Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 9, 2009

Ottawa’s low-carbon energy projections leave Canada producing more energy from coal, oil sands, nuclear and forests. This is green?

Here’s a toast to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy for providing us with a vision of what a carbon-lite Canada looks like. A toast, too, to environmental groups like Pembina, for endorsing the Round Table’s vision and letting all Canadians in on the future that these carbonistas foresee for us.

First, they say we need coal, lots of it, and especially lots of coal mining, if we’re to reach their vision. In fact, under the Round Table’s recently released blueprint — Achieving 2050: A Carbon Pricing Policy For Canada — the coal mining sector, enhanced by carbon capture technology, is one of the economy’s big winners, attracting a growing share of investment. Thanks to these new government-subsidized carbon technologies, remote, coal-rich mountains could become worthy of plunder for the first time.

Next, they say we need lots of crude petroleum, most of which will be invested in boosting the tar sands — petroleum crude extraction is another big winner in the carbonista economy. As the Round Table enthused in a background document, Canada will be an energy superpower, a “leading provider of world energy.”

Natural gas is also a winner, completing the Round Table’s government-subsidized blessing of all forms of fossil fuel extraction. The Round Table seems troubled not at all by the inevitable scarring of the countryside that accompanies mining for coal and tar-sand bitumen, presumably because those harms will be forgiven in full with the emergence of new technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide [Carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, until recently considered benign or beneficial. Of late, some scientists have attributed to it a large role in global warming.] Neither does the Round Table seemed bothered by the possibility that the carbon storage technologies are doomed to fail, as many predict. That may be because the Round Table has a better purpose for the carbon than storage — more energy production. By pumping the carbon dioxide underground in a process called “enhanced oil recovery,” the Round Table expects we’ll be able to extract even more fossil fuel energy.

The Round Table’s obsession with making Canada an energy superpower isn’t limited to fossil fuels. Its plan calls for the takedown of our forests — they’ll be needed to produce ethanol for cars. And for mega dams in Labrador, Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, along with little dams everywhere. And for massive new transmission corridors to carry wind power to urban markets from remote regions and to carry power of all sorts in an east-west direction, from province to province.

But the biggest energy bonanza of all would fall to the nuclear power sector, particular in Ontario, where the Round Table projects some 24,000 megawatts of new nuclear construction. That works out to some 20 giant nuclear reactors of the kind that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. now touts — each one twice the size of a typical Pickering reactor. To have these built by 2050, as the Round Table recommends, the reactors would need to come on stream in rapid-fire order. After the first of them was completed a decade from now, the following 19 would pop up at the rate of one every 18 months, giving Ontario the developed world’s most ambitious nuclear program, and making Canada the developed world’s most energy-intensive economy by far.

With Canada awash in all this energy, you’d think prices might fall. Think again. Households in Alberta and Ontario face electricity rate hikes “in the order of 50% by 2050,” the Round Table tells us, while “For space heating and domestic hot water in houses, natural gas costs could increase by about 60%.” We’ll be using less of the energy ourselves, it explains, the better to increase our exports to others and maintain “Canada’s growing role as a major energy exporter.”

To them, it’s all quite idyllic. The report writers revealed life in 2050, where large scale manufacturing and industry has largely vanished, along with the car and the single family home, and Canada has become a nation of artisans, techies and service providers. “Housing densities have increased to the point where 70% of Canadians live in some form of multiple dwelling. With the majority of jobs in services and light manufacturing, these land uses are integrated into residential developments so that it has become common to live and work in the same ‘walkable’ neighbourhood or work at home for several days each week.”

The cost to the economy of this nirvana? Not much if done right. “With an efficient carbon pricing policy, the overall economy would likely be reduced in size from what it would have been by only about 1% to 3% in 2020 and 3% to 5% in 2050.” The cost to the individual? It would fall disproportionately on the poor: “For the 20% of Canadians with lowest income, a carbon price of $100 per tonne in 2020 would add approximately $1,000 a year to living costs.” The Round Table report doesn’t tell us what the costs to the poor will be by 2050, when the carbon price doubles to $200 or what our fate will be if, after we turn our economy and our society inside out, its fantastical projections don’t work out.

But the Round Table also doesn’t want us to take its computer model simulations too seriously, because it as much as admits, and repeatedly so, that its work is tantamount to navel gazing on a computer game. As it explains in describing how its proposals might affect different Canadian industries and consumers, “the NRTEE recognizes the uncertainty inherent in our analysis, and therefore the following should be viewed as directional at best.”

