Author Archives: Andrew Park

Muzzling and the right to know

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 “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”

This phrase was coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her biography of Voltaire as a condensed description of the great man’s devotion to freedom of speech.

In Canada, unfortunately, the Harper-Cons attitude seems to be “I disagree with what you say, and if you try to say it, I’ll use the weight of my powers to crush you, redact you, and deprive you of employment”.

The latest skirmishes in Harper’s war against knowledge and information played out in the last 24 hours.  First, we have the inexplicable decision (by “environment” minister Peter Kent) to prevent 25 years worth of research by the National round table on the Environment and Economy (NRTEE) from being kept in the public domain.  Continue reading →

Unmuzzling the Scientists

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Science_Uncensored_Portrait

 

                                                                      Image from scienceuncensored.ca

Do you hear that sound………………………?

What, you don’t hear anything? 

Well, it’s not surprising, because that sound – or lack thereof – is just an Environment Canada (EC) Scientist hard at work.  What; you thought Environment Canada Scientists were extinct – victims of overzealous harvesting by the Federal Government?

Happily, that is not the case.  A few isolated populations of EC and DFO scientists are hanging on to their jobs in fragmented office habitats scattered across the country.  And the silence – well, you can’t hear them cos’ they have Duct tape firmly clamped across their mouths.

It’s for their own protection really – and yours, because if they contradicted some pet government doctrine, well, that might confuse you, or make the government look like they were wrong about something. 

And we couldn’t have that!

OK, so they don’t literally have Duct tape across their mouths, but they do have secrecy-minded gatekeepers between them and the public, and “minders” shadowing them at conferences. And they are increasingly hemmed in by rules about who they can or can’t talk to, whether they can publish their work in a timely manner, and even whether they can apply for grants. Continue reading →

Arab youth arrested at COP; Canadians confront Kent

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Reblogged from CYD-DJC:

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An hour ago, two members of the Arab Youth Climate Movement were  arrested. They held up a banner in the COP18 conference centre that read, “Qatar, why host, not lead?”. Onlookers erupted in cheers as they were escorted out. In their wake, the mood was sombre. The process at COP is failing, the deal on the table is not an ambitious one.

Read more… 376 more words

To wax Shakespearian for a moment, the COP 18 talks are full of sound and fury - and in the end, the heroic efforts of civil society notwithstanding, they will probably signify nothing, except another year of inaction on the international climate file

Cop18 Updates and Earthgauge Radio on Climate Change

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Our gallant Doha conference attendee, Alana Westwood, asked if I would post the following:
 
CYD (Canadian Youth Delegation) releases report on Canada’s failure to meet international commitment
 
The CYD-DJC is releasing the report Commitment Issues: Tar sands extraction invalidates Canada’s obligations to the UNFCCC and undermines global climate change negotiations. This  technical report details the role of Canada’s tar sands in ensuring the nation’s failure to meet international climate commitments. It calls for a moratorium on new tar sands to developments, as this is the most effective way for Canada to have any hope of adhering to the commitments it has made to the UNFCCC.
The full report is available here, and the executive summary is available here.Le resumé analytique est disponible en français.front page
The lead author is Mark Bigland-Pritchard, Ph.D with contributions from CYD members Karen Rooney and Alana Westwood.You may also want to check out the latest podcast from the excellent Earthgauge Radio, in which Kevin Anderson, one of the UK’s leading climate scientists, gives some very inconvenient and disturbing climate truths……

Cop 18 Climate talks: A view from inside Part II

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Canada gets First Place Fossil of the Day in Doha

Our fearless youth representative in Doha, Alana Westwood, reports on Canada’s dubious achievment of a first place “Fossil of the Day” award for our refusal to back financing of climate adaptation measures in developing nations.

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Yesterday, Canada received the ‘honour’ of a first-place Fossil of the Day (the award is given for bad performance during the negotiations). Though not our first Fossil in Doha, it is our first time owning the top of the podium all to ourselves at COP-18.

What did we do this time? Continue reading →

Peak Oil or Peak Canada?

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Peak oil or Peak Canada?

Yogi Berra famously said “It’s hard to make predictions – especially about the future”.  I like to think that Steven Harper was thinking this exact thought if he read the Globe and Mail’s double page spread on how shale oil promises to make the USA the world’s biggest producer of crude within a decade.

What price Canada’s status as an energy superpower now, Mr. Harper?

The Bakken Shale Zone, an area of Devonian and Lower Carboniferous rock that straddles Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba (Figure 1), may contain upwards of 3.65 billion barrels of oil.  Production in the region is increasing exponentially, up to 750,000 barrels a day last year.  This “glut” of light, easily transported crude is already depressing prices for our northern bitumen, threatening the viability of current operations and future plans.

