Perhaps the bright side of Ford’s term is that the governing by Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Councillor Doug Ford may unite citizens to become more active, cherish and fight for what is worth saving rather than being complacent (see Taxpayers vs Citizens in the Toronto Star), and help do what is needed, such as encouraging urban agriculture while removing bylaws that impede it and other smart, local, more sustainable solutions.

Though any who expect improvement after booting Ford and his followers out at the end of the term may be very disappointed when they discover the wheels have been set in motion long ago and are part of an inescapable predicament rather than a problem to be solved.

Jevons Paradox, where increases in total energy occur despite improved efficiency, occurs in a business-as-usual situation with increasing resource supplies. But as finite resources deplete we will be forced into consuming less in total amount, with increased resilience by switching fuels where possible in order to meet needs and demands. And increased resilience means for decreased efficiency, so Jevons Paradox won’t generally apply in a post-peak world.

By all means, increase efficiency where there is obvious waste, and don’t worry about Jevons Paradox. Efficiency is immediate conservation, and it buys us all much needed time to prepare for using less in total.

The Ontario Building Code (2006) establishes its goals in Division A. It has overall objectives that the Code seeks to achieve and then functional statements relating to those objectives. Both the objectives and functional statements are inherently qualitative, meaning no numbers or other facts. This is an appropriate way to separate goals from the solutions to those goals.

In Division A Table 2.2.1.1, objective OR2 is “Resource Conservation – Energy Conservation”. It states:

An objective of this Code is to limit the probability that, as a result of the design or construction of a building, a natural resource will be exposed to an unacceptable risk of depletion or the capacity of the infrastructure supporting the use of the resource will be exposed to an unnatural risk of being exceeded, caused by the consumption of energy.

Then the related functional statement F131 in table 3.2.1.1 indicates that statements in the building code relating to resource conservation are designed “To limit excessive energy consumption“.

That’s interesting. The entire goal of the energy components of the building code boils down to resource depletion or the ability to produce and deliver the resource, and not to use it all up too quickly. But notice the lack of numbers.

Who defines what an unacceptable risk is? Well, Appendix A 1.2.1.1.1.(1)(b) comes along and says Division B with all of its prescriptive requirements forming the bulk of the Building Code that everyone talks about is considered to be boundaries between acceptable risk and unacceptable risk. That is, “the risk remaining once the acceptable solutions in Division B have been implemented represents the residual level of risk deemed to be acceptable by the broad base of Canadians who have taken part in the consensus process used to develop the Code.”

There we have it. The key to changing the building code is to somehow get into the consensus process. But how does it work?

Here is my understanding of the process. The Province of Ontario sets out in legislation in the Building Code Act the various powers that the regulations under the act will have. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing administers those regulations in the documents comprising the Ontario Building Code. It’s good to leave an act as general as possible because it’s hard to change an act, while regulations can be changed without having to pass through the legislature.

The Building Advisory Council is the vehicle by which the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing solicits strategic advice on policy, technical and administrative issues related to the Building Code Act and the Building Code regulations. The terms of reference of the council is available in a PDF document on the Ministry web site.

Those terms of reference spell out the organizations who may have a designate to be on the Building Advisory Council, although the Minister can appoint additional members at will. To find out who the current designates are, have a look at the most recent minutes, available at the Building Advisory Council’s index page on the Ministry web site.

Following the chain of command approach, as an engineer I would contact the designate for Professional Engineers Ontario, the designate from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, or the representative from the Consulting Engineers of Ontario. A contractor might contact the representative from the Ontario General Contractors Association, and/or the designate for the Council of Ontario Construction Associations.

Any individual can always make submissions directly to the Ministry or the Minister, without having to do through the Building Advisory Council. But having a recommendation endorsed by the committee is helpful.

However, the Building Advisory Council is only an advisory panel. The Ministry as a whole, and ultimately the Minister, can do what they please. They can take recommendations under advisement and then turn around at make a step in a different direction, for political or other reasons. I’m sure when the engineers had an issue with Building Code Act about jurisdiction between it and the Professional Engineers Act, their complaints were dutifully passed along through the Building Advisory Council to the Ministry, which were then dutifully ignored. Nothing was changed until PEO applied to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2006 and won in May 2007.

