Month: December 2023

• Published as “Neoliberal elite need a Christmas Carol-style conversion’

Scrooge’s awakening to humanitarian instincts and conversion to a spirit of generosity needs to be replicated at scale

Dr. Trevor Hancock

19 December 2023

693 words

It’s that time of year, when Charles Dickens’ story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family is everywhere. But it’s not just a charming story of how a mean old curmudgeon sees the light and becomes a kindly old gent and a generous benefactor to his employee, Bob Cratchit. It’s about the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the appalling living and working conditions of the poor.

An article in The Guardian a couple of years ago quotes Dickens biographer Michael Slater to the effect that ‘A Christmas Carol’ is “Dickens’s reaction to the attitude of the government and many of the ruling classes in the 1840s … saying, if the poor couldn’t get work and couldn’t look after themselves, they’d have to go to the workhouses.” The article also quotes University of Cambridge Professor Robert Mayhew that the story is “a very seriously intended work of moral fiction”.

There are echoes of that same inhumane attitude to the poor around today, at a time when we find levels of inequality rising to levels not seen since the early 20^th century, the age of the plutocrats. According to the World Inequality Report (WIR) 2022, around 1900, globally, the ratio of the income of the top 10 percent and the bottom 50 percent was more than 16 to 1. By 1980 this had fallen to 8.5 to 1, but today it is back up to 15 to 1.

Inequalities in wealth distribution follow a similar pattern, which continues today. If we look at the top 1 percent globally, we see an extreme concentration of wealth and economic power: “between 1995 and 2021, the top 1 percent captured 38 percent of the global increment in wealth, while the bottom 50% captured a frightening [that is to say, frighteningly low] 2 percent”, the report notes.

While the level of inequality was less in Canada, we see the same pattern here. In 1900 the ratio of the income of the top 10 percent and the bottom 50 percent was a bit more than 3 to 1, dropping to 1.5 to 1 by 1980. But, notes the WIR, “income inequality in Canada has been rising significantly over the past 40 years”, and now sits at about 2.5 to 1.

The reasons for this are not hard to find: “income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries”;  in Canada, notes the WIR, it was due to a combination of “financialization, deregulation and lower taxes.”

This, of course, is the neoliberal revolution spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. In the name of freedom, individual responsibility and the worship of wealth accumulation, neoliberalism rolled back the policies that had contributed to low levels of inequality.

But n an interview in Scientific American this month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was blunt: “Unfettered capitalism, unfettered innovation does not lead to the general well-being of our society . . . One can’t just leave it to the market”, he said. The authors of the WIR, were equally blunt: “addressing the challenges of the 21st century is not feasible without significant redistribution of income and wealth inequalities.”

Our modern-day Scrooges operate at a much larger scale. They are the neoliberal elite that runs many of our corporations, sit on their Boards and in many cases in Cabinet, and who support and are supported by the right-wing think tanks that peddle this neoliberal claptrap. And they are the billionaires who turn up at Davos and, most recently COP28. Of the 34 billionaires registered as delegates at COP28, an Oxfam analysis reported in The Guardian found, “at least a quarter . . . made their fortunes from highly polluting industries such as petrochemicals, mining and beef production.”

Scrooge’s awakening to humanitarian instincts and his conversion to a spirit of generosity needs to be replicated at scale among this neoliberal elite. Raher than putting profit and power first, they need to put people and planet first. That would be a desperately needed Christmas Carol for our times.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Single-family homes in suburban areas result in much higher home energy, transportation and infrastructure costs

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 December 2023

700 words

Last week I looked at two major recommendations from the CHRM Consulting report on how to reduce our ecological footprint and create a One Planet Saanich and a One Planet Region; the need for energy efficiency and in particular energy-efficient transportation and reduced vehicle travel.

This week I continue this exploration by looking at key recommendations related to buildings. The next main recommendation is “In addition to energy efficiency and fuel switching we will make greater gains if we reduce the material intensity of our buildings, and ensure they are used more efficiently.”

Energy efficiency and fuel switching is already underway. As I noted last month, Saanich adopted BC’s Zero Carbon Step Code earlier this year and “does not recognize Renewable Natural Gas for compliance.” Another important initiative is the concept of ‘missing middle’ housing, which has been defined as “a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units – compatible in scale and form with detached single-family homes – located in a walkable neighbourhood”.

‘Missing middle’ housing lowers the ecological footprint in two main ways; at the level of the housing type, and at the level of urban form, a 2011 US EPA study noted. At the household level, the study stated, “the most striking difference is the variation in energy use between single-family detached homes and multi-family homes, due to the inherent efficiencies from more compact size and shared walls among units.”

