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A Chemist in Langley
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
On scare reporting of science and the risk of eating red meat
My twitter feed went insane this morning following a
news release from The Lancet about an article titled Carcinogenicity
of consumption of red and processed meat. For anyone interested in
toxicology, human health risk assessment or simply regular readers of the
academic literature the Lancet article was nothing particularly new. Unfortunately,
that group does not typically include the news media. For the news media the
article appear to be ground-breaking news worthy of front pages and blaring headlines.
Even some scientific news outlets got into the swing of things with Scientific
American going farthest off the deep end with an initial headline that pronounced:
Processed
Meat Poses Same Cancer Risk as Smoking, Asbestos...apparently someone with
half a lick of sense read the article and they quickly changed the headline to read:
“Processed Meats Cause Cancer, World Health Organization Says”. As a blogger on
topics of science communication, this is the sort of thing I write about all
the time and so thought I could do a quick take to add some clarity to the mix.
Let’s start with the basics. It has been known for a
long time that both the grilling of meat and the processing of meat increases
its risk for human consumption. Reports to this effect have been coming out for
years in general interest journals like PLOS (Public Library of Science) A
Prospective Study of Red and Processed Meat Intake in Relation to Cancer Risk,
to cancer journals like the International Journal of Cancer Meat
consumption and risk of colorectal cancer: A meta-analysis of prospective
studies to specialty journals like Meat Science: Red
meat consumption: An overview of the risks and benefits.
To explain the toxicology, the grilling of meat has long
been known to produce polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heterocyclic amines both of which are
associated with cancers. Similarly the processing
of meat and the use of preservatives have been linked to human health risks
for a very long time. Moreover, meat can be relatively challenging to digest so
even non-grilled meat poses a challenge to the human gut. Vegans and
vegetarians have been using this line of argument as a reason to stop eating
meat for years as well as anyone who has ever visited a PETA web page
knows.
So I suppose the question being asked today is: what
is so new about this report? The answer is that after all this time the International Agency for Research
on Cancer (IARC) finally decided to get into the mix. As I have
discussed previously in a post titled On
Wi-Fi in Schools and the Precautionary Principle the IARC has the job of assessing what is
a carcinogen and what is a possible carcinogen. The thing to understand is that
the IARC is only looking at carcinogenicity, it doesn’t ask the obvious next
question which is whether the risk meets the standard of being really
important. You will notice I did not use the word “significant”. The word
significant is an often misused one in the scientific community and will be
avoided in this discussion. The IARC is tasked with producing monographs evaluating
carcinogenic risks to humans. Based on the Lancet summary (the IARC report is
not out yet) the following conclusions were made:
Overall,
the Working Group classified consumption of processed meat as “carcinogenic to
humans” (Group 1) on the basis of sufficient evidence for colorectal cancer.
Additionally, a positive association with the consumption of processed meat was
found for stomach cancer. The Working Group classified consumption of red meat
as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A). In making this evaluation, the
Working Group took into consideration all the relevant data, including the substantial
epidemiological data showing a positive association between consumption of red
meat and colorectal cancer and the strong mechanistic evidence.
The IARC the Group 2A designation (assigned to red
meat) is often misunderstood. A Group 2A carcinogen
means a compound that is “probably carcinogenic to humans”. This is a compound
where but where “there is limited evidence
of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in
experimental animals”.
What the Lancet report also points out is that the
increase in incidence of cancers is around 17% per 100 g a day of red meat.
What it fails to tell you is what that means in the real world. Based on the
Canada food guide 75
g of meat is a serving. In restaurants the serving size for a steak is
typically in the 6 ounce range which is about 170 grams. So 100 ounces doesn’t
seem like a lot, but put into a different perspective I do not know many people
who eat 100 g of red meat a day 365 days a year. If you are like me you likely eat
red meat once or twice a week as part of a healthy, varied diet.
That being said, colorectal
cancer is the 3rd most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada with
a 5 year survival rate of around 64% -65%. The incidence of colorectal cancer
is about 35.2
cases per 100,000 population. So 17% turns out to be about 6 cases per 100,000
so an increase by 17% is a non-trivial number.
What all these numbers fail to discuss is whether red meat
has positive effects that could counter-weigh the negative. This is an
important point that is very often missed in the rush to judgement after the
publishing of a report of this kind. The Canadian food guide recommends red
meat as part of a healthy diet because red meat provides a number of critical components
for a healthy diet. Even the Canadian
Cancer Society points out that red meat is a valuable source of several
nutrients, in particular protein, iron, zinc and vitamin B12. Vegetarians are
often warned of the importance of getting enough of these nutrients as well as
critical fatty acids that are plentiful in red meat but are more
difficult to obtain via a vegetarian diet.
The question not asked, nor answered by the IARC is
how the typical person should read this report. As I note above, except for the
true heavy duty carnivores the results of this study are not really that
problematic. I think the best conclusion was presented by the authors of one of
the peer-reviewed scientific article above:
moderate
consumption of lean red meat as part of a balanced diet is unlikely to increase
risk for CVD or colon cancer, but may positively influence nutrient intakes and
fatty acid profiles, thereby impacting positively on long-term health.
