Carbon Taxes Done Right

I was thinking the other day of the Charles W. Morgan, one of the last whaling ships built. It was a magnificent sight, 113 feet long, with 13,000 square feet of sail. It would have drawn ohhs and ahhs from those assembled on the shore as she slipped down the greased rails of the drydock out into salt chuck. She was of course, doomed, and you can only imagine that Jethro and Zachariah Hillman knew that when they laid her keel in 1841 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Even her inaugural voyage was a harbinger of the world to come as the whales she was designed to hunt and process into whale oil were already in steep decline, and the first flickers of kerosene lamps were just around the corner.

It’s not often I think about large obsolete whaling ships, but I couldn’t help myself given the house that is going up at the end of my street. It is a leviathan, a 3,400 square foot, three car garage throw back to an age when we didn’t care about carbon foot prints or expensive oil.

I’m amazed that houses with three car garages still make it through the approval process. It’s like there is a left brain/right brain disconnection. Municipalities talk about greening and conservation, and then planning departments allow energy sucking behemoths through to construction stage.

Another example of a government that hasn’t figured out how to promote conservation is the provincial government with their spoon-full-of-sugar approach to the carbon tax for vehicles. Instead of giving every single person in B.C. a check for $100.00, followed in quick succession with a smart rap on back of the head by the extra taxation cudgel they should have talked to me first.

My scheme, promotes conservation, allows appropriate individuals choices, rewards those that deserve it, and most importantly doesn’t penalize the financially disadvantaged.

In an ideal community, you could live close enough to work that you could walk, and although that’s a great goal, we haven’t, for the most part been smart enough to build our communities that way. So let’s take a baby step and recognize how people live, and try and affect behaviours of dinosaur thinking..

The first step is to issue every vehicle a provincial gas usage card. It would work like your gas loyalty card, and you would swipe it after you swiped your credit card at the pump. The first 500 liters of gasoline that you purchased using the card would lower your cost per liter of gas to 50 cents per liter. After you’ve used up those first five hundred liters, then the next 500 liters would be sold at the current market price, which today is $1.50. The next 500 liters would be sold at the current market price plus 50 cents per liter. The next 500 liters would be sold at current market price plus $1.00, and so on. The scheme is called Balanced Zero Sum Motivated Carbon Based Cost Adjusted Subsidization (BZSMCBCAS). It’s a great acronym, but I don’t think it’s pronounceable.

Why 500 liters? It sounds like an arbitrary number doesn’t it. Actually it’s the result of a careful calculation. The average person in BC drives an average of 1000 km per month. Let’s imagine you drive the Smart Car. That works out to 40 liters of gas per month, or 480 liters per year. By simply using the most fuel efficient car on the market we can establish a baseline in the calculations.

As people went about their year the first months they would be saving a lot of money. As the 500 liter mark approached the bill from the gas pump would say things like “You only paid $25.00 to fill up! Soon that will cost you $75.00! Time to dump that gas guzzler!” Or something similarly subtle.

This system would be self supporting because most people don’t drive a Smart Car. People who drive too far in vehicles with bad gas mileage would subsidize people that don’t drive that far, or drive the average distance in cars with great gas mileage.

The BZSMCBCAS method could be used for any carbon-based fuel source. In housing the government could determine the average size house, calculate how much electricity and natural gas that size house would use if it were built to L.E.E.D (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards and then use that figure as the baseline to establish the discount. The same discount price /regular price/ penalty price scheme could be easily applied and home owners would soon realize that insulation, double glazing and lower thermostats would be investments, rather than costs.

They would also realize that building houses with 3,400 square feet and a three car garage have as much relevance in this modern carbon sensitive world as building the Charles W. Morgan.

Got a better acronym, email me at duanelaird@yahoo.com

The Price or is it The Cost of a Liter of Gasoline

It’s interesting how a small project can develop a life of its own. Take our kitchen. It all started with our latest acquisition, a great deal on a cool second-hand fridge. It was a couple of inches wider than our old fridge, but we figured that we’d ignore that little detail and make it all work.

The old fridge went away, and we put the new fridge in its place, or at least we tried to. It didn’t fit. Not even close. Maggie and I stood in front of the fridge, each with our arms crossed and our heads cocked to one side looking at the conundrum until finally she said, “Well, you’re going to have to do something about that,” turned, and walked out of the kitchen.

I figure by the time I move the window, get new cupboards, move some electrical, upgrade the lighting, and repaint, the money we saved on our second hand fridge will pretty much be gone. As I sat there totaling up the budget, I commented to no-one in particular that there is always a difference between the price of something and its real cost.

I sat there, deep in thought, sketch pad, tap measure and the Ikea kitchen catalog in hand. My mind wandered from the task, as it often does. I like to refer to it random cognitive perambulation, which I believe is its technical medical term. Maggie likes to refer to as goofing off, which is the non-medical term, I guess.

