Setting sustainability and environmental targets (1): Recent announcements on GHG emissions

The science, or rather the art, of setting targets for sustainable societies and reducing greenhouse gases depends a great deal on who is doing that and their context. In setting these kinds of targets, governments -- for the sake of their survival -- need to tread carefully and balance the need for addressing the threat and reducing the risks and costs of climate change, with potential disruptions of their domestic economy.

Last week saw two major pronouncements on targets to address climate change: President-elect Obama’s address to the Bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, and the Speech From the Throne by the Canadian Governor General to open the new session of parliament with the re-elected conservative government of Stephen Harper.

Obama pulled no punches in describing the urgency of combating climate change: “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We've seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

But for Obama, the challenge of climate change is also closely linked to the US’s dependency on foreign oil, and “if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.”

As the largest US provider of oil, the Canadian position is somewhat different. It’s difficult for any Canadian government at this time to set climate change targets and ignore the strong regional and wealth generating dimensions of the oil industry. So this explains the more nuanced approach in Governor General Michelle Jean’s Speech From the Throne of November 19. It states that "economic prosperity cannot be sustained without a healthy environment, just as environmental progress cannot be achieved without a healthy economy."

The speech recognizes that Canadians need “affordable and reliable energy” and that energy “is a source of wealth and Canadian jobs” but that there's also a need for "cleaner energy sources". It talks about Northern natural gas pipelines and nuclear energy. No mention of oilsands or carbon capture and sequestration.

It also reiterates the government's target of "reducing Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020". This position was first announced by then Minister of Environment John Baird in 2007.

Obama on the other hand, promises to “start a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions totheir 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.”

The Pembina Institute compared several targets for reducing GHGs. With regards to Canada’s targets of reducing GHG emissions “to 20% below the 2006 level by 2020, and to 60-70% below the 2006 level by 2050”, they note that “this would leave Canada’s emissions about 2% above the 1990 level in 2020 and would reduce them to 49-62% below the 1990 level by 2050”, i.e. well above the Obama targets.

They continue: “Other nations have already committed to targets more closely aligned with the science. The European Union's governments have made a unilateral commitment to reduce their emissions to 20% below the 1990 level by 2020. If other developed nations make comparable commitments, the EU says that it will strengthen its 2020 target to 30% below the 1990 level.
“In the longer term, California has committed to reduce its emissions to 80% below the 1990 level by 2050, and France to 75-80% below the 2004 level (which was slightly below the 1990 level). Even more ambitiously, Norway is proposing to be “carbon neutral” – or to make a 100% reduction in its emissions – by 2050.

“Based on a detailed analysis presented in our report The Case for Deep Reductions, Pembina believes that the Government of Canada should adopt targets to reduce Canada's net GHG emissions to 25% below the 1990 level by 2020 and 80% below the 1990 level by 2050. Given the scale of the challenge, Canada must start working towards these targets immediately. Any delay will almost certainly result in greater costs over the long term.”

Now, our study “Making it happen – the transition to a sustainable society” of course is not limited by political constraints. Our approach is to define plausible, hypothetical but stretch targets for reaching sustainability in 50 to 100 years. The idea is to use these to identify and explore the institutional barriers that impede the deployment of innovation and change to reach these targets and reduce the effects of climate change. And that is our major focus.

So in the next few posts, we will further explore various sets of targets and arrive at a reasonable selection of hypothetical but stretch objectives and metrics for a region like Ottawa Gatineau to make it a sustainable society. Stay tuned.

Barriers to innovation and change: wind power (1)

Margaret Wente’s column in today's Globe and Mail “Who could object to wind power?” is a dead-on analysis of some of the institutional barriers facing the deployment of alternative energy technologies, in this case a proposal for a large scale wind farm along the shores of Lake Ontario. Just because a technology is labelled renewable and environmentally benign does not mean that it will be adopted wholeheartedly by society. Wente identifies some of the critical economic and social barriers to the broader acceptance of wind power: costs relative to the yo-yo price of oil (down to $50 from a high of $140 per barrel this summer), hidden subsidies, the variability and unpredictability of electricity produced from wind, questions with regards to possible negative impact on bird flight paths, and NIMBY - not in my backyard. In fact, it was the last factor leading to a citizen’s protest in Toronto that prompted Wente to write the column.

