Why Parliament Hill's gong show goes on
James Travers
Ottawa
 Frustration is the national capital hamster wheel. Here are 10 reasons for the futile spinning:
Liquid Cash
Somewhere, somehow, Ottawa spends nearly $300 billion a year. No one knows where it all goes. Ministers and mandarins spent decades perfecting covering their tracks. Now they can't come clean even when there's nothing to hide. The Star once tried to write a good news story on how much is spent keeping Canadians healthy and out of hospitals. The secret is safe.
Play Dough
Separating new money from old is almost as hard as following the dollars. There ought to be a Guinness record for the number of times a reannouncement is reannounced. This year's economic stimulus, 80 per cent implemented for those gullible enough to believe the television spots, is a contender. Even the Mother of all Spreadsheets – sold separately but, permanently out of stock – couldn't help you tell new money from old.
Hold that thought
There's no such thing as a bad idea as long as it's good politics. Here's an example: Bailing out car companies is an ideological anathema to Conservatives and few Liberals think it's money best spent. But with auto-dependent Ontario deciding most federal elections, neither the ruling party nor an ambitious official Opposition is willing to risk just saying "no." Funny, eh, how self-interest revs the motor?
Dumb and Dumber
Happiness here is reducing complex problems to a bumper sticker. "Do the Crime, Do the Time" resonates, but it doesn't make Canadians safer any more than cutting the GST made us noticeably richer. Keep it simple, stupid, is the rule, not the exception. So stick this on your subsidized Suburban: "Don't just vote, think."
Smaller Heroes
You can buy a plastic Mountie on a horse; you can't find a statue of Halton's Michael Chong. To recap, the RCMP, among other horrors, skewed the 2006 federal election and got away with it. When Stephen Harper didn't bother to consult on a seminal decision within Chong's portfolio – the recognition of the Québécois as a nation – the minister resigned on principle. Democracy demands less of the former, more of the latter.
Technophobia
Quill pens are still the rage here. Putting official Ottawa online would free information logjams and provide the openness party leaders promise and forget the second they arrive here. Of course that would spike systemic secrecy and, holy smokes, give politicians awkward moments. It's so easy a fix you can only speculate why it hasn't happened.
Suffer the Children
There's no surer sign of skulduggery than the solemn assurance that something's being done for the children. If politicians really care about future generations they would do more than dump crushing debt on unborn backs. They would be brainstorming with the provinces on a national education strategy, building a Harvard, an Oxford or a Sorbonne for all those bright kids waiting to blossom in the early education system far-sighted countries have now and this one desperately needs.
Spin
There's a rule here that no one can be called a liar. Honest, that's a fact. What Parliament Hill has instead is spin doctors who administer half-truths. All they do is leave out the really good bits, the need-to-know stuff that helps ordinary folks find the grey zone between black and white. Oh, well, you're probably better off not knowing the whole truth anyway.
Polls are for dogs
It's no surprise that in a place this surreal, perception is reality. What matters here is what voters believe, not what they know. Trouble is, too many of us believe Elvis is alive and don't know if Sir John A. Macdonald was the first prime minister or started a burger chain. Along with a civics course, what's needed is a culture of deliberation and the discipline to know what we are talking about before we let the whisky wisdom speak. A round for the House, please.
So's your old man
Always a blood sport, federal politics is now a brawl. Liberals threw the first punches by demonizing the Reform Party and then its successors as agents of a secret agenda. Conservatives are swinging back harder, accusing their rivals of being soft on crime, unpatriotic, even traitors. It's schoolyard ugly and so hyperpartisan that public debate ends in personal assault. Embarrassing, yes, but frustrating, too, for a country deserves better.
Text Source: The Toronto Star Dateline: July 2, 2009. James Travers' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
My personal experience with the garbage strike
Jeff Berg
 For about two hours today I was able to experience the life of a garbage picker-upper.
We at the Peter Pan Bistro have been storing our garbage since the beginning of the strike. Today we finally hired a company to come and pick up the fetid mess. And because a management position in the restaurant world means mostly that you get to do what others won't I was the man for the job.
To put it mildly the stench of the wet garbage that I dragged out on to the street was intense. On a couple of occasions I gotta tell ya I came so very close to tossing my euphemistic cookies. As I was only half-way through at this point a solution had to be found or I was simply not going to be able to complete my self-appointed task. The only thing I could come up with was to grab a clean kitchen apron from downstairs and fashion it as best as I could into a filter for my overwhelmed olfactory system. This is the picture that you see here, and more or less it worked.
