April 02, 2009 Opinion » Sustainable City

Stimulating ecocide

Nova Scotia's craptapulous $1.9 billion economic stimulus package is chock full of old school, unsustainable spending.

by Chris Benjamin

Nova Scotia has leapt the bandwagon and launched a craptapulous economic stimulus package: $1.9 billion of vague promises, spread over three years. Fifty-million clams is for energy conservation and $1 billion for roads, bridges and highways.

Two years ago, before the curtain was drawn to reveal that those big numbers in our gross domestic product mean little in the real world, premier Rodney MacDonald released another set of promises, called the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act. That document stated as its prime directive: "The health of the economy, the health of the environment and the health of the people of the Province are interconnected."

Now we're stimulating roads at 20 times the rate we're stimulating energy conservation. Either the EGSP Act was a lie, or its authors have amnesia.

The stimulus plan is the latest in this government's legacy of using platitudes to obfuscate its true intentions. "It's hard to respond to something when we have so little information as to what this really means," says Christine Saulnier, provincial director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "But just funding shovel-ready projects doesn't do it. All the issues we faced prior to the recession, like affordable housing and childcare, are still there."

Building roads does nothing to end a recession. Instead, it drives us further down a dead-end road built on a fundamentally unsustainable, fossil-fuel-dependent way of life, which has concentrated wealth into a few hands while 1,252 people in HRM are homeless. It's like curing a paper cut by chopping off your finger.

This mess was caused by "debt-fueled growth," says Ron Coleman, senior researcher for Genuine Progress Index Atlantic. The GPI is an index of sustainability, wellbeing and quality of life that uses a range of indicators including civic participation, leisure time, living standards, natural capital and human impact on environment. "Yet more debt is being touted as the solution," Coleman observes. "Only it's government debt instead of individual debt. The GDP-based accounting system has failed to provide any early warnings to the economic crisis, whereas the genuine progress index has been fairly clear about it: our debt is increasing faster than income."

Monetary debt, the numbers-on-paper variety, isn't really the problem, though. The problem is with the real-world debt we are accruing to the environment. "If I were a tree or a fish I'd want this [recession] to last longer," says Coleman. "We are polluting faster than the natural world can filter; using resources faster than the natural world can replenish. The natural world needs some rest and relaxation."

But, hypnotized by growing numbers, we have long ignored that reality. Apparently some of us---not surprisingly the powerful ones who have the most to lose from any real change in how we work and live---are determined to keep digging our way through these troubled times, deeper and deeper...and deeper.

If Government is determined to spend, there is an archipelago-length list of projects it could invest in that would, rather than compound ecological debts, create a sustainable economy in which we can all participate.

An example from Ontario, where the provincial government created a $200 million fund for green technology: "The Emerging Technologies Fund supports the kind of investment that drives innovation, secures jobs today, and creates jobs tomorrow," says John Wilkinson, minister of Research and Innovation. When he says tomorrow, he means long after Nova Scotia's new roads have been built.

The Ecology Action Centre has put together its own long list of ideas, which includes among other things: investments in building retrofits, active and rail transportation routes, energy efficient pulp and saw mill technology, sustainable energy storage facilities and marketing locally produced food, including seafood, organic meat and produce.

West of here they understand the real economic value of local food. Toronto-based Sprott Resource Corporation just invested $27.5 million to hire and train aboriginal farm-workers on the prairies, with a focus on sustainable, environmentally responsible land use, providing 17 bands an equity stake. For less than three percent of the cost of our new roads a private company has created 250 new jobs.

More radically, Coleman urges the fully employed to relax---and work a little less. He says governments should reward companies that share the work, employ more people at reduced individual hours. "Focus on reducing work hours, sharing work so that no one is unemployed or disadvantaged." Last week Michelin saved 95 Nova Scotian jobs with this strategy and the support of a federal work-share program.

"People would consume less and have more free time with friends and family," Coleman adds. "They could do more volunteer work." He's right, and I'm sick of this stimulus bandwagon, anyway. Time for my nap.

If you 're not too busy, you could email Chris Benjamin at chrisb@thecoast.ca.

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Wow, it's all about the Benjamins here...