Anyway, somehow I got thinking about the price of gas. Does the price of gas reflect its true cost? Is there a way to actually calculate the “cost” of gas? Does the price we pay for gasoline at the pumps reflect the total costs that are associated with the consumption of gasoline? Apparently I’m not the only person that’s let their mind wander over this topic. I found an organization called The International Center for Technology Assessment, a non-profit committed to providing the public with full assessments and analyses of technological impacts on society. According to the ICTA, if you want to calculate the cost of gas, it requires a look at the peripheral effects, and developing a methodology to quantify them.

Let’s start with some simple ones, like subsidies. The Government of Canada provides subsidies for oil companies to the tune of $1.4 billion a year, not including the $1 million dollars a day in Canadian tax payer money that goes to support development of the Alberta oil sands. That works alone out to an extra 5 cents per liter. And we’re lucky, the American government is a bit more generous, with subsidies totaling close to $100 billion per year, which works out to 20 cents per liter in tax donations by American citizens.

And the costs don’t stop there. According to recent North American statistics, the average car travels 19,000 kilometers per year. At an average 11.3 km/liter, each car burns 1681 liters of gas per year, producing 4,035 kilograms of CO2. Even if you don’t buy into the global warming concept, there are direct correlations between the amount of pollution and cancer, asthma and other diseases. Those are treated with your tax dollars.

When you add the cost of global warming, damage and diseases caused by air pollution, loss of farmland, suburban sprawl, parking lots, new infrastructure initiatives like the Gateway proposal, oil spills, environmental degradation, and other directly attributable costs, the price comes out to between $4.15 and $5.00 per liter.

Like the price of my new fridge and the total cost of the reno, the price and cost of gasoline are quite different; the price of gas is no where near to the real costs that all of us pay for, one way or another.

So the $1.41 per liter you spend right now? Chump change. Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry about the real cost of gasoline. That’s way too scary.

For further reading, try A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World by Peter Tertzakian and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany et al. Any comments, contact me at duanelaird@yahoo.com.

Bottled Water Bad – Packaged Air Worse

In June of 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco mandated that the City of San Francisco could no longer use government money to purchase bottled water. He said that it simply didn’t make any sense to spend upwards of $500,000 per year of tax payer money on bottled water that was by objective standards often inferior to the quality of San Francisco's pristine tap water.

And he’s right, of course. Shipping water from Fargo or France simply makes no common sense. But I have discovered something even sillier: Shipping air from China.

It struck me, literally, this Christmas. It was Christmas morning and we awoke late and wandered downstairs to see what Santa had brought. The lights of the tree danced on the shiny ribbons, and for one brief moment it was as perfect and serene as any Currier and Ives etching. Then my six year old in the guise of a 50hp wood chipper set to work. No appreciation was given the origami-like precision of the wrapping on his presents, or the heartfelt and witty bromides on the cards as he tore through the wrapping to see what was his.

He was excited and appreciative at the same time. Wow, and thanks, and look at this! The coffee was still brewing, and so it was that my reaction time was still a little lagging when the lad said “Hey cool! Mega Bloks! Dad! Catch!” and tossed a large box at me. My hands weren’t entirely connected to my brain, and it caught me square in the forehead and pitched me back into the couch. I yelped in pain, and grabbed my head. Maggie rushed over, picked up the box to sit down, and began to comfort me and sooth my injury. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said, “this thing doesn’t weigh anything. Don’t be such a big baby, it hardly left a mark.”

She was right. Not about the big baby part, it actually smarted, but about the package weight, and reason became obvious after breakfast when we opened the box.

The box was 16 inches long, 10 inches wide and 2 inches deep. After we had removed the extraneous packaging, and stood the box on end, the pieces took up only one quarter of the box. Three quarters of the box was filled with air.

Why was that air there? It was there because a marketing and packaging design person wanted to make the package more impressive so that it would be purchased over something smaller. The callous and premeditated marketing and design person didn’t think about the consequences of his actions.

Let’s think about this. Mega Bloks are made and packaged in China and shipped by container to the West coast, where they are put on trucks and trains and shipped to various department and toy specialty shops all across North America. If all of their packaging was designed by the same wastrel, let’s call him Bob, then out of every four containers that contain Bob’s packaged products, three of them are filled with …. air.

That’s correct, Bob. You and Mega Bloks are shipping air from China. And each of those containers has an embedded pollution calculation associated with it. According to a recent UN report, cargo ships contribute ONE BILLION tonnes of air pollution a year to the atmosphere! Recent studies in the US and the Netherlands showed pollutants from ships contribute half of the smog-related sulphur dioxide in Los Angeles. In Rotterdam, where North Sea shipping lanes run within 25 miles of the shore, container ships spew pollution that can travel up to 1,000 miles inland.