Finally it was done. Or rather my part of it was done, now I had to hope that the fellas that we had contracted would A) Show up and B) Take the stuff. For if they did not I would be placed in the position of having to drag all that crap back into the cubby from whence it came. Frankly I was utterly dubious as to my ability to do so.
In any case at the end of this two hour period all I have to say about our striking garbage folk is that $50/hr doesn't seem too high a price to pay for what they deal with daily. I know after today that I most certainly couldn't do it.
___________
Who Wants To Pay More For Green Electricity?
 A research report in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution suggests that individuals prefer to be involved in a collective contribution to green electricity that involve everyone paying more, rather than having individual higher bills.
Many electricity suppliers offer so-called green tariffs. These tariffs charge a premium, which is then invested in renewable electricity generation, such as wind power and solar energy, or in other forms of carbon reduction technologies. However, Roland Menges of the University of Flensburg and Stefan Traub of the University of Bremen, Germany, wanted to know whether an individual's "willingness to pay" (WTP) for green electricity matched up with expectations or whether an alternative business model might work better.
The researchers surveyed people and offered them either a public-choice scenario or an individual-choice scenario. They pointed out in their survey that there are three different payment vehicles for the public promotion of renewable energy: direct tax (reduced income), indirect tax (tax added to bill via green tariff) and "carbon" tax. They tested to see how much free-riding would take place in each scenario. Free-riding would involve individuals paying for a standard tariff while benefiting from the development of renewable energy paid for by others with green tariffs. They also looked at how public promotion of green electricity would impinge on opinions and uptake of green tariffs. Finally, they investigated trust in the market.
The overarching conclusion of the study is that people in Germany prefer their green electricity products to be paid for as a collective contribution rather than as higher bills for individuals who happen to opt for a green tariff. This result might be interpreted in light of the more general conclusion of political economy that voters prefer an improvement of the environment by means of regulations and prohibitions instead of market-driven activities, the researchers add.
Text Source: ScienceDaily.com Dateline: June 30, 2009
That Old Time Religion
Owen Gray
 On Saturday, Tim Hudak was elected leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. Mr. Hudak entered politics at the age of 27, as a new member of Mike Harris' government. He married one of Mr. Harris' principal advisers, Deb Hutton. And, during the leadership campaign, he advocated the kind of policies Harris championed, like abolishing the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
When the party chose his successor, Ernie Eves, Harris left the building. On Saturday, he was in the front row, where -- according to The Toronto Star -- he "beamed like a proud father during his protege's victory speech." Mr. Harris certainly liked what Hudak stood for. What government needs to do, Harris said, is "to get out of the road so that the private sector can grow the jobs and the wealth we need to run the province." It all sounded remarkably stupid, given our present predicament. The Harris prescription is precisely why we are where we are. It is the reason GM and Chrysler are doing so well.
As Jeffrey Simpson wrote in a recent column, the private sector has not been a source of wisdom or innovation: "Fifteen years ago," -- when Mr. Harris was first elected -- "Nortel Networks employed 29,000 people. It was the country's high tech leader, known here and abroad. It did more research than any company in Canada. It spawned feeder companies. There were other high tech powerhouses like JDS Uniphase and Newbridge Networks. Today many of those companies have been demolished, broken up or taken over. Even Cognos, a wonderful Canadian success story, succumbed to an IBM takeover."
The Conservative prescription used to pass in the 19th Century for Liberalism. Back then, Edmund Burke's conservatism stood for community stability and government protection from wild-eyed individualism run amok. It was with The Great Depression and the New Deal that Liberalism morphed into a different creature -- a political philosophy which saw government as the banker of last resort. New Deal Liberalism gave us Unemployment Insurance, Old Age Pensions and Medicare. Twenty-first century Liberalism seeks to set people back to work, establish a green economy and slow global warming.
On that last score, American conservatives are still in denial. John Boehner -- the Republican leader in the House of Representatives -- called the climate change bill , which passed in the House last week, "a pile of shit."
