The Enviro Boys Finale

It has been two years and eleven months of blogging for Enviro Boys. This blogging experience, to which Chris FM called a “blogospheric experiment” was a real delight. Over the past two years, we have written over 480 blogs posts on topics as diverse as transportation, water policy, renewable energy, waste management, climate change, environmental politics, bottled water, and the joys of blogging itself.

When we first started this blog, it was an opportunity to share what Chris and I were learning in our classes - from environmental policy to the more theoretical concepts in resource management, economics and geography (a combination of what we studied). Sharing this material in a more accessible and engaging way was exactly what the blogosphere enabled us to do. We have written posts specifically on why we enjoy blogging as a hobby in and of itself. You can read a few here and here.

Over the years, we have had 57,000 page views from over 11 countries around the world. This includes over 15,000 views from the U.S., 14,700 from Canada, 2,300 from Germany and 1,600 from China, to name a few. It's been special for us to see readership grow across the world.

This is our last chance to thank all of our esteemed readers, followers, guest post authors and everyone else who has made this a worthwhile experience. It has been fun, memorable, and something we have enjoyed so much since our third 3rd year of undergrad. I remain grateful to this day to Chris, who approached me three years ago to ask if I was interested in joining him with this side project.

To conclude, I will leave you with two links: one is my favourite blog post that I wrote for Enviro Boys, the other is my favourite post that Chris wrote.

Please use this website as an archive of knowledge and information. The google search bar at the top of the page will allow you to search our site (internally) for the various topics we have written about over the years.You can also view all of the topics we have blogged about on the right side of page below our blog list.

My enthusiasm for blogging will continue for years to come. Indeed, I am starting a blog with a friend in January. The blog will focus on cities - their economic rise, ability to attract talented and industrious people, their impressive public transportation networks, and their role in the coming years as the world becomes more urbanized. As the blog will be written by a planning student (me) and my friend (urban geographer), it will naturally have an urban spin. Once the blog is created, it will be advertised on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you, once again.

Tim and Chris

What is water's dollar value to the Canadian economy?

Image credit: http://blue-economy.ca/

The question above was partially answered by a research project called the Blue Economy Initiative involving a team of authors from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, Canadian Water Network and RBC Blue Water Project.

Among the impressive list of authors is Professor Steven Renzetti, an environmental economist and one of Canada's biggest thinkers on the economics of water. You can read a summary here, which features an interview between Water Canada and Professor Renzetti. The report finds that water is responsible for a contribution to Canada's economy of between $7.8 and $22.9 billion.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

"We just don’t know what the value of water is in Canada today. That’s the biggest concern. We’re making decisions on public capital and infrastructure and improving water quality, but we don’t have enough information to determine whether these decisions are sound. As usual, it’s a typical academic result in that we don’t know enough and we should.

To promote dialogue about how water contributes to the economy, people need to understand the wide range of ways from which we derive benefits from it. We need to have more experience and knowledge on measuring these values so we can incorporate them into decision making and protect the resource. Another worry is that we’re falling behind. When you look at places such as the European Union and China, they have large research programs aimed at informing decision makers about biodiversity and ecosystems. Here, we have lots of scientists worrying about the chemical and physical natures of water, but we don’t know about its economical nature. It means we’re not going to make good decisions".

Read the full interview here.

Traffic congestion in the GTHA

We all know that traffic congestion is a mounting problem for the Greater Toronto Area. Alas, the traffic woes are not confined to the GTA but extend to the Hamilton Area as well. This region is known as the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA).

While we are generally aware that traffic congestion is getting worse -- exacerbated by population growth  and a poor response in transit supply to demand -- do we really know the true costs of congestion in our urban areas? A recent article citing U of T Professor Eric Miller, offers a number of statistics and facts about the traffic congestion problem that any resident of the GTHA should know about:

"The average commute time in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area will jump by a third in 20 years without a major injection into transit, according to expert calculations."

This amounts to: "an extra 27 minutes a day, 2.25 hours more a week, 4.6 full days a year, that local commuters will spend in their cars battling congestion as the region adds an expected 2.6 million people".