Put more completely, meat, and red meat can be part of
a good diet and the exclusion of meat from your diet should not be done without
careful thought about how you will replace the essential nutrients you
currently get from meat. You can live a healthy life eating meat and you can
also live a healthy life while eating meat-free in moderation is the key. The other conclusion of this
report is well-known to mothers across Canada, excess consumption of red meat,
especially grilled red meat, is not good for you...but then we all knew that
before the Lancet broadcast it to the world didn’t we?
Note for readers:
I have written a lot in the last year about how risk
is communicated to the public. Unfortunately, due
to the nature of my blogging platform (read free and simple since I am a
chemist and not a web designer) it is not terribly easy to figure out what I
have written in the past so I will summarize here. I prepared a series of posts
to help me out in situations like this. The posts started with “How Big and Small Numbers
Influence Science Communication Part 2: Understanding de minimis risk”
which explained how the science of risk assessment establishes whether a
compound is “toxic” and explained the importance of understanding dose/response
relationships. It explained the concept of a de minimis risk. That is a risk that is negligible and too small to
be of societal concern (ref). The series
continued with “How Big and Small Numbers
Influence Science Communication Part 3: Understanding "Acceptable"
Risk” which, as the title suggests, explained how to determine
whether a risk is “acceptable”. I then went on to explain how a risk assessment
is actually carried out in “Big and Small Numbers in Science
Communication Part 4: the Risk Assessment Process. I finished off
the series by pointing out the danger of relying on anecdotes in a post titled:
Risk Assessment Epilogue: Have a
bad case of Anecdotes? Better call an Epidemiologist.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
On inane criticism in the climate change debate - the Ridley affair
I have been following the climate change
debate for over a decade now and have been writing on the topic for several
years. Even with that level of exposure, the inane level of personal criticisms
thrown around in this debate never ceases to amaze me. Selected individuals, on
both sides, appear to believe that the only way to maintain their stature in the
field is to belittle and disparage those with whom they disagree. To demonstrate
the inane levels some go one need not look further than a tweet from my
favourite geophysicist and climatologist Michael E Mann. Dr. Mann tweeted:
Ouch! "Climate Science Denialist @MattWRidley
Criticised By Same Scientist He Sourced On Greening Planet Claims"
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/10/19/climate-science-denialist-matt-ridley-criticised-scientist-he-sourced-claims-about-greening-planet.
Dr. Mann was referencing a dispute about an
article written by Dr. Matt Ridley. The article (The
Benefits of Carbon Dioxide presented as a link to his web site as the
original article is stuck behind a paywall) presents a number of well-understood
positive effects associated with the rise in global carbon dioxide
concentrations. Any reasonable policy discussion of climate change has to
include considerations of both the positive and negative effects of increases
in global carbon dioxide concentrations. As I have discussed previously in my
post “What
is so Special about 2 degrees C in the Climate Change Debate?”there are
strong arguments to suggest that, at least initially, increased global carbon
dioxide concentrations have had/will have a positive net effect on the global
economy and human and ecologically health. The literature is equally clear that
at some, still undetermined, higher global carbon dioxide concentrations the
positive effects will be outweighed by the negative effects with the balance
spiraling further into the negative territory thereafter. None of this is
particularly contentious.
As for the concept of the CO2
fertilization effect (the topic of Dr. Ridley’s article) it is a
well-understood by-product of the global increase in carbon dioxide
concentrations. The CO2 fertilization effect was first discussed by
the IPCC in their first
round of reports and has been incorporated in every round of IPCC reports
thereafter. To put it another way: a Google Scholar™ search of CO2 fertilization effect
comes back with over 100,000 hits. Let’s be clear here, we are not talking about
regular Google™, we are talking about over 100,000 hits on Google Scholar™. So
we are not talking about a point of significant contention in the climate
change debate. People can argue about the intensity and scale of the CO2
fertilization effect but the effect itself is not one up for much serious
debate.
So you might ask: what egregious error was
significant enough for DeSmog
blog to prepare a full article that was subsequently trumpeted by Dr. Mann?
Well, Dr. Ridley’s article is chock full of information. It presents over a
dozen points from a Global Warming Policy Foundation report titled “Carbon
Dioxide – The Good News”. It includes references to literally hundreds of
articles that support the point under consideration and runs at around 2400
words (including postscript). However, buried deep within the pile of
information, references and data is a single interesting piece of trivia:
The satellite data show that there has been roughly a
14 per cent increase in the amount of green vegetation on the planet since
1982.
The interesting piece of trivia was pulled
from a presentation
by Dr. Ranga B Myneni of Boston
University at the “Probing
Vegetation Conference from Past to Future” held 4 - 5 July 2013 in Antwerp,
Belgium. This sounds pretty inane so far does it not? However, DeSmog blog
hunted down Dr. Myneni to ask him about the use of this data in Dr. Ridley’s
article. Dr. Myneni’s response was typical of an academic, he waffled about uncertainty
and precision and was reported as saying:
His [Dr. Myneni’s] analysis of satellite data covering
the last 30 years did show a 13 to 14 per cent increase in vegetation growth.
He said some of this could be attributed to increased levels of carbon dioxide,
but changes in the way land was management [sic]was also a factor.