Nineteenth century conservatives would never have used such inelegant language. The fact remains, however, that twenty-first century conservatives -- like Mr. Harris, Mr.Hudak and Mr. Boehner -- are stuck in the nineteenth century. For the last thirty years they have wanted to return to a simpler time -- when the rules were clear, most of the population was caucasian, women stayed home and government stayed out of the way. Like William Jennings Bryan's supporters during the Scopes Monkey Trial, they have advocated a return to "that Old Time Religion." Unfortunately for them -- and for Mr. Bryan -- we have evolved since then.
Text Source: Northern Reflections
The fruits of Obama's conciliation
Jeff Berg
 Obama and those at the top of his administration have expended a great deal to time and talk to the value of "reaching out" to those "on the other side of the aisles". This is of course at the very least a noble idea in theory. It is also one that has found a good deal of resonance among much of the American public as evidenced by Obama's approval ratings. The scorched earth approach of hyper-partisanship personified by the Bush Republicans is not something that most wish to revisit. As a result on this front the score is Obama 1 Republican detractors 0.
These above considerations are however largely a question of style and not substance. The substance comes with the choice of appointments and the policy decisions that issue from those chosen. On the economic front the appointment of Summers, and Geitner and the continuation of Bernanke were extremely conservative choices. All three of these men having deep ties to the very financial institutions that recently crashed so much of the U.S. and global economy. Furthermore all three are deeply tied as cheerleaders and/or architects of the very policy decisions that were the principal causal factors of this severe economic crash. After their appointments the obvious question was "Will such men reverse course and make the necessary changes?" The answer to this question is already in. http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney06262009.html
Bernanke, Geitner and Summers have done everything in their power not to change the wholly unstable system they were party to creating but to reinstate it. Towards this end they have committed truly staggering amounts of capital to reflate securitization. So far this effort has cost 2 trillion with a further 10.8 trillion committed to the cause. At best all this money can accomplish is to return the U.S. to a financialized economy with poor long term prospects.
What is in some ways more telling of their orthodoxy and allegiances is the fact that they have also preserved the very financial instruments that caused the financial industry to implode in the first place. I.e. Excessive leverage, Derivatives, Credit Default Swaps and the unregulated Over The Counter market. A move that is likely to doom their (very poor) best case scenario.
In an article in Counterpuch, Obama's Used Green Team, Jeff St. Clair details what this "reaching out" has translated to in practical terms re appointments to the most important environmental organizations in the U.S. government. It is devoutly to be hoped that these leopards prove more adept at changing their spots than their economic counterparts. Time will tell.
Jeff Berg is a member of Post Carbon Toronto
SHAM-OCRACY: PARLIAMENT'S FISSURES
Wanted: One selfless champion of democracy
We need a saint to roll back all the power hoarded in the PMO
James Travers
 Ottawa–Leonard Cohen's best lines about democracy aren't in his song about democracy. They're in "Anthem," in which he tosses off two sentences so lovely and insightful that most writers would be content to call them a life's work. "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in."
Canadians who care about their freedom, who worry about its fractured foundations, will be relieved to know Cohen isn't just inspired, he's right. Parliament is now so fissured that the fixes are in plain sight.
When an institution crumbles from the top, restoration begins at the bottom. Mostly for convenience, prime ministers since Pierre Trudeau have taken for themselves power that belongs, in the most profound sense, to the people. Recovering what is ours requires methodically repairing a Westminster-style system that over time surrendered its responsibility to control the public purse and hold the executive to account.
Even if shifting the pendulum made some '80s sense, it's now swung way too far. All that matters now in this capital is what works. Political parties that once thought hard and said a lot about public policies are reduced to anointing leaders and hustling voters. Spending is so opaque that following the dollars is a long day's journey to nowhere. Appointed strategists, spin doctors and sycophants are more influential than cabinet ministers. Between elections, Canadian prime ministers exercise their authority with an audacity that would astound U.S. presidents.
How we got from there to here is clear enough. Struggling with rising complexity, successive leaders sacrificed accountability to expediency. Along the way, parties and Parliament were neutered while a non-partisan bureaucracy, along with key agencies – most notably the RCMP – were politicized. Taxpayers and voters were pushed to the periphery, pawns to be managed, not citizens to be represented.
Where we're headed is more opaque. As former Ontario NDP premier and now federal Liberal Bob Rae pointed out earlier in this Star series, Canada is badly in need of a selfless champion. There's an immediate opening here for a leader who cares deeply enough about democracy to willingly peel away powers stealthily taken and ferociously guarded.
