Category Archives: Policy

Muzzling and the right to know

Posted on by
Reply

 “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

Posted on by
4

 

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

Posted on by
Reply

Reblogged from CYD-DJC:

  • Click to visit the original post

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

Peak Oil or Peak Canada?

Posted on by
3

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
1

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 →

Where are the Philosophers?

Posted on by
3

Part 1. Philosophy and Ethics – the missing environmental policy ingredients.

Where are the philosophers?  I’m not asking “where are they located geographically?”. I know that; they are squirreled away in about 60 academic departments in major universities and colleges around the country.  What I am asking is where the hell are professional philosophers in the current political and environmental mess that is Canada? 

For try as I might, I could find no commentaries by bona fide philosophers on the infamous Omnibus Budget Bill (Bill C-38), the closure of the Experimental Lakes Area, characterizing environmentalists as proto-terrorists, changes to the Fisheries Act, the elimination of Canada’s Ocean Contaminants Program, or opposition of first nations to the Northern Gateway Pipeline. 

These issues have important ethical and moral implications for Canada and Canadians.  More than this, a serious consideration of any of them would raise important moral questions about the way policy decisions are now being made in this country.  Continue reading →