So Dr. Myneni quibbled about the number (it
could be 13%, it could be 14%) in the way academics are prone to do while
confirming that Dr. Ridley was absolutely correct (in that Dr. Ridley said
roughly 14%). However, in the world of DeSmog (and apparently Dr. Mann) Dr.
Myneni had “hit back” at the “Climate Science Denialist Matt Ridley”. Anyone
who has read Dr. Ridley’s writing knows full well that Dr. Ridley is not a “denialist”
but rather he is a “lukewarmer”.
Heck, he wrote an article that appeared in the Times
on the topic. Dr. Ridley acknowledges that global warming is real, mostly
man-made and will continue. He simply differs with scientists like Dr. Mann
about the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide. That is like
calling someone who points out that birds have the ability to fly a denier of
the law of gravity?
Dr. Ridley is, however, a well-known
science communicator and author. His voice is respected and his words read in
the public sphere. Therefore in the eyes of the activists he must be disparaged
and torn down at every possible opportunity.
As a noted author, Dr. Ridley knows something
that every good science communicator knows: non-specialist readers like numbers
they can sink their teeth into. He also knows that in the grand scheme of
things the average reader really doesn’t know, or care, what the numbers mean,
but they like to see numbers so they have something to relate to when
discussing a topic. Dr. Ridley could have just discussed the CO2
fertilization effect in general but to improve the story he chose to use the
number from Dr. Myneni’s presentation. The number that Dr. Myneni confirmed was
correct when interviewed by DeSmog blog.
So let’s re-examine the basis for the debunking
of Dr. Ridley: Dr. Myneni, a well-respected climate scientist, presented a number
at one of the most important international conferences on the topic of
vegetation change. The conference, being sufficiently confident in Dr. Myneni’s
professionalism, published the number in their promotions. Dr. Ridley used that
number in an article about popular science in a non-scientific venue. Most
importantly, the number itself is really a side-note since, for the purposes of
the article, it could have been 10% or it could have been 15%; Dr. Ridley was
simply using for illustrative purposes and to make for a more readable text. Dr.
Myneni, stepping out of his role of a scientist and moving into the role of an
advocate complained that the “benefit of greening is not worth price of all the
negative changes” all the while confirming that the rough number provided by
Dr. Ridley was indeed correct. That is certainly some debunking there.
What is most frustrating is that given the
insane nature of the climate change debate this controversy was seen as deserving
a full post on DeSmog
blog in an attempt to discredit Dr. Ridley, the scientist. Moreover, once DeSmog
blog had posted the article promoters of the alarmist climate change narrative felt
the need to highlight the post and add their two cents worth. Talk about a
tempest in a teapot!
The oddest thing about this whole controversy
is that from my twitter feed, it is clear that many of the activists in the
climate change debate feel they have won a victory in this little skirmish. They
don’t get how unserious articles like this make them look. Until the activists
on the alarmist side can get their act together and become somewhat serious in
their criticisms, outsiders, like myself, are going to continue to not take
them seriously. We all know about the fable of the boy who cried wolf. Well when
blogs like DeSmog and other climate alarmists cry “denialist” and “debunked” at
every opportunity it will be hard to take them seriously when they actually do
manage to debunk someone.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Thoughts on the new Liberal Government and the Environment
Like many interested observers, I was shocked at the
size of the Liberal victory in our Canadian election. I was confident in a Liberal minority but had
no clue that the Liberals would end up with a majority. From an environmental
perspective the new Liberal majority government should definitely be a step up
over the previous Harper government’s anti-science, laissez-faire on the
environment agenda. That being said, I am strongly of the belief that a lot of
what I have read in the last several days about the Liberals and their environmental
policies represent projection on the part of observers rather than an accurate
reflection of Liberal policy.
To clarify, one problem with elections campaigns is that the people involved often incorrectly read into their
candidates features and characteristics that are not actually part of that candidate’s
platform. As such, my concern is that many environmentalists have been reading their
personal desires into the Liberal victory. Throughout the last couple years Justin
Trudeau has been viewed by many as the “anti-Harper”. He is
clearly cut from a very different mold than the outgoing Prime Minister. Mr.
Trudeau is viewed as happy and outgoing while Mr. Harper has been seen as dour
and secretive. But these personality differences do not make Mr. Trudeau a
polar opposite to Mr. Harper. Mr. Trudeau is not the Ying to Mr Harper’s Yang.
Rather, Mr. Trudeau is an entirely independent being with his own hopes, needs
and desires. To be clear, Mr. Harper’s environmental and science policies could,
at best, be considered regressive and as a consequence, the new Liberal government
will definitely represent a step forward for the environmental cause in Canada.
That being said, I would suggest that my friends in the environmental movement
spend a little bit of time reading the Liberal policy documents before they get
too excited about the next five years.
The first thing I will point out is that while the
environmental community views Mr. Trudeau as a potential environment-first Prime
Minister, the Liberal policy platform is a little less supportive of that title. A look at the “Platform”
section of the Liberal election web site has 106 topics of which I count six
that would represent “environmental” priorities and as the business adage goes “too
many priorities means no priorities”. A look
at the Liberal policy
backgrounders also does not bode well for “environment-first” title. Of the
29 detailed policy backgrounders presented on their web site only two address
topics related to the environment.
