Flick off, Rex. Just flick off

How can we expect Canadians to vote in an informed manner when the CBC provides a platform – on the news, no less – to a nutter who chooses to believe paid oil company shills rather than Canada’s own climate scientists? Rex Murphy proudly notes that he gets his climate science from two guys who are not climate scientists; one is a former mining stock promoter and the other is an economist. Like Murphy, the economist is tight with the Libertarian Fraser Institute, which receives funding from ExxonMobil.

At best, this calls into question Murphy’s sense, and at worse, his integrity. Is he receiving money from Big Oil? Why else would any sane person believe two uncredentialed shills rather than Canada’s own scientists? Perhaps, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Rex Murphy believes this whole ‘global warming thing’ is a socialist conspiracy to take over the world?
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Stephen Harper and the Conservatives enjoy decent support in the polls. I suspect much of this is due to widespread – and justified – distrust of the Liberals in the West, combined with the belief that Mr. Harper is a Conservative.  But is he really? Are you getting what you’re voting for?

Canada is the biggest obstructor worldwide when it comes to action on global warming. This is deadly serious for many reasons. Even if Mr. Harper has bamboozled you into thinking that global warming is not happening, not human-caused, not a cause for concern, a giant socialist conspiracy, or some other claptrap, or if you believe that the Canadian government is doing the responsible thing about climate change, think again. You have been fooled by a master. Don’t believe politicians; go ask the scientists.
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In a previous post, I suggested that Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff were, from the point-of-view of the average voter, slightly different flavours of vanilla. Someone on Reddit suggested that my post was a sales pitch for the Conservatives.

Considering that I have called for Mr. Harper to be charged with treason due to his obstruction and inaction on the climate crisis, the idea that I am suggesting people vote for the man is almost funny. The poor Redditor failed to understand the difference between analysis, which is what I was doing, and a recommendation, which I most definitely was not.

Just to be crystal clear, I am also extremely unimpressed with the other choices on the political spectrum. Jack Layton and the NDP seem to have forgotten what principles are in their desperate search for votes, any votes.
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Official portrait of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad 2009

At the recently concluded Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed an opportunity to set a firm commitment for a reduction in North American greenhouse gas emissions which would have challenged his American counterpart to follow suit.

The Harper government has made no secret of its disdain for the existing Kyoto targets (which he once called ‘a Socialist scheme’), going so far as to announce what he felt were more ‘practical’ emissions reductions calling for a 20% reduction of 2006 levels by 2020. This has only raised the ire of environmental groups in Canada, who say that the government is in no position to promise alternative emissions reductions while opposing Kyoto and allowing the limits set by that protocol to balloon to levels 30% higher than the agreement called for.
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Just as I was starting to panic and think that I would have nothing to write about for my next blog, Mr. Harper came through for me in his most recent decision to attend the Copenhagen climate change meeting. Not that I think he shouldn’t attend it, I do – but the fact that he wasn’t going to attend until Obama decided to reminds me of high school, or maybe even junior high. Now I understand that rubbing elbows with Obama is probably a big thrill, one I would enjoy too, but seeing as Alberta alone emits more pollution than some small countries, I think Mr. Harper should have been attending regardless of what his US counterpart was doing that day – because it is the right thing to do, not the popular thing.

Like many of us years ago, I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. However, unlike many of you, I made the mistake of watching The Day After Tomorrow right after it. The combination of the two scared the hell out of me. If you’ve seen the two films you understand what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, basically The Day After Tomorrow is like if An Inconvenient Truth was a movie and not a documentary: the world goes into another ice age because the North Atlantic current shuts down from melting ice caps and Canada gets wiped out by snow and ice; only the Southern hemisphere is unaffected. Now I know it’s just a movie and everything, but the science is basically true, and to me, that’s freakin’ scary. We’re talking doomsday stuff here, and need I remind anyone that 2012 is right around the corner. I’m not suggesting we base federal policy on the Mayan calendar, nor am I preaching a doomsday is imminent, but if we continue on this path, we will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure it sells big bucks in the theatres, but I’d like theatres to be around in the next few decades and maybe more after that, I mean, I do have nieces and nephews.
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Tar sands oil refinery