Posted by Andy "Webeditor" Murdoch on April 4, 2009 at 4:59 PM | Report this comment

Hello Chris Benjamin at the Halifax Coast;

I have a few thoughts to share regarding your recent bits in the Coast.

TRAMS:
I can remember trams running in Halifax. I read the article you wrote on their promotion, but I do not share your enthusiasm for trams, I was cringing while I read. Trams are operationally problematic; perhaps they were just too old, but they were always breaking down and those power transfer arms would come-off frequently. The tram would stop suddenly, dead in it's tracks, while the driver had to get out into traffic and re-engage the arms to the electric cables above. This hampers traffic flow and transit schedules. Things seemed to get worse on miserable rainy or misty days, a frequent weather phenomena here. They were always dropping sparks everywhere too.

They have an incredibly ugly infrastructure on the ground and in the air, I was so glad to see the sky again after they took those networks down. You know the cables can't be fixed to buildings; there needs to be a network of poles to hold them all up, many more poles than what we have now. I don't miss the poles either. The rail's groves are a danger to pedestrian's ankles and biker's balance, that's both pedlers and motorcyclers. Slippery and even more dangerous when wet! If your car's wheelbase happens to share the rails width, you'll be surprised when you hit the brakes on a wet day!
Tram systems are hopelessly inflexible for systemic changes when planning new and different routes. One tram cannot pass another one, without great difficulty. The capital costs of the rails and the power grids are expensive, and power grids are inefficient, there are huge power losses between source and use. Road repair and under-road service repairs become more expensive because of the steel tracks embedded within. Those rail groves become a point of entry for water infiltration which causes serious destruction to the integrity of the roadbeds through hydrostatic and freeze-thaw actions. [A quick aside - Nova Scotia has one of this world's most frequent freeze/thaw cycling rates!] Clearing the snow off streets can create damage to the rails and increase snow removal costs, and cause more delays and traffic woes. Snow removal methods used downtown, involve loading dump-trucks with bucket loaders; those electric power cables are a nuisance again.

It's not good to be increasing demand for HRM's dirty power, but I guess that is only a short term issue, we'll be slowly moving over to cleaner and more sustainable sources to feed the grid, albeit, always with huge power losses between source and use. The power grid is flawed, it is a colossal waste of power because a big chunk of the power we put into it does not get to the user's device. Feeding the grid, regardless of source, is not conducive to energy conservation. The answer is to keep the transmission lines as short as possible, local power plants supplying the immediate surrounding areas. The ultimate solution humanity needs is self-powered buildings and self-powered vehicles.

Conventional trams, in my opinion, are not the answer we are looking for; but other than that, I admit, they are a nice quiet ride. We need alternative fuel sources for vehicles with on-board self-powering power-plants.

Zero Growth:
I did appreciate what you had to say in this issue's piece called 'Stimulating ecocide'. I've never believed that dept was a good thing at any level, but it does have it's place and purpose, if kept within reason. A twelve billion dollar dept for Nova Scotia, is not within reason, it is totally irresponsible, in my opinion.

Your article is right-on! Our current National and Provincial governments have the stimulus priorities all wrong; hey, who's surprised? Not I. They have everything all wrong, except once they got something right, as you referenced, they produced the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act. Then when the time comes that they could actually move forward on their stated prime directive, they totally fall flat on their faces again! Their current solutions are absolutely hideous, and they have the way to move forward collecting dust on a shelf! They wrote it too! Fuck!!

Your words, "hypnotized by growing numbers..." strikes a hard note with me! I've been perplexed for years now, by mankind's grip on the fundamentally flawed belief in the concept that growth is good! Growth, as it is calibrated in our economy now, is so obviously not good and not sustainable. What is the matter with people? Why do we not hear more about zero growth as a desirable target? I read a lot of bitching about a lot of good stuff related to sustainability, or our lack thereof, but why do we believe we can grow and expand what we are currently doing to the planet? Growth must be measured only in sustainable terms, not the physical and economic yardsticks we are using now. Research and innovation toward sustainable technologies is paramount to our healthy survival and to our economy, just as your cartoon and article point out. Your examples of the directions taken by people in Toronto and Ontario were great!

Please don't stop researching and writing on this topic, it needs our full and constant attention. It may even get the attention of government. They may even see the light in following their own prime objective. Yes, I can be a dreamer.

Bruce Benjamin