The first “protecting
our oceans” provides some solid red meat for the environmental cause. It clearly states that a Liberal government will reinstate monies for
ocean science and monitoring. It also provides hope that the recent shredding
of the Fisheries Act will be
reversed. Finally the document pretty much rings the death knell for the Northern
Gateway pipeline as it says that a Liberal government would enact the North
Coast crude oil tanker ban. Under that blanket prohibition the Northern Gateway
would only really be possible if David
Black’s Kitimat refinery were brought online to refine the crude oil/dilbit
prior to shipping.
The second platform document is bigger than the first
but is surprisingly light on substance. The document is titled “A
New Plan for Canada’s Environment and Economy” and deals with six major
themes:
• Taking Action on Climate
Change
• Investing in Clean
Technologies
• Creating Clean
Jobs and Investment
• Restoring
Credibility to Environmental Assessments • Preserving and Promoting our National Parks
• Protecting out Freshwater and Oceans
As the old
expression goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the problem with the
document, as is often the case in environmental policy, is in the details, or
lack thereof. The “Action on Climate Change” reads as surprisingly non-committal
on the action front. It has a lot about communication, and working together
with various levels of governments and NGOs but has very few identifiable
deliverables. It includes a “portfolio of actions” while describing few strong
commitments (it does include a very important commitment to phase out subsidies
for the fossil fuel industry). Surprisingly, I cannot for the life of me find a
detailed policy document that includes any mention of the “Low Carbon Economy
Trust” which some have mentioned
but few can describe.
The Liberal’s “Investment in Clean Technologies” details
a pretty paltry additional $300 million a year directed towards various industrial
sectors. The wording of this section is sufficiently vague that it could range
from a terrific tool to enhance the prospects of cutting-edge companies to a
political slush fund like many of the regional
development agencies used to buy votes for the last several decades.
The “Creating Clean Jobs and Investments” section is simply
standard boilerplate that could be drawn from almost every environmental policy document
ever written. It does, curiously, include a section on protection of marine
environments which is sorely needed, especially on our West Coast.
For the pipeline opponents, the “Restoring Credibility
to Environmental Assessments” sounds like a great section. Interestingly enough
the section does include this interesting piece of wording:
We
will explore, consult, and work collaboratively to move towards a system where
federal environmental assessments of projects include an analysis of upstream
impacts and the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the projects being
assessed.
This text could be something straight out of a Sierra
Club Report or it could be a standard requirement for a risk assessment depending on how you interpret the word "resulting". Environmentalists surely read it like the Sierra Club would have us do. The only problem with this interpretation is that it undermines the
whole concept that emissions are calculated on where fossil fuels are consumed
not on where they are produced. Using the logic proposed I could easily develop
a process by which Canada could meet its Kyoto targets overnight. Since the Sierra Club version of the methodology blames the producer of the energy, not the consumer, Canada could
go to zero CO2 emissions simply by importing all our fossil fuels
from outside our borders. No need to adapt our industry; no need to stop idling
our cars or insulate our houses; since the consumer’s pattern of use doesn’t
count towards their emissions we would all be free and clear. Oddly enough that
is not how the rest of the world views the problem. In International venues/agreements producers of fossil fuels are only expected to
account for the energy used to generate the fossil fuels not the CO2
generated when the fossil fuels are burnt at the other end. I would suggest that any plan to change
environmental assessments in this manner is bound to fail international muster.
The final two points involving the protection of our
parks, freshwater and oceans are strong policies I would love to see implemented
ASAP.
Going back to the earlier point in this post, the
problem with the Liberal agenda is that the environment represents such a miniscule
proportion of it. Only 2 of 29 policy documents discuss the environment and the
amount of money earmarked for the environment is miniscule when compared to
other priorities. The $300 million dollars for innovation and investment is
barely more than the amount the Liberals have allotted in additional
funding for the CBC. That should pretty
much tell you where we, environmentalists, fit in this new order.
To be clear, I look forward to the next few
years from an environmental perspective. I was strongly opposed to how the
Harper government stripped away protection for Canada’s waterways and shredded
much of our environmental research infrastructure. It is my hope that Mr.
Trudeau will reverse many of those decisions/laws. That being said, I cannot
simply assume that Mr. Trudeau is going to be an environment-first Prime
Minister and suggest that my colleagues in the environmental movement who assume
otherwise are in for a bad shock.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
On the Indifference of our School System to Parents and Teachers
To date on this blog I have avoided discussing the school
system. As many of my readers know I am the husband of a school teacher and
have avoided writing on topics that would potentially affect my wife’s
workplace but I am going to make an exception to my informal rule. The
reason for this is that our local school district continues to show indifference to the needs of parents and teachers in our district and I am simply tired
of staying silent on the topic. You see, I am also the parent of three kids:
two are school-aged and one starts kindergarten next year and I am amazed
at how many decisions our school district has made in the last few years that
have negatively affected our household and those of our friends and family.
We have all been taught that it is important to make a
good first impression, but our school system immediately starts off badly with
parents. Next year our family will be re-introduced to the concept of “gradual
entry” into kindergarten. For those of you unaware of the program, it is a two
week regime designed to gently ease children, who have been attending daycares
since age 1, to the "rigours" of full-day kindergarten. My nephew went through the gradual entry program
this year and it was ridiculous. Elementary schools start the Tuesday
after Labour Day and as his first step in the gradual entry process my nephew
had no school on that Tuesday. On the Wednesday he attended school for 30 minutes. As for Thursday and Friday, he didn’t have any school on
those days either. So for the first week of gradual entry kindergarten he attended
30 minutes of school.