The differences are dramatic: a single family dwelling (SFD) in a conventional suburban development uses 108 million BTUs for home energy use. But a multi-family dwelling in a transit-oriented development uses only 54 million BTUs for home energy. That is not just halving energy use, but household energy costs. The study added that using “moderate energy-efficient building technologies, such as those qualifying for Energy Star performance”, as well as ‘green automobiles’ could further reduce energy use, but not as much as housing location and type.

The data also reveal the second way in which missing middle housing is more sustainable; its transportation costs. A multi-family dwelling in a transit-oriented development uses only 41 million BTUs for transportation, whereas a single family dwelling (SFD) in a conventional suburban development uses 132 million BTUs, more than three times as much, in transportation energy.

The reasons are not hard to find. Low density urban sprawl makes transit unaffordable – there are simply not enough passengers to make it viable. At the same time, that low density, coupled with zoning that separates functions and street designs that are not well connected, make it hard to walk or even bike to key amentities and services. So most people, most of the time, have to drive to get anywhere – assuming they have a car. This is why the idea of more compact, more dense and walkable communities – the ‘15-minute community’ is gaining popularity.

Urban sprawl has other expensive inefficiencies baked in. The amount of infrastucture per household that has to be built and maintained is much greater for SFDs than for more dense urban forms. This makes it resource and energy inefficient and much more expensive per household.

A 2005 study by the Halifax Regional Municipality looked at service costs per household for 14 different services across eight different forms of urban settlement, from low density (1.2 people per acre) to high density (92 persons per acre). The differences in many cases are dramatic: Provision of roads varied from $1,053 to $26 per household, water from $425 to $42, sewers from $625 to $147, and policing and fire combined from $684 to $369. Overall servicing costs, including libraries, parks and recreation and other services amounted to $5,240 per household in low density areas, and to $1,416 in high density areas.

Clearly, on both economic and environmental grounds, sprawl must be actively discouraged and compact urban development and missing middle housing within existing urban areas encouraged. One way to do that, suggests a 2015 review of American experience in the Journal of Planning Literature, is “simply pricing public facilities properly”, a user-pays principle. If you want to build or live in low density, you have to pay the full lifetime cost of creating and maintaining that expensive infrastructure. That should help limit urban sprawl.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “We need smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, not more trucks and SUVs

Large SUVs and light trucks are vastly over-designed for the suburban market and very energy inefficient

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 December 2023

701 words

Over the past few weeks I have dug into the details of Saanich’s ‘four planets’ ecological footprint (EF), as calculated by CHRM Consulting, while recognising this is an under-estimate, in that it does not account for our impact on biodiversity or the extent of our ‘toxics footprint’. This week, I start to look at the key recommmendations in the report for getting us to a ‘One Planet’ Saanich – which, of course, is also applicable to the whole region.

Given that our carbon emissions are a large part of our overall footprint, it makes sense that “an overarching priority for climate action is to minimize demand for energy and eliminate emissions from use of fossil fuels”, as the report states. It has always seemed to me that an important but often overlooked opportunity in that regard is to minimize energy demand by increasing efficiency, which some have argued is, in effect, our greatest new source of energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) calls energy efficiency the “first fuel” in the clean energy transition, providing “some of the quickest and most cost-effective CO₂ mitigation options while lowering energy bills and strengthening energy security”, and “the single largest measure to avoid energy demand in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario.” However, the IEA adds, “the pace of global energy intensity improvements had noticeably slowed in the second half of the last decade and virtually stalled during the first two years of Covid-19.” The good news is “efficiency progress has gained momentum, with annual energy intensity improvements expected to reach about 2% in 2022.”

A splendid – or actually, a terrible – example of inefficiency is the growth in sales of the large SUVs and light trucks we see everywhere, vastly over-designed for the suburban market and very energy inefficient. A report last month from the Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI) reported “The growing market share and huge size of SUVs are undermining opportunities to mitigate the impact of vehicle improvements even with the growing shift to electric vehicles” (EVs).

Among other things they found globally SUVs are now 51 percent of the new car market, having largely squeezed out small and medium size cars, and that the average weight of a light duty vehicle “has reached an all-time high, exceeding 1.5 tonnes” meaning they require more materials, which increases their ecological footprint over and above their use of fossil fuels. Overall, they reported, “energy demand and CO₂ emissions could have fallen 30% more between 2010-2022 if vehicles had stayed the same size.”

The reason for this shift is pretty straightforward – SUVs are more profitable for the auto industry. The GVEI report notes they are “sold at a premium for proportionally lower manufacturing costs, which leads most of [the manufacturers] to resist and slow the transition to EVs.” But it clearly is not in the public interest to sell more and more, and larger and larger vehicles. It is way past time the government stepped in and mandated smaller vehicles – you don’t need a huge SUV or truck for commuting around the region.