If it’s the same for Vancouver, then Bob, and other product designers like him are directly responsible for 37% of the pollution in Vancouver. How many trucks whiz down the highway carrying air? How many ships ply the oceans polluting the air we breath to bring us air? We are expanding port facilities and building roads to accommodate the air you’re shipping from China.

Nice goin’ Bob.

Worm Wranglers Wanted

George, our mailman came to my door the other day, all smiles, and said “I’ve got worms!”, to which I replied that there were several good doctors that could help him. “No, no,” he said. “I’ve got a worm composter!”

I had been showing off the garden and my compost piles to George a few weeks ago, and he excited with the idea of recycling his kitchen waste but lives in an apartment. Worm composters are the perfect solution.

Taking up little space, simple to start and maintain, a worm composter provides a happy place for your worms, who in turn will process 5 to 10 pounds of fruit and vegetable peels, pulverized egg shells, tea bags and coffee grounds every week, leaving behind worm casings, compost “tea”, and no odor.

Getting started is easy. There are several worm composting kits available that come with everything you need to create a worm ranch. A model called the Cascade Worm Factory comes complete with the bins, a manual and 10,000 worms. For the more adventurous, there is Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof, an excellent guide available in your library that will take you through constructing a worm composter out of wood, and scavenging through horse dung piles for your own red wigglers, and setting up the correct environment. Most municipal recycling programs also offer courses and resources in worm composting. Check yours today, and happy ranching!

Mulching Away

It isn’t often that I get to use the bon mot “au contraire”, but last week presented the perfect opportunity when my nosy neighbor Fred leaned over the fence and said “getting a little lazy there, leaving all of them grass clippings on the lawn.”

I stopped pushing my manual reel mower, turned, raised an eyebrow and said “au contraire, Fred” and proceeded to explain the wonders of mulch.

There are two basic techniques for mulching. The kind I was practising on my lawn is known as lazy or accidental mulching. The grass is cut, falls onto the ground and in a couple of days has begun to break down and replenish the soil. It also keeps the ground cooler by inhibiting evaporation, leaving my grass greener with less water.

The second type of mulching is directed mulching; taking straw, leaves, bark, or wood chips and spreading them around the bases of plants or on the paths of the garden specifically to deter the growth of weeds, and to provide nutrients to the plants. This takes a little more work that just leaving your clippings on the lawn, but it is a sound way of controlling weeds, and giving your plants a boost.

Mulching is also a good garden and lawn fall activity. Shredded leaves make for excellent fall and winter plant food.

By far the biggest benefit of mulching is keeping leaves and grass clippings out of the landfill. On average 10%- 20% of landfill wastes are grass clippings. So Fred, I’m not “lazy”, I’m performing a public service for the greater good. So there.

The 110 Mile Diet - Book Review

100 Mile Diet – A Year of Local Eating

No, you don’t need to walk a 100 miles to lose weight, and if fact this book is not about shedding the personal pounds at all. It is about leaving a lighter environmental footprint on our fragile planet.

The book is a chronicle, told in alternating chapters by the two authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, of their year of eating nothing that they could not source within a 100 mile radius of the downtown Vancouver apartment. The impetus for the experiment was the growing realization that our food travels a very long way to get to us. Consider the Caesar Salad. Lettuce from California, olive oil and parmesan from Italy, anchovies from Spain, Worcestershire sauce from England. A trip of thousands of kilometers, all thanks to our ultimately doomed oil-based global transportation system.

It is a tale of a personal relationship struggling under the stress of no chocolate, no pepper, no olive oil, no ginger. The sorrow of weeks of beets and potatoes. The joy of sourcing wheat and thus pancakes, for the first time in 9 months. It is a tale of two people reconnecting with the local food farmers, farmers markets, and learning to taste, to really taste and appreciate their food for the first time.

What started as a personal experiment has grown into a movement. Check out www.100milediet.org for the full story, to find how you can benefit from eating locally, to see personal stories from other local eaters, and to find an ever growing list of local producers across Canada and the United States.

The Road to Hell is Paved with HOV Lanes.

Carpool lanes, also known as HOV lanes or diamond lanes are designed as a relatively low cost solution to traffic congestion. The underlying logic is simple. If every car contained two people then we would have half as many cars on the road, and traffic congestion, the main cause of the ironically named “Rush” hour, would disappear. And while the logic is simple, the reality is less clear.

For example, in Vancouver a special HOV lane was built on one of the busiest in the city. While the number of cars with more than one rider in the morning commute increased from 600 to nearly 1,000, the number of single-occupant vehicles increased 46% to 5,200. That wasn’t foreseen. Neither was the 8% decline in bus ridership. It seems that as people began to ride-share and moved into carpool lanes, it freed up capacity in the regular lanes, encouraged more people to take the route, and because the bus riders saw only a 3 minute saving with the new lane, many of them abandoned the bus in favor of their cars.

So the HOV Lane caused less bus ridership, and in the end, more traffic. Somewhere there is a city planner banging his head on the desk.