Now if you happen to have a stay-at-home parent in the
household this glacial process would not be a problem, but for two-income
families it ranges from a major inconvenience to a real financial hardship. As
most families know, daycare is hard to get, expensive and most daycare slots go from September 1 to August 31 to fit in the school calendar. If
you have a child in school, you certainly aren’t going to pay a full month
worth of daycare to hold a slot for one week in September. This means that
during the two week gradual entry program families either need to find alternative
child-care or take time off work. Since most kids in working families have been
attending daycare since age 1, gradual entry represents a struggle to figure
out, or pay for, child care arrangements for kids who are completely ready for
school, but no longer have a daycare slot. For families like my own, with
only one parent available to do home care during the week (I will discuss that
issue later), it means I will be using two weeks of my annual holidays to
accommodate this questionable requirement.
The frustrating secret about the gradual entry
process is that the first week is mostly devoted to the school system doing administrative
tasks that they could have accomplished during the summer. As I described above,
our nephew only got 30 minutes of face time that entire first week. He wasn’t
getting acclimatized to school he was being shunted aside while the administration did
the work they should have completed before September. Administrators
are paid very generous salaries and perhaps requiring them to work a bit during the
summer would allow thousands of British Columbian families to save a week’s salary/holidays.
I can understand the need to for gradual entry but it is time the school
system gave kids some credit for resilience and cut the “gradual entry” back to
one week.
Now we have addressed gradual entry, let’s talk about professional
development days. As we all know teachers get professional development days in
the school calendar. In the 2013-2014 calendar there were six of these days.
Each required a parent to stay at home or find alternate care for their
children costing either money or vacation days. Well apparently the school district decided that ruining six days of work
was not challenging enough for parents so since the 2014-2015 school year the school
calendar was changed so that the district professional development was done by
the half-day. So now instead of six full days they have gone to two full-day
provincial professional development days, four half-day district professional
days and six “collaboration” days.
So you may be wondering what a “collaboration day”
represents? These aren’t really days, but rather they represent 80 minute
blocks where school starts either earlier or later than normal in order allow
teachers to work on schemes to “collaborate” both internally (within the
school) and externally (with teachers at other schools). Six times a year our
kids will be sent home 80 minutes early to allow for this process. On the
bright side, during the first year of collaboration days they started school 80
minutes later. This precluded parents getting to work in the morning and cost a
lot a parents work shifts. At least by moving the collaboration to the afternoon it
allows families with after-school care to simply pay extra for the extra care.
As for the straw that broke the camel’s back, Thursday
the school district announced that all parent-teacher interviews in the
district will be coordinated to be held at the exact same two days at the exact
same times. There will be one day when the teachers stay until 4:30 pm and
another when the teachers stay at school until 7:30 pm. Even the dinner break
for the teachers will be at the same time. This sounds like a good idea from an
administrative perspective but completely ignore the fact that a
large percentage of the teachers in our district are also parents; parents who
are interested in the academic well-being of their kids. In previous years, elementary
schools teachers could stagger their days to allow teachers, who were also
parents, to attend to both tasks. This year, in a fit of administrative
orderliness, the district will not even allow teachers who have an empty block
in their schedule to leave their schools to discuss their kid’s performance.
That last point brings me to the level of “respect”
our school district holds for its employees. The school district demands an
incredible amount of flexibility from the parents in the district (as
demonstrated above) but allows for exactly zero flexibility for its employees.
They don’t trust their teachers to leave the school during breaks in the parent-teacher
interview schedules; they won’t allow teachers any flexibility during the “gradual entry”
period to allow the parent/teachers to help ease their kids into the school
system; and they won’t allow any flexibility to cover the half-day breaks.
Going over all the numbers in the text above, I have
come to a frightening realization. I am one of the lucky people out there who
gets three weeks of holidays a year. Looking at the numbers above I can see that
I will be using all that time filling in the gaps in our child-care arrangements.
The two weeks of gradual entry (actually only 9 work days with Labour Day) combined
with the 6 professional development days actually works out to my entire
allotment of holidays for the year. It looks like we won’t be taking a family summer
holiday unless I am able to bank a lot of overtime or take unpaid time off.
Happily I have a job where I can bank overtime but there are going to be a
bunch of Kindergarten parents who will not be spending any special summer time
with their kids because our school system doesn’t consider their interests when
it makes decisions. The sad part is they don’t even do this out of malice,
instead it is mere indifference. The school district has shown time and again
that they are indifferent to the needs, wants and desires of the working families and
teachers in the school district. Administrative tidiness is all they care about. Given the choice between inconveniencing thousands of parents and workplaces
and having nice orderly lines on their charts, they choose the orderly lines every time and are utterly indifferent to the time and resources their decisions cost the rest of us.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
More on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Environment
As many of my blog readers know, I have a regular blog at the Huffington Post Canada. On
that blog I post shorter versions/updates of my A Chemist in Langley posts and
post “short takes” on recent issues in the world of evidence-based environmental
policy and renewable energy. The good thing about that venue is that it draws
more eyeballs to the screen than my own little blog here. The downside is that
it has a pretty strict limit on how long a post can be (about 800 words).