"Studies have shown that GTHA congestion costs an estimated $6 billion in unrealized GDP each year. Gridlock also results in 26,000 fewer jobs created in the region".

I blogged about this topic a number of months ago discussing the importance of transit alternatives like high-speed rail to help alleviate traffic congestion on highway 401.

The article offers much more. A natural alternative is to expand transit services. Fortunately, Metrolinx, has a $50-billion, 25-year "Big Move" plan which will involve a conglomeration of 100 projects ranging from bike lanes to 1,150 kilometres of new transit lines. Eric Miller, who continues to caution that traffic congestion is a huge impediment to economic growth, thinks the Big Move is an “excellent start” but it won’t be the entire answer. The GTHA is competing with the world’s biggest metro areas — places like New York, London, Shanghai — which have very sophisticated transit systems.

To read the full story, see here.

The return of the e-waste discussion

Image credit: veracitystew.com

It has been a while since Enviro Boys has written about the topic of e-waste, or waste management more generally. Like all environmental problems, this one is complicated.

Elisabeth Rosenthal from the NY Times Green Blog reports:

"When Americans turn in their old car batteries for recycling, they probably think they are doing good for the planet. And done well, recycling batteries is certainly environmentally responsible, since lead mining and processing cause far greater emissions of carbon dioxide than extracting lead from old car batteries for re-use."

More:

"But my article from Mexico should remind us that recycling can be “green” or not, depending on how it is done. That is particularly true of electronic waste, including batteries, where one goal of the recycling process is to extract precious metals. In much of the world, recycling is a big business with ties to gangs and organized crime. That is often the case with lead battery recycling plants in Mexico, that country’s officials told me".

I wrote about this topic of couple of years ago. E-waste is electronic waste in the form of batteries, computers and other electronics that are exported from one country to another for informal recycling processes.

My quick assessment pointed to how the US has not signed the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. Worse yet, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of the US gives the country authority and control over hazardous and toxic wastes.

E-waste is simply a part of the US's waste disposal strategy. These policies surreptitiously cover up their inherent problems, because they appear to be designed to promote E-waste but in actuality, such waste can end up countries such as Mexico (as reported by Elisabeth Rosenthal). E-waste is also a problem within southeast and east Asia causing pollution and serious ecological harm. See here for the article. While the US is guilty, I am sure Canada is just as bad but alas, the lack of transparency with its waste disposal, make it difficult to know where our car batteries end up, for example.

E-waste is a tricky problem. There have been many recommendations made to nation states on how to deal with this problem. Rosenthal concludes with:

"The government could simply ban used battery exports, as Slab Watchdog suggests. Or it could require that Mexican factories processing used batteries from the United States meet our environmental standards and undergo inspections. The Food and Drug Administration inspects foreign factories that make drugs imported into the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency could take on a similar role for battery recycling plants".

You can read the full story of recycling American car batteries in Mexico here.

Carbon emissions on the rise: a time for adaptation?

The NY Times reports that:

"Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery".

What's more:

"Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003".

Over the next few days, leaders from around the world are attending the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 7th Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP7) to the Kyoto Protocol, in Durban, South Africa. Other climate change conferences such as Copenhagen (2009) and Bali (2007) have had tremendous challenges in putting forward meaningful actions on mitigating climate emissions. Finding consensus on mitigating emissions is too difficult with the rising giants of India and China along with several developing countries.

Despite my cynicism, something positive may emerge from Durban. However, after working an internship with SFU for the past 6 months and learning about the many benefits of climate change adaptation, I feel more more inclined to support policies that address ways to respond and prepare for climate change impacts. I have blogged about this extensively. In short, adaptation is far more productive than climate change mitigation because people can begin to understand the potential impacts of climate on their lives and what sort of incentives are available to respond to this.

Matt Kahn at UCLA is famous for his work on the economics of climate change adaptation.  Take some of points with a grain of salt, but I think he's on to something that policymakers in the deveoped and developing world alike ought to pay attention to.

More on adaptation soon.