So, this should be good news for Canadian environmentalists, right?  Continue reading →

COP-18 Climate Talks; a view from inside. Part I

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My former student and blogger, Alana Westwood, is a youth representative for Canada (Powershift) at the UNFCCC COP 18 (Conference of the Parties), which opened today in Doha, Qatar.

What follows is the first of several dispatches from the front lines of climate negotiations.  You can link to the Canadian Youth Delegation at www.cyd-djc.org  

Part I:Tackling climate change from the air-conditioned desert.

Alana Westwood

COP 18, this year’s instalment of the annual United Nations climate negotiations, opens today (November 26th) in Doha, Qatar.

In the 28°C winter of Qatar, dust shifts on the street as I make my way to the shuttle. My shoes squeak in sand stained with black soot. With no sidewalk in sight, I gave up trying to preserve my shoes after dodging SUVs and 4×4 trucks on the road, almost all of them bearing the insignia of luxury brands. Continue reading →

A small victory for the reality-based community

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A lot of people were giddy with delight to hear that Barack Obama had won a second Presidential term.  They were so relieved that Mitt Romney, who came to symbolize hide-bound privilege and every retrograde “ism” and “phobia” in the USA, would not occupy the oval office, that they forgot what a disappointment Obama has been. 

So just what is there in Obama’s victory for the progressives and environmentally aware?  Is Barack Obama waging peace? If anything, somewhat the reverse.  Nor is he much of an environmentalist.  Not one word, not even a syllable was said about the environment in any of the three presidential debates.  The next four years may not be the pipelinapalooza they would have been under Romney, but I would bet money on more pipelines – including the Nebraska stage of the Keystone line – being built with Obama’s approval.

For all that, we can still do a small victory shuffle to honour the fact that a member of the “reality-based community[1]” will lead the most powerful and indebted nation on earth for the next four years.  The alternative would have been a fully signed up member of a party controlled by loony-tunes who proudly declare “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers“.

Here in Canada of course, our slide into political unreality continues.  Since they were first elected, various members of the Federal Conservatives caucus have proudly and repeatedly declared that “we don’t govern on the basis of statistics”.  But as any scientist knows, statistics are how we make sense of observations and data about the world.  So, if not statistics, what is the basis of your policy – guesswork?  Ideology? Reading the tea leaves? Continue reading →

The melting Arctic – are we paying attention yet?

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Record Arctic Ice melt, 2012.

The annual retreat of arctic ice away from the shores of the circumpolar countries ended on the 16th September.  Timelapse videos of the summer’s melt show the ice morphing like an amoeba as it is pushed around by ocean currents and storms.  All the while, it is being nibbled away at the edges by the warming ocean waters, and bergs are hemorrhaging through the Fram strait between Greenland and Svalbard into the North Atlantic, where they melt.

Figure 1.  Arctic ice melt 2012.  Note ice flowing through the Fram Strait and disappearing into the Atlantic at top right.

At its lowest, the extent[i] of the remaining ice was only 3.41 million km2, the lowest it had been since detailed recording began in 1972.  What is more, this was a record coming hot on the heels of other record low ice years – in 2007, 2005, and so on. 

About 800,000 km2 more ice was lost in 2012 than in the previous record loss.  And if we consider ice volume, the situation is even worse; last year’s minimum volume of 4000 km3was about 75% lower than the minimum volume in 1979 (see Figure 2 below). 

The unprecedented rate of change, especially in ice thickness, is obvious from sea level.  Returning from a 37 day research voyage, David Barber of the University of Manitoba reported that the ice pack was “rotten” all the way to the North Pole: “The multi-year ice, what’s left of it, is so heavily decayed that it’s really no longer a barrier to transportation. You could have taken a ship right across the North Pole this year“.  Continue reading →

The Failure of Environmentalism?

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Part 1.  Winning the Battle; Losing the War.

So I’m reading a short article about oil pipelines in the Report on Business.  It’s banner proclaims “Beyond the protests, pipelines are a solid investment”.  Sure, says author David Berman, there may be protests, fears, and discontent about pipeline projects on both sides of the Canada-US border, but investors can chill because markets care not a fig for any of that.

Berman explains that, compared to many other industries (e.g. gold mines and oil sands – great comparison group there !), pipelines are relatively safe.  Hell, even “socially conscious investors” are getting in on the act.  And this is why, despite all the opposition to projects like Keystone xl and Northern Gateway, share prices for pipeline builders remain strong.

This is remarkable.  Environmentalists are having a field day with Enbridge, the aspirational builder of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, and pushback against Tory cutbacks to environmental spending crosses demographic, professional, and political boundaries.  But the market seems to be saying that it is “all sound and fury”, and that in the end, pipelines will be built.   Continue reading →