Paul Martin promised to do just that and then changed his mind at the moment when good intentions were about to become best practices. A reformer in opposition, Stephen Harper in office is reinforcing the command and control status quo with stern father-knows-best discipline.
More than a coincidence, that's a pattern reflecting the realities of governing a federation that's not easily governed. Fearing that things will fall apart if the centre cannot hold, prime ministers respond to every challenge by squeezing their grip.
Even if understandable, that reflex isn't sustainable. Sham-ocracy is now as self-evident as the emperor's nakedness. Voters cover their eyes by staying away from polling stations. Restive members of Parliament question their purpose in a forum that's mostly theatre. Once anonymous mandarins are fed up being put on display when politicians are caught "gifting" ruling party friends. Ministers want a seat at the table, not just a speak-when-spoken-to place in the Prime Minister's focus group.
Slow to build, those pressures now provide the push in the search for solutions. One repeated proposal is to replace this country's increasingly lonely first-past-the post electoral system with proportional representation that better reflects political diversity and makes every vote count. Another is ending this capital's 19th-century obsession with secrecy by exposing it to new millennium technology.
Both remedies have appeal. It's tough defending a winner-take-all process that in the last election rewarded some 1.3 million Bloc Québécois voters with 49 seats – and a large chunk of the federal balance of power – while nearly 1 million Green Party supporters got none. Tough, too, not to see the modern merits of breaking the current Access to Information logjam by revealing online most of what the federal government does and all of how it spends.
Even if proportional representation is imperfect, and it is, it still makes sense to give it serious thought in an era when minority administrations are the new normal. It makes even more sense for voters and taxpayers to demand openness as the government's default position. Still, it's unreasonable to expect either one, or even the two together, to put right what's wrong. Changing the players and forcing them to play in daylight won't make a lasting difference as long as the game is rigged. Situational as they are, the rules now ensure the Prime Minister is the only possible winner.
Here's how the rules work for him but not for the rest of us. As the prolific writer and astute public affairs analyst Donald Savoie observes, prime ministers, once safely installed, have most of the powers commoners spent hundreds of years stripping from monarchs. Surrounded by whispering courtiers and fawning supplicants, they rule beyond Parliament's reach and oversight. Incrementally, they have turned servant into master and democracy on its head.
Reversing that process begins with establishing refreshingly modest objectives. After years of deconstructing and then rethinking government, pollster and analyst Frank Graves reached the conclusion that Canadians aren't looking to Ottawa for much. To paraphrase the EKOS president, what they want most is to be certain politicians are working in the public interest, not primarily for themselves or their party. And they need some assurance that the government is producing policy and providing services efficiently.
If that isn't too much to ask, it's still more than is being delivered. There are days here when this capital seems to have lost all contact with the country. Every abuse of power and privilege, each new scandal, is salt in the open wound of citizen disapproval and discontent.
Those are dangerous trends. At best they threaten to make the central administration irrelevant. At worst they expose the country's veins to the opium of demagoguery.
The way out is the way back. Piece by piece, democracy must be rebuilt. It begins with political parties re-establishing their rightful place in the policy process by providing a gathering place for people who care about the country and have strong, even strident ideas on how to make it better. It continues by giving back to Parliament what is Parliament's – the responsibility and resources necessary to follow the dollars from promise into pockets, to know what ministers are doing and to hold the Prime Minister accountable.
Just this once, Beelzebub isn't in the details. Every step in the reconstruction is well known and not overly demanding. Parties have to take policy as seriously as politics. Committees must be less partisan and more professional. Bureaucrats need to rediscover the voice they once used to speak truth to power. Watchdogs must be unchained to sniff out wrongdoing and bark when it's found.
None of this will happen until someone more saint than politician makes it the prime minister's business to roll back the office's extraordinary authority. Barring that, followers that leaders have been pushing around for so long will have to declare that enough is more than enough. In the absence of one or the other, democracy will continue its slide into sham-ocracy.
Again in Cohen's words, "Yeah the widowhood/of every government –/signs for all to see."
Text Source: Toronto Star Dateline: June 27, 2009. James Travers' column appears in the Toronto Star on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You can email jtravers@thestar.ca
How Confucianism could curb global warming
China openly debates the role of Eastern thought in sustainability.
James Miller
 Kingston, Ontario - Now here's a curveball to secular Western policy experts: China's intellectuals are openly debating the role of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in promoting the Communist Party's vision of a harmonious society and ecologically sustainable economic development.
Nowhere is the question of what to do about the environment more vital than in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases – especially because scientists agree that climate change disproportionately affects the poor and the disenfranchised and that climate change will affect future generations far more than the present.
Yet the general impression of China's role in issues relating to environment is one of foot-dragging because it hasn't bought into a Western model to address it.
But Pan Yue, China's vice minister for environmental protection, is calling for China to capitalize on traditional Chinese religions in promoting ecological sustainability.
He says, "One of the core principles of traditional Chinese culture is that of harmony between humans and nature. Different philosophies all emphasize the political wisdom of a balanced environment. Whether it is the Confucian idea of humans and nature becoming one, the Taoist view of the Tao reflecting nature, or the Buddhist belief that all living things are equal, Chinese philosophy has helped our culture to survive for thousands of years. It can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis and building a harmonious society."
And this just might work.
As The New York Times recently reported, China is in the midst of a transformation to cleaner forms of energy.
Although much of China's energy needs are still met by inefficient, coal-fired power stations with poor track records in terms of emissions, China has begun to invest heavily in cleaner coal technology in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.
Because of this, the International Energy Agency reduced its estimate of the increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases from 3.2 percent to 3 percent even as the same agency raised its estimate of China's economic growth. China is managing to increase its economic output at a greater rate than its emissions.
This is good news for everyone.
But buried innocuously in the middle of this report was the startlingly frank statement of Cao Peixi, president of the China Huaneng group, China's largest state-owned electric company.
When asked about his company's decision to invest in more expensive but cleaner technology he replied: "We shouldn't look at this project from a purely financial perspective. It represents the future."
The $64,000 question facing economists and politicians across the world is how to make decisions that take into account the big picture beyond the "purely financial perspective."
This is a hard question for Western economic and political theorists to answer, because their theories are based on the Enlightenment view of the self as an autonomous, rational individual.
But how are we to make decisions that take into account the interests of those who have not yet been born?
Being respectful to the interests of past and future generations is key to the Confucian view of the self and groups. To the question, "Who am I?" the Confucian answers, "I am the child of my parents and the parent of my children."
Confucianism begins from the proposition that human beings are defined by kinship networks that span the centuries. From this perspective the interests of the individual are bound up with the interests of the kinship group as it extends forward and backward across the generations.
This will be a key factor in the way China handles present and future environmental issues.
Consider the views of Jiang Qing, a leading Confucian intellectual. According to a recent report by Daniel Bell, a political theorist at China's Tsinghua Univeristy, Mr. Jiang proposes a political system that can take into account the interests of those who are typically ignored in modern democracies, such as foreigners, future generations, and ancestors.
"Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming?" he asks.
As China assumes a greater leadership role on the world stage, we can expect the emergence of a variety of models of sustainable development rooted in a plurality of cultural traditions, including Confucianism.
The time when Westernization was the only credible model of development is over.
Text Source: The Christian Science Monitor Dateline: June 26, 2009
James Miller is a professor of Chinese studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Queen's University, Kingston. He is currently researching the relationship between religion, nature, and modernization in China.
HUMAN RIGHTS:
Author Naomi Klein calls for boycott of Israel
 BILIN , West Bank (AFP) — Bestselling author Naomi Klein on Friday took her call for a boycott of Israel to the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where she witnessed Israeli forces clashing with protesters.
"It's a boycott of Israeli institutions, it's a boycott of the Israeli economy," the Canadian writer told journalists as she joined a weekly demonstration against Israel's controversial separation wall.
"Boycott is a tactic ... we're trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa," said Klein, the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."
"It's an extraordinarily important part of Israel's identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy," the Canadian writer and activist said.
"When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don't come, when the symphonies don't come, when a film you really want to see doesn't play at the Jerusalem film festival... then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is."
She briefly joined about 200 villagers and foreign activists protesting the barrier which Israel says it needs to prevent attacks, but which Palestinians say aims at grabbing their land and undermining the viability of their promised state.
She then watched from a safe distance as the protesters reached the fence, where Israeli forces fired teargas and some youths responded by throwing stones at the army.
"This apartheid, this is absolutely a system of segregation," Klein said adding that Israeli troops would never crack down as violently against Jewish protesters.
She pointed out that her visit coincided with court hearings in Quebec in a case where the villagers of Bilin are suing two Canadian companies, accusing them of illegally building and selling homes to Israelis on land that belongs to the village.
The plaintiffs claim that by building in the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit, near Bilin, Green Park International and Green Mount International are in violation of international laws that prohibit an occupying power from transferring some of its population to the lands it occupies.
"I'm hoping and praying that Canadian courts will bring some justice to the people of Bilin," Klein said.
Her visit was also part of a promotional tour in Israel and the West Bank for "The Shock Doctrine" which has recently been translated into Hebrew and Arabic. Klein said she would get no royalties from sales of the Hebrew version and that the proceeds would go instead to an activist group.
Text Source: AFP
Running a Temperature
Climate change will soon be the world's greatest health crisis.
ANTHONY COSTELLO
 We tend to think of climate change as an environmental issue, which, of course, it is. Current scientific findings on Arctic ice melting, rising sea levels, greenhouse gas emissions, and ocean acidity suggest that during this century, the earth's average surface temperature will surpass the supposedly "safe" threshold of 2 degrees celsius above preindustrial level.
But climate change is also a public health issue, one whose profound effects on the lives and wellbeing of billions of people are just beginning to be understood. A major new report launched jointly by The Lancet and University College London, which I coauthored, has concluded that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Our findings strongly suggest that health experts and advocates ought to be at the forefront of calling for action on climate change. Their help is urgently needed: plans need to be put in place immediately to manage the worst effects, requiring unprecedented levels of international cooperation.
Some of the effects are already being felt. The heat waves of 2003 resulted in 70,000 deaths, mostly from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Increased mortality from heat stroke should be expected soon. As temperatures rise, there will be an increased risk of transmission of insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria. As many as 260 to 320 million more people may be affected by malaria by 2080 as mosquitoes spread into newly warm areas. Pathogens also mutate faster at higher temperatures, making treatment more difficult.
A 2-3 degree temperature rise may not not sound too threatening, but temperatures do not rise uniformly. A 3 degree rise overall means a 5-6 degree rise at the polar caps, with the inevitable melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, leading to up to 13 meters of sea level rise over the next 200 years. More worryingly, the release of methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from below the permafrost in Canada, Siberia, and the arctic tundra, could set up a tipping point leading to catastrophic warming and more rapid rises in sea level.
Food supply is another area of concern. One group of U.S. researchers predicts serious crop yield declines and food shortages before 2030, which will put great pressure on prices and demand. Rising food prices have hurt many poor people in the past 2 years, and hunger in south Asia is at a 40-year high. Some estimates suggest that up to half the world's population could face food shortages by the end of the century because of disruptions caused by climate change.
Then there's water. In Africa, 250 million people are already deprived of a secure water supply -- and the numbers are growing. There are serious droughts in China, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of the United States. Several cities, wealthy as well as poor, such as Barcelona, Adelaide, Kathmandu, Mexico, and New Delhi have precarious supplies and may need to import water. And the spread of water-borne diseases is likely to increase as populations are forced to rely on less-clean water sources.
This is to say nothing of the increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes and cyclones, greater vulnerability in developing world shanty towns to extreme weather events, and large-scale population migration that will worsen existing health crises and in some cases create new ones.
The health effects of climate change -- with the rich causing most of the problem (the poorest billion account for only 3 percent of the world's carbon footprint) and the poor suffering most of the consequences (Africans will lose 500 times more healthy life years than Americans) -- will forever shame our generation if nothing is done to address them.
Governments must appreciate that there are major health benefits and cost-savings from low-carbon living, with potential reductions in obesity, heart disease, diabetes, stress, accidents, and respiratory illnesses. Any effective response requires greater coordination and accountability by international institutions and governments. Unilateral responses simply won't suffice.
It is encouraging that U.S. President Barack Obama has made climate change a priority, that the Chinese government has announced ambitious emissions reductions and massive investment in renewable energy sources, and that the climate debate is recognizing this is not just an environmental issue but one that threatens our health and survival.
But we don't have much time. Current climate developments are at the very worst end of the computer model predictions. Every year of delay increases the costs and difficulties of effective action. Unless this challenge finds its way to the top of the international agenda, this century could be a disaster movie without a happy ending.
