same camp as the conservatives, but for very different reasons. Unlike the libertarians, Jacobs did not aim for freedom from government as an end in itself. Instead, her conservative side was rooted in a love of diversity, choice and competition. That’s a type of conservatism that I can definitely buy into. I don’t love or hate government for its own sake, but I do really like choice and diversity, provided that equality, social justice and opportunity also flourish. My objection to the libertarian approach is largely that unregulated markets often don’t lead to diversity, choice and competition, but instead lead to stifling monopolies or oligopolies. And libertarians are frequently content to ignore issues of equality of opportunity and social justice.
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