In addition, it is time government stopped the crazy marketing of cars based on speed and/or the rugged great outdoors. The recent ban on a Toyota ad by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK on the grounds that the ads ““condoned the use of vehicles in a manner that disregarded their impact on nature and the environment [and] had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society” sets an important precedent that Canada should follow.

But in addition to smaller, more energy efficient cars – and the GFEI also notes that “electric powertrains use three to six times less energy than internal combustion engine vehicles to travel the same distance” – the Saanich Ecofootprint report goes further, suggesting “we can have greater impact if we go beyond switching to electric vehicles and instead focus on reducing the demand for vehicle based travel.” 
That means stopping urban sprawl, densifying existing urban areas so they become more walkable, bikeable and livable, creating a better fit between where people live and where they work, using telecommuting  where appropriate, and creating good public transit, instead of wasting millions more dollars on flyovers for cars.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “We carry from birth a body-burden of toxic chemicals that we add to along the way”)

Decades of lax assessment coupled with the assumption that chemicals are innocent until proven guilty have left us and the ecosystem with a burden of toxins

Dr. Trevor Hancock

28 November 2023

700 words

Last week I noted the ecological footprint does not do a good job of including some forms of wastes. While biological wastes and materials going to landfill or recycling are accounted for, “Toxics and pollutants released from the human economy that cannot in any way be absorbed or broken down by biological processes . . . cannot be directly assigned an Ecological Footprint”, notes the Global Footprint Network. So on top of learning about and reducing our ecological footprint, we need to also understand and reduce what we might call our ‘toxics footprint’.

Unfortunately these pollutants include plastics, heavy metals such as mercury, and many synthetic chemicals, including pesticides, PCBs and PFAs (found in non-stick pans, fabrics, furnishings, shampoos and cleaning products), that were designed to be stable and not easily broken down by nature. Thus they are persistent – or in popular parlance, ‘forever chemicals’. We have known of their potential ecological and health impacts for decades – Rachel Carson, in her famous book ‘Silent Spring’, sounded a warning about pesticides way back in 1962 – more than 60 years ago.  

In the planetary boundaries framework they are part of one of the nine planetary boundary systems, the broader class of ‘novel entities’:  “new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms” including “chemicals and other new types of engineered materials [read nano-particles] or organisms not previously known to the Earth system [read GMOs] as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by [human] activities”

The big problem with these novel entities is two-fold: First, human activity disperses them widely around the planet and across ecosystems, contaminating many life-forms – a process know an eco-toxicity. Second, for some of these novel entities (in particular, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), heavy metals and nano-particles) nature – through a process known as bio-concentration – brings them together and concentrates them up the food chain.

And who sits at the top of those food chains? Us, making this process perhaps the most elegant and potent form of nature’s revenge on humanity that I can think of. But its not just us, its other predators too. Locally, we have seen high levels of POPs threaten the health of orca, while DDT nearly wiped out bald eagles and other raptors in the 1970s. We and they all carry from birth a body-burden of these chemicals, many of which are known to be toxic in various ways – and we add to that burden throughout our lives.

But even worse, in many cases we do not know what their toxic effects are, and we certainly don’t know what the effects of their multiple potential interactions are. This is hardly a new problem. An important 1979 report on ecotoxicity from the Canadian Environmental Advisory commented on “the unavoidable limits to scientific knowledge and the limitations of the classical scientific method, particularly as it relates to toxicology.”

Forty years later, nothing much has changed. In finding last year that the planetary boundary for novel entities had been transgressed, Linda Pearson and her colleagues noted “There are an estimated 350,000 chemicals (or mixtures of chemicals) on the global market. Nearly 70,000 have been registered in the past decade” – and many of those have been registered only in emerging economies, where chemicals management capacity is lower. Even where capacity is high, they note, such as the European Union, of 12,000 or so chemicals registered with the 10 year-old REACH program, 80 percent are yet to be assessed.

So what we have, in effect, is a decades long unauthorised experiment to find out what happens when we expose humans, other species and entire ecosystems to long-term contamination with multiple, low dose, persistent toxins and loose novel entities into our ecosystems.

This results from decades of lax assessment of these chemicals, coupled with the bizarre assumption that chemicals, like people, are innocent until proven guilty. All this has been facilitated by a chemical industry that has shown time and again that it will fight tooth and nail to keep its products on the market, and will always put its profits over the wellbeing of people and the planet.

That is our toxics footprint, and it is a dangerously unknown and shameful legacy.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy