And Good Sunday Morning!
I start writing Good Sunday Morning in my sleep. Well, not literally, but Friday night to Saturday morning, when I roll over from time to time, briefly awake, I start composing Good Sunday Morning. As John can attest, it is one of life’s great blessings and a reason I am able to work long days and keep on trucking, that I sleep like a rock, deeply and well (thank you Lord). I wake up thinking, “I’ll just double check this or that factoid online,” before I start writing Good Sunday Morning. But today, dammit, once again my memory is better than Google!
So, I will tell you the story of the misidentified Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle. I know it is true and if anyone can help me find old newspaper clippings that would be grand. But first, why I am trying to verify the mystery of the misidentified beetle!
Last week, I was contacted by Dr. Art Borkent, a retired scientist living in Salmon Arm. He is very concerned that Agriculture Canada’s cuts will have disastrous consequences. He sent me a briefing note, which I sent it to the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon. Heath MacDonald with my own letter expressing alarm. The crux of the matter is that Ag Canada is eliminating the entire group of experts in the taxonomy of Diptera (flies). Here is how Dr. Borkent set out his background: “I am an insect taxonomist who specializes in midges.” Not a sentence to ring alarm bells in the PMO.
Through Zoom, Dr. Borkent and I have become friends. Art and I agreed that the “Build Canada Strong” crowd was unlikely to think the taxonomy of Diptera was anywhere on their list of footnotes, much less priorities. Below is an excerpt from Dr. Borkent’s letter to the minister:
“Reducing bureaucracy in the federal government should not result in a loss of vital scientific capacity. A mistake has been made that must be reversed, as explained below. The Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes is a world-class and world-famous collection of insects that includes more than 18 million specimens…recent cuts to staffing within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada include the scientists and their support staff working on flies (Diptera Unit). This gutting of a whole unit will leave a substantial gap in our capacity to identify flies in Canada. …What is at stake here is the continued existence of a core scientific capability: the ability to document, identify, curate, and interpret insect biodiversity in support of agriculture, biosecurity, conservation, and environmental policy. At the same time, biodiversity loss is consistently ranked among the top global risks for the coming decade, making the erosion of this capacity particularly difficult to justify.”
Art and I agreed that without an economic risk it would be hard to get government’s attention. For many years, the field of taxonomy has been losing resources, and respect. But then I remembered and started telling Art a story he had not heard. “Don’t you remember that time when…”
As a former resident of Halifax, I remember the devastation of the trees of Point Pleasant Park. For years, and if memory serves, starting in the 1990s, trees were dying in this amazing urban park. There was news coverage of Canadian Forest Service experts who said the trees were diseased, but the municipal parks workers contested that explanation. They pointed out that when trees were felled, they were healthy and solid to the core. These were healthy spruce that were dying. No sign of inner rot or disease. And still the trees died. Federal scientists outranked the men who for years had cared for the trees. Friends of Point Pleasant Park protested the plans to fell thousands of trees. As they were cut, they went to local sawmills, well out of Halifax.
It was not until a bit of serendipity that the cause of the death of Point Pleasant’s trees was discovered. A British expert in beetle taxonomy visited Ottawa. Piecing together from what can be found online of the loss of trees in Point Pleasant Park, I am guessing he visited in 1999. Our visiting expert spent time at the Ottawa Experimental Farm, repository of the vast collections of insects. In examining the collection he noted, “Ah, this one is misidentified. This is not a [whatever] beetle, this is a brown spruce longhorn beetle (Tetropium fuscum). This one is quite nasty”–or some such observation. The Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle is native to parts of Europe and Asia–not Canada. It likely arrived in the wood of a shipping container. And then the key and alarming fact, the misidentified beetle had been collected in Point Pleasant Park nearly a decade earlier! Oh dear. For the lack of an expert taxonomist, the Brown Spruce Longhorn beetle had become established in Point Pleasant Park, and at high concentrations, able to kill healthy trees. The parks woods workers were right. And those trees, with their attached beetles had been sent to other parts of Nova Scotia. Risking further infestation.
The cost is large and has never been properly calculated. Point Pleasant Park has since been hit with other disasters–Hurricane Juan in 2003 and much more recently, the invasive Emerald Ash Borer has been discovered. How many trees might have survived Hurricane Juan if established in healthy stands of strong spruce? We will never know.
The point is that science matters. We paid tribute in Parliament on Friday to one of the only MPs who was a serious scientist. I am heartbroken that my friend Kirsty Duncan has died, at only 59 years old. She was Canada’s first Minister for Science, appointed by Trudeau in 2015. As it stands, she will be the last. After the Trudeau Liberals’ re-election in 2019, Dr. Duncan was moved from Minister of Science to Minister for Sport, and science was no longer a stand-alone portfolio, merged with Industry and Innovation.
Kirsty was an amazing person, with too many talents and accomplishments for me to do justice to even listing them here. I first got to know her before either of us were in politics when she was a climate scientist working in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was among the number that shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She was first elected as an MP one year later.
In preparing remarks to honour her memory, I contacted some other IPCC scientists, one of whom is a regular reader of GSM: Dr. Ian Burton, Officer of the Order of Canada and one of the world’s leading experts in climate adaptation.
I made a bit of a botch of my speech in her memory. I got too emotional and messed up my timing. As the Speaker cut me off, (not her fault) I lost track of the hard stop I had at five minutes, a dear friend sitting near the Speaker, Ontario Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac) (not audible as not recognized by the speaker and was not heard on his microphone) asked the Speaker if, by unanimous consent, I could please be allowed to complete my eulogy. And all colleagues agreed. Tribute to Kirsty Duncan. I had to shorten remarks from scientists quite a bit. Thanks to friends Dr. Gordon McBean and Ian for sending tributes.
I should mention that one of this week’s major news items was that the Prime Minister has scrapped the mandate for new car sales to be EVs. In its place he is restoring the $5,000 rebate to Canadians who wish to buy EVs, and pledges to use the regulatory approach under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to reduce pollution from all passenger vehicles through something called the CAFE standard–-corporate average fuel economy. This will apply to internal combustion engines of passenger vehicles. In a media interview, I pressed for the government to extend these standards to the bulk of the new car market–-SUVs and trucks. If they did that, without crunching the numbers, my hunch is that emissions reductions could be even better than the EV mandate. Thus far it is unclear if they will.
As a near throw-away line at the end of the press conference, the Prime Minister mentioned significantly improving Canada’s electricity grid, with details to be announced soon. That would be good news indeed. It is a long-sought goal of the Green Party and the key major project to allow Canada to move off fossil fuels, by electrifying more and using 100% renewable electricity from wind, solar, run-of-the-river hydro, tidal and geothermal. It is possible. It will not be easy nor inexpensive, but as Liberals are prepared to waste billions in subsidies to fossil fuels, carbon capture and storage (unlikely to ever make a dent in our climate challenge) and fanciful investments in small modular reactors, we need to press for a cross-country, north-south-east-west electricity grid.
Speaking of doling out billions to Big Oil in fossil fuel subsidies, on Tuesday evening, I had a debate at what is called “adjournment proceedings” or colloquially “late show.” In these debates, opposition MPs are allowed to follow up on questions from Question Period in the House – often months later. The government sends out their parliamentary secretaries for such debates.
I was following up on my question to the Minister of Finance from December 4th. The question was simple: Now that the government has broken its budget commitment not to provide subsidies for enhanced oil recovery, how much larger is the deficit? Instead of an answer from Finance, on December 4th, the Minister of Environment, Julie DaBrusin, rose and gave a non-answer from the Liberal pre-prepared crib sheet extolling the Canada-Alberta MOU. So, I had hoped that in the February 3rd late show there might be a reply–if not an answer–from the ballpark of the subject matter of my question. No luck.
Instead of anyone from Finance–or Environment–this time, the Parliamentary Secretary for Housing was given the script. Once again, no answer and a pile of hooey about the great and wonderful Build Canada Strong plan. Ah well. Here is the clip (10 minutes) Late Show.
I will write more soon about the bogus claims of great reductions in greenhouse gases (GHG) to be expected from the billions we are spending on the “Pathways Project.” The Pathways Project is the key prize in the Canada-Alberta MOU, claiming to make Alberta’s bitumen carbon neutral. With promises to back up the assertion I made in the House that the only thing Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has ever captured is government money, I will include an annex to deep and detailed analysis should you want to dive into them. You will find it in the P.S. to today’s letter.