In my view this is not a big oil or pro-nuclear conspiracy, but a normal and expected reaction to the introduction of new technology that causes change. If we are to move to a sustainable society, based on a significant reduction of per-capita energy consumption and the deployment of noncarbon-generating energy sources, these are the kinds of barriers that are inevitable. They should be recognized early on and addressed fully if we are ever to arrive to our end goal of a sustainable future. That is a key question facing our study.

The start of a new project

November 2008

Making it Happen: The Transition to a Sustainable Society

We are pleased to announce the start of a new project, “Making it happen – the transition to a sustainable society”. This project is about exploring a holistic and integrated approach needed to remove barriers and accelerate the transition of our economy and society to a more sustainable model. A transition to a sustainable society is critical to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Over the last several decades, there have been numerous reports and studies advocating change towards a more sustainable society that would be less dependent on fossil fuel, and more conserving of other critical resources such as water and biodiversity. Call it a Conserver Society, Small is Beautiful, Sustainable Development, or a Green Society, these visions have advocated an alternative way of structuring our economy and using less resources in order to reduce our environmental impact, and more recently, our carbon footprint.

There are also many technologies available today that would help move us in this direction. Every year there are thousands of new patents for environmental technologies, and investment in green companies has soared.

So why some 35 years after the first OPEC crisis and the Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth”, are we still playing at the fringe? Why have we not made more fundamental progress? Why is it that Canada is so far behind other countries such as Sweden or Germany in becoming sustainable?Some have suggested that we need leadership and political will, or major economic incentives to make this change, like a carbon tax or a cap and trade system before anything significant is likely to happen.

That may well be the case. But our hypothesis is that even with such leadership and macro-economic signals, there are still countless barriers and obstacles that need to be overcome before such a transition happens.

In preparing this study, we have reviewed many studies and reports relating to a sustainable society. What we found to be missing, what is currently not being addressed in a systematic way is how to make the transition to a sustainable society happen. Below the level of the large macro economic interventions, there are countless small institutional obstacles that prevent environmental technologies from being widely deployed. For each plan or innovation, there are inevitable difficulties, obstacles, or institutional barriers that prevent that plan or innovation to be fully deployed. Many of these are unexpected and unforeseen, and have not been considered in the original plans or designs. And most of these are not technical in nature.

These can include legal and regulatory barriers, inappropriate standards, ill-suited labour and skill pools, inadequate training, insufficient consumer education, limited available choices, inhibiting municipal bylaws, and so on. We’re talking here of a whole range of social, economic and institutional barriers, many of which have been designed originally for valid social and economic purposes, but which, in their current state, inhibit the rapid technological deployment and transition to a sustainable society. Perhaps one of the most insidious barriers is the lack of integrated planning in our society, the absence of a holistic perspective in making decisions that affect how we use resources and run our economy.

So our objective is as follows:How might we identify and better understand the social and economical barriers to innovation and change as it relates to addressing the challenges of climate change and the conservation of natural resources including water, as a basis of proposing government interventions to unleash the innovative potential of Canada.

Our approach

While the issues may be daunting and their linkages complex, we will be following a straightforward methodology to map out in a coherent way the different barriers to innovation and sustainability. Our steps are as follows:

1. Identify an ambitious, stretch hypothetical objective for a sustainable society, and derive all the "technological fixes" and changes that need to be implemented to achieve this hypothetical objective in 50 to 100 years.

2. Based on a practical agglomeration of the "technological fixes" and changes, bring together carefully selected panels and focus groups to identify the institutionalbarriers to achieve those rates of deployments. We hope to invite practitioners as well as subject matter experts, to identify the richest possible spectrum of barriers and obstacles.

The end result should be a systematic map of the different obstacles and barriers to the deployment of sustainable technologies and "way of doing things", which will make policy and decision makers at all levels - municipal, provincial, and federal - more aware of what needs to be done to address what is perhaps the single most serious challenge to the survival of our planet.

The project is managed out of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, under the direction of Dr. André Potworowski, with the help of an advisory board whose interim chair is Dr. Tom Brzustowski, and is expected to take two years to complete. The initial phase is funded by the Gordon Foundation and the federal government (Natural Resources Canada).For more in formation, Contact:
Dr. J. André Potworowski, potworowski@telfer.uottawa.ca (613) 746-9600 , or
Dr. Tom Brzustowski, brzustowski@telfer.uottawa.ca, (613) 562-5800 , #4759.