Having a word limit can be a good thing as writing for that blog has allowed me
to refine my writing and find shorter ways to say things. The downside is that I
blog about topics that are not always black and white and a word limit can restrict
my ability to expand on an important point or give useful examples to clarify
topics of interest.
My post yesterday Why
the TPP Doesn't Spell Doom for the Environment is a really good example of
where a post would be improved with the addition of a few hundred more words.
So today, I am going to add those words. In doing so I will take some others
out and mix it up a bit.
As I wrote in my Huffington blog post,
early Monday negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) concluded with an Agreement
in Principle. While details of the agreement are still under wraps, the
Canadian government has provided a Technical Summary of the Agreement. Now an Agreement in
Principle is not
a final deal ready to be ratified by governments and so we don’t have to go
rushing about and panicking yet but it is important to understand what the deal
means from an environmental perspective.
The thing to understand about these trade agreements is that they are not
the black/white story that the activists claim they are. Rather from an
environmental perspective, trade agreements have both positive and negative
aspects. They can have the negative effect of slowing down the development of
unilateral environmental regulations, but they can have a positive effect by
forcing environmental laggards to catch up with the pack.
It is quite true that trade agreements typically include considerations to
prevent individual countries from developing their own distinct environmental
policies. One of the important features of these trade agreements involve
knocking down or eliminating non-tariff barriers (also called technical barriers to trade). The problem is that
environmental regulations have historically been used by the bad actors on the
international trade front to disguise simple protectionism. Like the wolf in
the story Little Red Riding Hood the protectionism is dressed up to look like
it is intended to enhance environmental performance but under the covers hide
regulations intended to harm foreign competitors, often without improving
environmental performance in the least. A recent example is the case of Korean emissions standards which did nothing to improve
emission characteristics of cars on Korean roads but did a wonderful job of
stopping the export of North American autos to Korea.
To further explain how these trade agreements can hurt individual action on the environmental front, imagine that Canada implemented a national carbon tax. Every pound of steel produced in Southern Ontario would be subject to that tax. This would make Ontario steel more expensive than the steel from an identical steel plant with otherwise identical cost structures elsewhere in the TPP zone. Under the National Treatment and Market Access (NTMA) chapter of the TPP, Canada would not be allowed to put a tariff on imported steel (that was not subject to the carbon tax) to address the difference in price and our steel industry would suffer. In this case the TPP would slow down the development of innovative, Canada-first policies to fight climate change.
To further explain how these trade agreements can hurt individual action on the environmental front, imagine that Canada implemented a national carbon tax. Every pound of steel produced in Southern Ontario would be subject to that tax. This would make Ontario steel more expensive than the steel from an identical steel plant with otherwise identical cost structures elsewhere in the TPP zone. Under the National Treatment and Market Access (NTMA) chapter of the TPP, Canada would not be allowed to put a tariff on imported steel (that was not subject to the carbon tax) to address the difference in price and our steel industry would suffer. In this case the TPP would slow down the development of innovative, Canada-first policies to fight climate change.
Now the example above ignores some very important points put forward by the
environmental community. The first is that we almost never see an example where
a Canadian plant is identical to one in Vietnam (for example). Canadian plants
tend to depend more on automation to address the differences in our employee cost
structures. If we are running more efficient factories, the addition of a
carbon tax can actually have a positive effect. By driving up the cost of
carbon Canadian producers are forced to improvise and adapt. This is what fuels
innovation. A factory dependent on cheap labour is less likely to make those adaptations
and thus Canadian companies have the potential to adapt their way out of the
higher costs.
A further important consideration is what happens to the money generated by
the carbon tax? If that money is reinvested into new energy efficient processes
or renewable energy projects then once again a country like Canada can thrive
under a carbon tax regime. This is why I, among many, don’t like the idea of
purely “revenue neutral” carbon taxes. I think a percentage of the money
generated by a carbon tax should be funneled back into rapid transit,
environmental infrastructure and research. In a perfect world a carbon tax
should only be a temporary thing as we move away from carbon. Making our
government dependent on the revenues from a carbon tax only ensures that we
will never move away from carbon because I have yet to see a government give up
a revenue source once it has figured out a way to hook its way into that
revenue. Earmarking carbon tax revenue, rather than throwing it in general
revenue, is a way to ensure that the government doesn’t rely on it to keep the
lights on and thus our government has an incentive to eventually get us off the
carbon train.
The most important feature of a low-carbon, high environmental value economy
comes down to consumer choice. The TPP will not force Canadians to buy foreign
products, it only says that we cannot deny other countries the opportunity to
sell their product in our market. We, as consumers, can make a conscious choice
to pay a little bit more to get a better, greener products. This is where the
Greens of our world have to actually start living by their words.
