the Walnut Diary

I have just finished reading The End of Oil, the eye-opener by Paul Roberts. While the book’s 2004 publication date leaves it rather dated in its assumptions that oil prices could rise as high as forty dollars per barrel and that bio-fuels can help, Roberts provides an interesting context for the U.S.’s current resistance to climate change legislation.

The Kingston Steam Plant in Oakridge, Tennessee, was built by the TVA in 1955. It is one of nine hundred coal-fired power plants in the United States which with minimal pollution controls produce over 44% of the nation’s electricity (268).

The problem is that the older plants are paid for, produce very cheap electricity, and new plants fall under the federal Clean Air Act which requires expensive pollution controls. The old plants are exempt. What’s more, Roberts explains that the TVA has done a $400 million stealth renovation on the Kingston plant, doubling capacity, but not improving air quality, so it continues to emit a hundred thousand tons of sulfur and nearly four million tons of carbon every year (261).

It’s a simple question of costs. Coal is dirt cheap and the Kingston plant can produce power for about 2 cents per KWH. A new gas-fired plant would be clean and not too expensive to build, but natural gas costs three times as much as coal, and the price of the electricity would be more than the market would bear. A new coal gasification plant could operate efficiently, and even sequester the carbon dioxide produced, but the cost would rise to a prohibitive 6.5 cents per KWH.

In the energy world of the United States there is no economic reason to reduce carbon outputs, and every reason to devote millions of dollars and votes to fight climate policy. Herein lies the resistance to the Kyoto Accord and other climate-change initiatives. George Bush Jr. won the presidency with the support of the coal-producing states and a war chest made rich by contributions from oil companies and auto manufacturers.

There is at present no economic disadvantage to emitting CO2. Putting out a ton of carbon doesn’t make you or your company less competitive or less profitable – whereas cutting CO2 emissions almost always will, in terms of additional technology costs and lost productivity (273).

Roberts explains why automobiles in North America have worse fuel efficiency than they did in 1988. Following the OPEC crisis in the mid seventies, Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency legislation stipulated a steadily-rising standard for vehicles sold in the United States. Ronald Regan cancelled it “and terminated a decade of dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency” (262).

Roberts likens the social costs of gasoline consumption to those of cigarette smoking, and explains how the tax on tobacco by government is primarily a means to internalize the costs. He suggests that a similar tax on carbon is increasingly in use around the world to offset the costs of oil consumption which extend well beyond the pump price.

This idea is not new. In the United States, coal-fired power plants already pay a penalty for each ton of sulfur dioxide they emit – a requirement that has dramatically reduced sulfur emissions and the acid rain they cause. A similar system for carbon would be even more transformative. As carbon began to represent a cost to be avoided, so consumers, companies, and entire industries would shift their business strategies, investment patterns, and technology programs to minimize carbon consumption and emissions. A carbon tax would rectify the myriad perverse incentives that today not only encourage wasteful building, driving, and other inefficiencies, but give hydrocarbons an advantage over other energy technologies, such as hydrogen or renewables. Consumption patterns would shift dramatically: as the price of gasoline or coal-fired power rose to reflect carbon capture, consumers and businesses would move toward more efficient cars and appliances (276).

It remains to be seen, however, whether such an idea can cross the Atlantic and overcome the American disdain for paying for pollution, something that has been free for centuries (279).

“The utilities will never admit this in public,” says one climate analyst who has worked closely with the power sector, “but if you talk one on one to senior guys from the power industry and you ask them whether they think that at some point in the next five to ten years there will be a significant limit on carbon, they will all say yes. They know this is coming, and they are investing in little clean technology things on the margins. But until they see what the limit will be, what the carbon market actually is, they can’t move. (280)”

Paul Roberts saved a surprise for his last few pages. Stephen Harper’s trying to dismiss Stephan Dion’s proposed carbon tax in Canada as “crazy” but in 2003 a similar program narrowly missed passage in the U.S. Senate after a late rally by the Republicans. Its champions? John McCain, the current Republican presidential nominee, and Democrat Joe Lieberman (p. 331).