Text Source: Foreign Policy Dateline: June 24, 2009
Climate change in a myopic
world
Kevin Anderson
 As an academic whose employment and conscience are dominated by climate change it is easy to forget the UK is a peculiar little island. Within our shores not a day passes where the media isn’t either bashing climate-science or predicting climate-induced apocalypse. Yet, across the North Sea, even our environmentally more progressive neighbours are not subject to this intensity of debate; perhaps our sea-faring nation’s obsession with ‘weather’ explains the difference. Whatever the reasons, it is certainly rewarding to witness science so rapidly informing the climate debate. What is less welcome, however, is the subsequent economic capture of that debate and the almost sterile policy arising from it.
The challenge
Put simply, CO2 is the principal greenhouse gas and, not withstanding the current economic downturn, global CO2 emissions are increasing at a rapid rate. More alarmingly, if international efforts to return global society to previous growth paths are successful, there is no indication that this rate is likely to change significantly in the coming decade or that global emissions will peak before 2020.
Current global emission trends and the absence of meaningful political leadership by even the more climate-progressive nations, suggests that there is now very little hope of staying below the 2°C threshold between ‘acceptable’ and ‘dangerous’ climate change. In other words, according to our scientific understanding of the issues, there is a very high probability that the world will enter a prolonged period of what some have defined as “dangerous climate change”.
The sooner deep reductions in global CO2 emissions can be achieved, the less we will venture into this “dangerous” and unpredictable territory.
Within the UK, there have been several important indicators that the Government is beginning to consider seriously the mitigation challenge. At a national level the lengthy energy review process and the more recent report by the Committee on Climate Change are evidence of such. Whilst at an international level the Treasury commissioned ‘Stern review on the economics of climate change’ demonstrated interest in the issue from ministries other than those with immediate environmental responsibilities.
Economic hegemony
The publication of Nicholas Stern’s thorough and solemn review has, in many respects, served to catalyse both public and private concern over our escalating emissions of CO2. Whilst the broad acknowledgement of climate change as a serious and urgent policy issue is certainly welcomed, I, and I suspect many climate scientists, see the response to the Stern report as another sad indictment of societies privileging of economics over science. For more than a decade dedicated climate scientists have attempted to provide public and private policy makers with reasoned and accessible arguments as to why our emissions of CO2 should be curtailed substantially. Despite the wealth of such reports and papers from, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK’s own Hadley and Tyndall Centres, it has taken a relatively narrow financial interpretation of the science to alert policy makers to the undesirable repercussions of a climate-induced collapse of existing human societies and ecosystems. In policy parlance, this is another example of science, and even society and nature, simply becoming subsets of contemporary market economics.
If this were just the sour grapes of scientists wishing to be regarded with the reverence of economists it would be of little relevance to the climate change debate. However, not only does the severity of climate change only gain currency within policy realms when couched in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, but so, it appears, does the debate on how to control our CO2 emissions. Policy makers refuse stubbornly to contemplate mechanisms for mitigating CO2 emissions that cannot be demonstrated to, at best, not threaten short-term economic competitiveness and preferably offer early monetary returns. Again, the prevailing dominance of this accountant mentality would not be a concern if it could be reconciled with the direction and scale of the message emerging from the scientific and quantitative analysis of climate change. Unfortunately, there currently appears no scope for reconciliation, despite valiant attempts by some to characterise climate change and the mitigation of CO2 in terms of winwin opportunities.
Unique scale
Whilst there are several important examples of where responses to looming environmental crisis were, at least in significant part, achieved at small economic cost or even on the basis of winwin (e.g. acid deposition and ozone destruction respectively), these are poor analogies for climate change and CO2 emissions. Certainly there are technical and thereby commercial opportunities for providing low or zero CO2 energy supply; similarly technologies are available for improving the efficiency of how we use energy. These opportunities, however, are dwarfed by three aspects of the scale of the problem, which collectively negate the appropriateness of analogies and consequently frame climate change as a problem unique to modern societies. Two of these scale issues clearly work in conjunction; the global pervasiveness of the fossil-fuel energy system and the quantity of fossil fuel that has, is and will likely be combusted. The other scale-related distinction between climate change and earlier ‘environmental’ problems arises from the substantial disjuncture between political timescales and those associated with the carbon cycle.
The dilemma
Consequently, we are today faced with a dilemma. Do we continue to pay lip service to the issue of climate change, and hope future generations will understand our preference for barely-veiled hedonism over stewardship? Or are we prepared to respond genuinely to the scale of the challenge we have brought upon ourselves?