I live in the community of Walnut Grove in Langley. Walnut Grove has very
good selection of local stores that provide high-quality products often at a price
slightly higher than it would cost to buy at a big box store or an American
warehouse outlet. My family has made a choice that we are willing to pay the 5%
-10% more to be able to walk to our local baker, vegetable market, butcher,
wine store and grocery store. We value the fact that everyone at our local
stores know us and our kids by name. We like the fact that Mr. Lee from IGA gives
our kids hugs when they walk into his store and that his niece shares a
classroom with our son at the local elementary school. We love that profits
from our meat purchases at Meridian Meats go to their head office in Port Coquitlam
and that our money for vegetables go to local farmers and not to some corporate
head office in Arkansas. We appreciate the Overwaitea Food Group, whose
corporate head office I can see on my walk to work. Sure we could, and
sometimes have to, shop at places like Costco and Walmart but that makes up a
very small percentage of our shopping dollar. The TPP does not take any of that
away from us.
It is only when consumers demand low prices above all that we as a country
will suffer. Meanwhile, the low prices often come at a cost of lower quality or
higher inconvenience. I’m not sure about you, but spending 20 minutes each way
to drive to a big box store is often a false economy both in lost time and in
travel costs.
On the positive side of the ledger, under the TPP multilateral environment agreements (MEAs) are further
strengthened. Enforcement of the Montreal Protocol, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from
Ships and the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora will
all be strengthened for exactly same reason that individual action is
discouraged. In order for competition to be considered fair every country is
expected to live up to its international environmental obligations. MEAs set a
baseline that every member of the TPP must meet, to do otherwise results in
penalties. A country trying to shirk its environmental duties would be punished
and forced to improve environmental performance to group norms. Thus in this
case the environment benefits from the agreement. If the TPP had been in effect
when Kyoto was signed Canada may not have been able to drag its heels in
implementing the plan because its trade partners would have been there to force
Canada to do its part or suffer the consequences of failing to act.
In following the debate on the TPP I find it particularly odd that the
people who most dislike these international trade deals, are often the same
people who demand that we, as a country, involve ourselves in international
environmental deals/regulations. You either trust in international cooperation
or you don’t. Somehow the leaders in the environmental movement want us to
believe that international is good when it comes to the environment and bad
when it comes to trade?
The other thing to recognize it that most of the really big problems of the
world today cannot be handled by individual governments. Climate change, loss
of biodiversity, destruction of coral reefs, the virtual elimination of the
upper trophic levels in our world oceans, these are topics that have to be
handled by a community of nations. Our shared global future is one where MEAs
are going to be a necessity and trade agreements like the TPP are going to
provide one of the few dependable mechanisms to enforce those MEAs.
Thus international trade agreements like the TPP can discourage
independent action but strongly encourage international cooperation and movement
towards common international goals. To discourage foot-draggers from stopping
all environmental advances, typically once an agreed upon percentage of the
trade partners take a side on a MEA everyone has to jump on board or suffer the
consequences. From these examples you can see the issue. When a single country
wants to make a unilateral advance in environmental regulation, the TPP is
going to slap it down, or failing that the industries in the affected country
are going to become less competitive. However, when the global community agrees
on a common environmental goal the foot-draggers and slow movers are punished.
Finally, a lot of the naysayers have popped up to ask how NAFTA helped the
environment? My response to that question is that it is complicated. NAFTA was
one of the first really big trade deals and when it was written, politicians
didn’t really understand how important locking environmental performance into a
trade deal was to ensure fairness in international trade. As such, the
environmental components were tacked on at the end of the negotiations with
NAFTA. Even with this proviso NAFTA ended up improving environmental
performance in Mexico without a commensurate decrease in Canada/the US. I
welcome my readers to go to the literature on this topic, because the
references are many and surprisingly weighted in the positive direction.
So are trade deals like the TPP perfect? Absolutely not, but from an
environmental perspective they are far more nuanced than the anti-free trade
activists would have you believe.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Why the West Coast’s gas prices are so high and who is to blame
Early in my blogging career I wrote a blog piece discussing
factors that affect gasoline and diesel prices on the West Coast. The post was
called A
Primer: Why Cheap Oil Doesn't Mean Cheap Gasoline or Diesel and dealt
mostly with how gasoline is created in refineries. Well, the topic has come up
again and once again we have people complaining about gasoline and diesel
prices on the West Coast in a world of low oil prices. Most recently the
National Observer had a post of the subject “Canadians
get ripped off at the pumps” produced by a local economist Robyn Allan. Having read that article I
suppose it is about time I updated my earlier post and addressed some of the
obvious shortcomings in Ms. Allan’s piece in the Observer.
The first thing you need to know to understand
gasoline prices on the West Coast is that it is all about supply and demand and
has very little to do with the price of oil. The reason for this is simple: it
is not oil that you put in your gas tank; it is gasoline and diesel, both of
which are refined products. In my earlier post I give a description of how we
convert oil into gasoline and diesel and pointed out that there is a limit to how
much gasoline and diesel can be generated from a barrel of oil. This is especially
problematic with respect to diesel fuel since the component of the crude oil
mixture used to generate diesel fuel is also the same one used to make kerosene
and fuel oils (for household heating). The diesel market is, thus, heavily
affected by the current and future market for fuel oil (especially in central
and eastern Canada where fuel oil is heavily used for home heating).