Even before acid rain, Canada and the United States have long been at odds over the issue of inter-continental pollution. The debilitating fact that our individual and shared industrial waste respects no physical boundary has become an increasingly destructive and contentious issue, which is matched only by the often impenetrable political boundaries which have prevented substantive policy initiatives from curbing the fundamentally devastating environmental impact this has wrought.

Chief among these transgressors are the Alberta tar sands.

Since 1966, development of these vast areas of petroleum manufacturing has gone full steam ahead, despite persistent and troubling data from environmental protection groups that the massively intrusive and destructive footprint of this endeavour has had disastrously long term effects on native plant, animal and human life in the region and beyond.
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Do you have a bad roommate stereotype? For me, The Bad Roommate is constantly in a bathrobe that I’m sure belongs to me, has just, without even enjoying it, finished off the leftovers I was counting on, and isn’t sure what they did today, yet certainly created an unfathomable mess in the kitchen. Among other things, the worst part about my Bad Roommate is that they defiantly occupy an essential space in the house and aerate bad vibes while doing so.

Put another way, the Bad Roommate is a kind of angry, bathrobed, vacuum, that ironically doesn’t clean. (My apologies to any roommates, current, or fondly and formerly, who think I’m writing about them. In any case, I kid because I love).

I conjured up this image while reading reports that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), Canada’s federally-owned and beleaguered nuclear technology company, is set to receive a $200 million bailout from the Harper government. The bailout, disclosed in the Conservative’s supplementary budget estimate, is the second the Crown-Corporation has received this year and makes the grand total of taxpayer subsidies doled out to AECL in 2009 $651 million. According to the document, this additional funding “will be used to address a cash shortfall caused by unexpected technical challenges on CANDU reactor refurbishment contracts.”
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The political means of addressing climate change are once again up for discussion.

Nostradamus was right. The year 2012 will certainly bring the end of an era.

Next month’s UN convention on climate change in Copenhagen reminds us that the Kyoto Protocol is on its last legs.

Indeed, the world’s first legally-binding legislation on greenhouse gas emission and climate change, for years battered and bruised through political conflagrations, diluted by the rhetoric of parliamentarians and spokespersons, pondered, plied and twisted through years of delay, and ultimately never ratified by the United States, is in need of a successor. And if Environment Minister Jim Prentice’s prognostications prove accurate, a definitive deal will not be reached in the Danish capital.
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I woke an hour earlier than usual this morning to head off to the west-end of Edmonton to locate what now looks to be the last bastion of free parking in the city of Edmonton – Beulah Alliance Church. At eight blocks north of the West Edmonton Mall it was an easy find but a long drive as Edmontonians were caught, not just with their pants down, but with their all-season-radials in all-winter weather. I sought out this particular church amongst the plethora of other Albertan evangelical options not, however, for salvation or bake sales, but for a free bus that would take me to meet none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper at, what was at the time, an ominous undisclosed location, where he would be speaking about an unnamed topic. Tantalized, I braved almost an hour in slushy gunk to get to the upper-middle class and mostly white riding of Conservative party member Rona Ambrose.
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The Federal Government is dipping into the Clean Energy Fund (CEF) and assisting the Alberta Government with the funding of two major projects (totalling over $1.6 Billion). Both of the projects make use of carbon-capture technology and stand to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, in a manner which doesn’t simply transfer them to another country, thereby helping to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon capture essentially results in waste CO¬2 being pumped into the depleted aquifers and stored there, rather than emitting them into the environment. Many of the comments that I have heard are quite negative, and relate to the fact that this is a lot of money going into an unproven technology, making it important to note that carbon capture and storage is used in Egypt by BP.
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