If it is the former, then we should carry on as we are, with a weakly-capped and leaky European Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme, the expansion of aviation with token green gestures, installing a few thousand wind turbines and the several nuclear power stations, buying the occasional hybrid car and swapping to energy efficient light bulbs, - all with a selfcongratulatory, but ultimately insincere, pat on our own backs. If it is the latter, then we need to begin by revisiting the financial accounting model that has come to dominate our lives, and reestablish society’s dominance over economics.
Has the tripling of our economic wherewithal since the 1950s brought about a tripling in our sense of well being, do we really gain significant welfare benefits from our daily access to mange tout, and are the carbon emissions, noise and physical division of communities by busy roads adequately compensated by our easy access to private transport?
The scale of the challenge arising from our understanding of climate change will demand responses that, despite all our economic massaging, will incur substantial financial costs; – we can no longer have our short-term and narrowly-defined economic cake and eat it!
However, once we escape the financiers’ myopia we will be in a position to identify the myriad of indirect benefits that will accompany a coherent and comprehensive strategy to reduce substantially our emissions of CO2. If we are prepared to exchange our current self delusion for a more honest recognition of the scale of the challenge, the message is one of hope not of despair, with a prosperous future measured, if at all, by a range of metrics of which money is just one.
__________
1
http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/NR/rdonlyres/B794DBF2-
E37A-4B9C-AC2C-770C4AE3F257/0/FinalversionspaMarch07.pdf
Text Source: Tyndall Centre, Tyndall Briefing Note No. 36, May 2009 
EI: National Improvements Needed
Erin Weir
Today’s Employment Insurance (EI) figures confirm that fewer than half of unemployed Canadians received EI benefits in April. Although 18,600 more Canadians received benefits in April than in March, this was the smallest increase in six months.
The relatively modest increase in EI beneficiaries corresponds to a relatively small increase in official unemployment during April, the month in which the Labour Force Survey indicated a surprise surge in self-employment.
Employment Insurance Coverage, April 2009
| |
E.I. Recipients |
Unemployment |
E.I. Coverage |
| Canada |
697.0 |
1,464.4 |
47.6 % |
| Newfoundland |
39.4 |
36.8 |
107.1 % |
| P.E.I. |
8.4 |
9.7 |
86.6 % |
| Nova Scotia |
32.4 |
45.7 |
70.9 % |
| New Brunswick |
34.6 |
35.6 |
97.2 % |
| Quebec |
199.3 |
353.9 |
56.5 % |
| Ontaio |
230.0 |
621.2 |
37.0 % |
| Manitoba |
14.4 |
29.1 |
49.5 % |
| Saskatchewan |
13.2 |
27.3 |
48.4 % |
| Alberta |
48.3 |
126.6 |
38.2 % |
| B.C. |
82.7 |
179.8 |
46.0 |
Access Barely Improves
As noted in last month’s commentary, a higher percentage of unemployed Canadians are receiving benefits due to layoffs of full-time employees who have enough hours to qualify and due to the automatic loosening of EI eligibility rules as the unemployment rate rises.
But the pace of change is painfully slow. The proportion of unemployed workers accessing benefits rose by less than 1% last month - from 46.8% in March to 47.6% in April.
Regional Disparities Abate
The improvement in EI coverage was stronger in western Canada. The percentage of unemployed workers receiving benefits in Manitoba and Saskatchewan now exceeds the national average. Alberta is still well below the national average, but has pulled ahead of Ontario. BC remains close to the national average.
This development would seem to upend the recent call from western Premiers for greater regional fairness in the EI program. However, somewhat improved EI coverage in western Canada makes Ontario’s low rate of EI benefits even more striking.
Policy Agenda
The slow pace of natural improvement in EI benefit coverage should prompt deliberate changes to make EI benefits more accessible. It is disappointing that the Leader of the Opposition made a national eligibility standard of 360 hours his chief demand only to quickly abandon it.
There is a risk that the proposed “working group” on EI will focus only on ironing out regional differences rather than on enhancing EI nationally. In theory, regional parity could be achieved by making EI more stringent everywhere in Canada.
The goal should not be a national standard just for the sake of regional parity. The goal should be a national standard that significantly enhances the accessibility, level and duration of EI benefits for all Canadian workers.
|