As I note above we can’t use crude oil in our fuel tanks,
we need to use refined petroleum products and we all know where refined
petroleum products come from: refineries. So it is not just the amount of oil
on the market that defines the price of gasoline but the ability of the
refineries to convert that oil into useful things like gasoline and diesel. That
is not all, however; once we have refined the oil into gasoline we still have
to transport it to market. All the refined gasoline in the world does you no
good if it is stuck on the East side of the Rockies. These are the portions of
the story where Ms. Allan falls off the rails in her analysis in the National
Observer. In her piece she pretty much ignores the two critical bottlenecks in
the progression from oil in the ground to gasoline in your tank: refinery
capacity and transportation capacity. Today I am going to deal with refining
capacity.
As anyone who
follows the oil industry knows, we on the Canadian West Coast have allowed our
refining capacity to wither and die on the vine. Historically, there were
several oil refineries on the West Coast including the Chevron
refinery (still open), the Imperial
Oil Ioco refinery and the
Shell Refinery. Thanks to regulatory hurdles and market forces we are now
down to a single refinery (Chevron) which is able to handle about 57,000 barrels/day
(b/d) of oil. To put that number into perspective, the Chevron refinery only supplies
about 25%
of B.C.’s commercial fuel supply and 40% of YVR’s jet fuel needs. As a
consequence we import a LOT of fuel from refineries in Alberta (mostly around
Edmonton). According to Natural Resources Canada, we import almost 60% of our petroleum
product needs via pipeline and gasoline tanker cars (by rail) from Alberta.
Unfortunately, even that is not enough and so we are also dependent on the big
refineries in the Puget Sound for things like aviation fuel (from Cherry Point)
and additional volume
when the prairie market gets too tight. Because that additional fuel is bought on
an irregular schedule it is subject to the whims of supply and demand. This
makes US supplies a critical consideration in any gasoline price discussion in
BC.
The United States has broken their petroleum market up
into five Petroleum Administration of Defense Districts (PADDs). This was
originally done
during the Second World War to ensure energy supplies but is still in
effect to this day. The West Coast of the US, including California, Oregon and
Washington, make up PADD V. PADD V is a rather unusual district because of its
geography (it is mostly bordered on the east by mountains). Unlike the other districts,
which are linked internally with lots of pipelines and combined capacity; PADD
V is pretty much
stuck on its lonesome and has to be self-sufficient. There are some minor
cross-PADD connections but mostly when something goes wrong in PADD V it hits
the entire region. Well this year has
been a tough one for PADD V. In February, a major fire shut down the Torrence refinery
in California. Torrence is the third largest refinery in California and
supplies about 10% of California’s gasoline supply (remember the California gasoline
market is essentially equivalent to the entire Canadian gasoline market). The
loss of Torrence meant that all of the other refineries in PADD V had to make
up the difference. All of a sudden the Puget Sound didn’t have an excess of
fuel to sell to British Columbia as it was being sold in California.
In addition to the Torrence issue, the American mid-west
was also having a bad time. For most of August the BP
Whiting Refinery in Indiana was also shut down. This left a huge crunch in
the market in the prairies as mid-west suppliers were offering top dollar for
gasoline from Alberta. This left BC in a pickle. Alberta didn’t have any cheap
gasoline because it was all going to fill a need in the US mid-west and PADD V
didn’t have any cheap gasoline because of the fire in Torrence and another
disruption in April. We were the
equivalent of the lonely traveler wandering into town, during a nasty storm, in
the middle of convention season and demanding a room. Without a reservation (firm,
regular, fixed-rate contracts for gasoline) and without any alternatives (since
Edmonton couldn’t help us) we ended up having to pay top dollar for our
gasoline. Thus we had $1.20+ gasoline in a world where the oil price was below
$60/bbl.
Of course the piece in the National Observer completely
ignored these conditions. In the Observer it was all the greedy oil companies’
faults that we could not get cheap gas. No mention was made to the red tape,
fuel access restrictions (pipeline capacity) and bad political climate that
scared all but one of the local refineries out of the market. No mention was
made of the work to block expansion of pipelines that would have allowed more
refined gasoline to move east-west across the country. No mention is made about
protestors that locked
down the Chevron refinery further curtailing supply.
The truth is that we as Canadians have brought this
down upon ourselves. We made it uncomfortable for refineries to exist in BC by
limiting supply of crude (by fighting pipelines) and adding red tape. In
doing so, we have made ourselves utterly dependent on refineries in Alberta and
the Puget Sound to keep our cars and buses running. Like so many other
environmental fields (see my post on rare
earth metals) we have off-loaded all the environmental costs to other
jurisdictions and lived like environmental free-loaders letting others take the
risks while we reap the rewards. Well now it is time for our chickens to come
home to roost. We are not getting “ripped off at the pump” as Ms. Allan would claim;
rather we are getting a well-justified comeuppance. We made a politically
expedient decision to limit the production and transportation of a critical
component of our economy (refined fuels) and so now have to pay the price for
that decision when regional supplies are low. The ironic part of all this is
that from an environmental point-of-view this is a good thing. By making the
fuel more expensive we will force people to use less of it. This is supposed to
be a good thing. Why is that ironic? Well because a media outlet like the
Observer is the one complaining most loudly about the problem. That the
Observer would turn around and complain that the outcome they have been working
towards has come to pass? That is just rich!
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