At best, the Round Table is pointing us in the right direction. More likely, it has it all backwards, and it is asking Canada to embark on a course of economic and environmental destruction based on predicting the future half a century out assuming the existence of technologies that may never exist to solve a global warming [Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and oceans in the-20th century, and its projected continuation.] problem that may never have existed.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 17, 2009

To some, green roofs are wonderful. They absorb rainwater, reducing strain on sewer systems. They insulate buildings from the cold in winter and the heat in summer, and from noise all year long. They provide greenery that building occupants and building neighbours can sometimes view. Some green roofs even provide food.

To others, green roofs are terrible. They add to the capital costs of buildings. They need continual maintenance. They add to the insurance and warranty costs that building owners face. They may even harm the environment.

In the fantasy world of urban planners, green roofs that meet city cost-benefit tests always make economic sense. These tests assign dollar values to mostly intangible benefits such as improved aesthetics and a reduction in noise (at 1.3% of a building’s value for each of the four decibels of sound avoided, for example, one group of planners estimated a mammoth $100-per-square-foot benefit for New York properties).

Planners then subtract the tangible costs of green roofs, such as the extra expense of constructing what is, in effect, a very heavy second roof suspended above the real roof, and ignore the intangible environmental costs associated with this second roof: the additional noise during construction, the additional emissions associated with the extra steel and concrete required in construction. Because the mostly intangible benefits exceed the tangible costs, the planners endorse green roofs.

In the real world of property owners, green roofs suit a determined minority and – given the state of the art – repel the wary majority. Green roofs not only cost a fortune to build, they must be continually planted and weeded – not always easy or convenient given the need to bring men and material to a level above the real roof. Green roofs must be watched over vigilantly to make sure the drainage system that suspends tons of water-soaked soil inches above the real roof doesn’t threaten the occupants below. Weighed against such costs and risks, the benefits of aesthetics and better insulation are too meagre for most.

Toronto doesn’t inhabit the real world. Its lawmakers, impressed by fantasy cost-benefit calculations, are about to make mandatory the installation of green roofs in new construction of large condominium and commercial buildings. The upshot: More expensive housing and higher maintenance fees for Toronto residents, more expensive occupancy costs for businesses, more of the middle class and more businesses leaving an ever-less affordable Toronto, less tax revenue to support city services, more suburban sprawl.

One other upshot: a vulnerable building stock. Green roofs are a largely untried technology about to be introduced for the first time on a large scale in Toronto’s winter environment. If a common problem emerges in future, the city would have victimized thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of hapless condominium owners.

This eventuality – too remote to even cross the minds of Toronto’s political establishment – is top of mind in British Columbia, which is still seared by the experience of its “Leaky Condo” scandal of the 1990s. In the booming housing market of the 1970s and 1980s, B.C. developers aggressively built California-style condo units, often relying on construction techniques suitable to California’s much dryer climate. Then the B.C. government, to promote energy conservation, required buildings to be airtight, inadvertently dooming much of the B.C. housing stock: Buildings – built in B.C.’s wet environment by developers who didn’t anticipate the new government standards – rotted en masse.

The cost of this unanticipated vulnerability in the B.C. housing stock? Between $1.5-billion and $2-billion to B.C. society, including hundreds of millions of dollars in destroyed property values for some 72,000 households. The citizenry still suffers from the anguish of seeing their homes destroyed.

Because of B.C.’s experience with this systemic failure, the province balked at the Brave New World of green roofs: Its Homeowner Protection Office stepped in to stop local municipalities that were planning to mandate green roof programs, especially after it discovered that three of the province’s four home warranty insurance providers wanted no part of the green roofs and that the fourth would only countenance green roofs “under very special circumstances – the right project, the right site, the right designer, the right installer and plenty of financial security for the insurer.”

While a Homeowner Protection Office study acknowledged that, in theory, “it is technically feasible to design, install and maintain a green roof such that it performs as well as a conventional roof or better,” it also balanced the theory with real-world practice: “The issues surrounding green roofs centre on the cost benefit of green roofs, the probability that such roofs will be designed, installed and maintained properly and the risks that may arise if they are not.”

Its bottom line: Experience in Germany and other countries shows that the learning process for green roofs can take time and that “an evolutionary approach that allows costs, benefits and risks to be assessed in each case is preferable to more directive, mandatory approaches.”

Toronto and other governments can best help their citizens, and best promote the healthy development of green roofs, by scrapping mandatory requirement for green roofs and also scrapping the many regulations that discourage green roofs, including myriad building code requirements and zoning that prevent unencumbered use of roofs for food production. Green roofs will then get built when people, not planners, judge them to be of benefit, and without systemic risk to society.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.