To all who signed the petition calling for Zain Haq to be brought home—he was the the first-ever climate activist to be deported from Canada–thank you for being one of the over 4,000 people who supported his case. I presented the Petition for Zain on Friday. The government now has 45 days to respond to the petitioners’ demand that Zain be united with his Canadian born wife Sophia Papp so they can return to their home in Vancouver.
And finally, some really good news for salmon–a win in Federal Court and a reprieve from the BC Ministry of Transport! Thanks to Ecojustice for great work for wild salmon in our courts!
And lastly, deep thanks to all who have been protesting, weekly, the threat to Goldstream, with inspiring leadership from Tsartlip elder Carl Olsen. It is a “pause” not a full victory so try to join Carl in the on-going protests if you can !
From snowy and chilly Ottawa, sending love and thanks!
Elizabeth
P.S. Annex of background on CCS, with thanks to my wonderful intern Michelle Angksara for pulling these together for me!:
International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)
- There are seven CCS projects currently operating in Canada, mostly in the oil and gas sector, capturing about 0.5% of national emissions. CCS in oil and gas production does not address emissions from downstream uses of those fuels. Captured carbon is used predominantly for enhanced oil recovery to facilitate additional oil extraction.
- CCS in the oil and gas sector is expensive—as much as CAD $200 per tonne for currently operating projects—as well as energy intensive, slow to implement, and unproven at scale, making it a poor strategy for decarbonizing oil and gas production, as evidenced by the track record of the technology in Canada and globally.
- Despite this, the federal government provides substantial support for CCS, having committed at least CAD 9.1 billion public dollars to date, alongside CAD 3.8 billion from the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Industry is seeking further public funding.
- The report also notes that carbon capture, currently the linchpin of many firms’ transition strategies, cannot be used to maintain the status quo. If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 °C would require an entirely inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilization or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture. Theamount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today.
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)
- For gas companies, CCS means removing the CO2 contained in the gas field; this is known as Scope One emissions and often represents well under 10% of the total emissions associated with each gas project.
- Global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 410 million tonnes (mt) to reach a new high of 37.4 billion tonnes in 2023. Meanwhile, after 50 years of trying, the capacity of CCS dedicated to the geological storage of CO2 was only 11.33 million tonnes per annum (mtpa), and the amount of CO2 injected was below capacity levels.
- Given that it has taken around 50 years to capture less than 10mtpa of CO2, it is going to take a heroic technical effort to meaningfully reduce the 37 billion tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere each year, and a gargantuan sum of money to build the CCS facilities. Chevron and its Gorgon CCS partners have invested more than AU$3.2 billion in the Gorgon CCS project to bury a total of around 9.5mt of CO2, which equates to a cost of AU$336.8 to bury a tonne of CO2. Apply that to the 37 billion tonnes of CO2 of energy-related emissions each year, and the cost is in the trillions.
2025 Stanford study: “Energy, Health, and Climate Costs of Carbon-Capture and Direct-Air Capture versus 100%-Wind-Water-Solar Climate Policies in 149 Countries”
- Summary article here
- The carbon capture scenario does not produce the same energy savings and health benefits. Old, dirty combustion infrastructure is inefficient, expensive, and causes harmful air pollution. Carbon capture and direct air capture, even if deployed safely across the world, would help lower carbon emissions but would not address those secondary issues.
- The authors’ conclusion is striking. Policy promoting carbon capture as a climate solution “should be abandoned.” Even when carbon capture is powered by 100% renewable energy, they argue, there is an opportunity cost to not using that same clean energy to just replace fossil fuel generators.
- From the article’s conclusion: “Given the speed and magnitude of changes needed for an energy transition, all-of-the-above policies promoting carbon capture (CC) and direct air capture (DAC) may, in the limit, cause millions of unnecessary air pollution deaths each year and substantial climate damage in both the short-term (by slowing the elimination of black and brown carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane) and long-term (by slowing the elimination of CO2). As such, policies promoting CC and synthetic DAC should be abandoned.”