Roberts, P. The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. 2004.

Mom left a flyer on our counter announcing Hazardous Waste Day at the Toledo recycling depot. New to life in the country, I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I dutifully loaded up a utility trailer with the items listed.

Saturday morning, bright and early, I headed off to Toledo with my load. A late email from a neighbour led to a stop at his garage to unload most of the used oil for the farm’s machine shop furnace.

With the remainder of my hazardous waste I turned in to the garage at Toledo, only to find no one around. Wrong day? Wrong garage? Cell phones are made for this: I called Mom. She checked the address and called me back. Turn towards Brockville, not Smiths Falls.

Off I went. Then I saw it, this incredible lineup of cars and pickups, stretching back toward Brockville from the township building. I pulled to the right, approached the end of the line and did a u-turn to join the queue on the opposing shoulder. The three vehicles behind me did the same.

And there we sat. Over the course of the next hour and a half my line-mates and I inched ahead: it was likely two month’s worth of grinding on the truck’s starter before the line had wound its way along the highway, in between the nice ladies with vests and clipboards at the gate, then all the way back around the salt shed and out to the unloading area. I kept thinking of how nicely a hybrid would work in this kind of stop-and-go traffic. Can a Toyota Prius pull a trailer?

When they got their turn, the graying drivers hustled about, dropping off paint cans and batteries, used oil and superannuated propane tanks. A host of workers clad in vests helped unload the vehicles. Everyone was polite, but they wasted no time on chat.

Things were a lot different at the good old Westport Dump when we were kids. I used to love The Dump, the wild west of Westport. You could slide anything down that hill that you could physically roll out of a truck, and if you went home with other treasures gathered in exchange, nobody minded.

Target shooting at The Dump was not particularly frowned upon. I remember Don Goodfellow, Bob Conroy, John Wing and I spent one soggy March-break afternoon up there with John’s .22 and a couple of boxes of shells. As the afternoon plinking session wore on, John’s failure to clean his gun complicated things slightly. The rifle was one of those French semi-automatics which starts with the action open, picks up a shell when the trigger is pulled, loads it into the barrel and discharges the round all in one motion. Too much accumulated lead in the barrel prevented a shell from loading, but it fired anyway from the impact. The shrapnel blew out of the side of the gun and startled the marksman of the moment, but fortunately the rest of us were standing behind the shooter as our dads had taught us. Still, it was a lesson well learned. I think it was Don who reamed the breech of the rifle out with a nail file and we shot on until the ammo ran out.

The dump was a place of privacy and lawlessness where one could unload his truck and then, if he wanted, break the windows out of a recently abandoned hulk slid down the embankment. Strangely enough, I don’t recall any of us ever doing that. We preferred to shoot ketchup bottles.

What a change today when I drive into the Portland Recycling Site. It’s a crowd scene like at Toledo, with Subarus and Hondas jousting their way through the line just the way they do in downtown Ottawa at rush hour. Same cars, same drivers, no doubt. Serious people mechanically totter to the various bins, do their business, then rush away.

Even four years ago it was different. I’ll never forget the two smartly-uniformed young women who ran the place the summer we cleaned out the stone house. I immediately dubbed them the Dump Divas, and after one carefully made-up young lady complimented me on my trailer-packing, conceived an absurd desire to please them with gifts of old rockers, 3-legged tables, a pair of seats out of a long-gone Chrysler van, and other such treasures. I’ll never forget this one poor girl in spotless black uniform, perfect hair and makeup, shined black shoes – up to her ankles in some noxious goo oozing out of the pile of effluent behind her as she helped us unload our trailer. She was obviously determined to do a professional job, regardless of the circumstances, but my heart went out to her. Maybe a little law and order at the landfill site is a good idea, after all.

Anyway, the Toledo toxic-waste experience took the better part of a morning, but my half-pail of white lead, my expired epoxy, and even my 33-year-old unopened pail of Styrofoam adhesive have gone wherever recycled chemicals go, and I hope they won’t come back in a toy easily ingested by a future grandchild.