In conclusion, to reform the Building Code such that Division B significantly raises the bar on energy performance of buildings and in effect lowers the threshold for the acceptable risk of resource depletion, we need to work with the Building Advisory Council members, the Acting Director of the Buildings and Development Branch as well as other people from the Building and Development Branch who are present at the BAC meetings, the Minister, and finally the Premier of Ontario. It wouldn’t hurt to work with your local Member of Provincial Parliament too. And if all else fails and you think you have a case, go to court.

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The Ontario Building Code (2006), as with as all provincial acts and regulations, is available for free in a Word document on e-Laws but the online version does not contain the contents of the Volume 2, such as the supplementary standards.

The accompanying article “Take Peak Oil seriously – it’ll be here much sooner than you think” contains quotes from Ontario’s environmental commissioner Gord Miller, investigative journalist extraordinaire Andrew Nikiforuk, and recently retired Natural Resources Canada geologist David Hughes. All have been saying what needs to be told, and it’s good to see mainstream local attention on the topic of energy decline.

Global energy use by humans over time. We are currently at a peak of energy production and will unlikely produce the same amount as we have before.

Techno Explosion assumes that our current trajectory of exponential growth continues due to some miraculous discovery of near limitless energy. This would ultimately lead to environmental disaster as resource extraction, food production, population, pollution and economic activity all increase as the available energy rises, as has been the case since modern civilization began.

Techno Stability is the mainstream green expectation that we will be able to have a steady-state economy and energy production plateau, with renewable energy sources coming on line as rapid as fossil fuels decline. I agree with Holmgren that this is also an unlikely scenario, as the creation of renewable energy generation infrastructure will continue to use considerable non-renewable resources, if it is even possible to run civilization on the scale of today.

Collapse assumes that humans are fully subject to ecological patterns and that we have greatly overshot our carrying capacity, leading to a massive population die-off and lower resource capacity than we started with, mirroring boom-and-bust cycles of deer on an island or any typical animal predator-prey relationship that becomes out of balance. The implications of a collapse are shocking, depressing and generally foster a mentality of inaction.

Energy Descent recognizes that a controlled reduction in energy use is likely the best way to adapt to lower energy availability with the least amount of human suffering. It will likely be a series of plateaus and economic disruption as new balance points are met for a time before further reduction in energy causes a move to a lower state of economic activity. Other authors have titled this the Long Emergency, or Powerdown scenario.

The responses we can expect from individuals up through to nations will depend on the severity of climate change on our food production and the rate of energy decline.

Responses to climate change and energy decline depend on severity and interaction between the two issues

If both climate change and energy decline are mild, as is currently the case, Holmgren describes a gradual move toward Green Tech, with a gradual distributed powerdown. If climate change becomes severe, governments may step up with a Brown Tech solution, attempting to deal with environmental changes through legislative reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as well as engineering responses to reduce damage through infrastructure upgrades. This would require more energy and resources, so ultimately a concerted response to climate change may worsen energy decline, leading to a Lifeboat scenario, where it becomes necessary to decide what to save and what to discard from our civilization and way of life.

As rapid energy decline sets in, use of “dirtier” energy sources such as coal will be pressed into action, reinforcing climate change in a reinforcing loop that could push civilization into collapse.

Finally, if energy decline is rapid but climate change is not severe, we may be able to enter in a bottom-up rebuild of civilization beginning with relocalization by necessity as transportation dwindles with less and less petroleum available for our vehicles. This Earth Stewardship approach is most suited to permaculture techniques and a controlled energy descent scenario.

Holmgren suggests that all four responses will likely happen in succession as well as simultaneously – both in geography and in social structures. He predicts that a lifeboat scenario will be on individuals’ minds as a primary response to ensuring family survival, while neighbourhoods will become local again with an earth steward approach.

Responses to climate change and energy time will be different at each level of human society

Really, both Lifeboat and Earth Stewardship scenarios are already present for the majority of the world’s peoples, which the Western world deems as “developing”. Ordinary people in “developing” nations, outside of the megacities, have a great deal to teach us about living off available local resources and within carrying capacity.

Bioregional societal structures such as regional municipalities and entire provinces might take on a green tech response while a federal government imposes a brown tech response at all levels. Add in the tug-of-war between these interconnected responses through energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and it’s impossible to predict how our global civilization will change.

Ultimately, if nothing else, our current rapid pace of life has prepared us for continued change. Many generations into the future humans will once again live in relative harmony with nature and flow with natural cycles, hopefully retaining useful knowledge from our relatively short-lived spike of energy consumption. It may be possible to encode the lessons of unconstrained human growth in the stories we tell, to prevent a runaway train from occurring again.