Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Australia’s climate change vulnerability and inaction

You would think a country where the entire state of New South Wales, responsible for a quarter of their agricultural output, is currently in drought and where water scarcity threatens their long-term viability as a country wouldn’t be such a climate change villain. Their wildfires keep worsening and their most important river is drying up. Alas, as with Canada’s oil-selling obsession, Australia seems more concerned about selling as much coal as possible to China as with maintaining a habitable continent.

Even without factoring in such exports, their emissions of greenhouse gas pollution have been steadily rising since 2013 after a period of general decline going back to 2005. Perhaps that’s unsurprising as they repealed their carbon tax in 2014.

This ties into a frightening possibility: as the most vulnerable rich countries are hit harder and harder by climate change they may not draw the lesson that international cooperation is necessary, retreating instead into self-defeating selfishness.

Using gaokao scores outside China

There’s a lot that’s unnerving about the rise of China: their no-questions-asked support for authoritarian regimes, the worsening arms race they are in with the US and others, the surveillance state they have developed, and their massive contribution to climate change, to start with. One element that hits close to home is how their gaokao university entrance exam — which tests loyalty to the Chinese state as well as knowledge — is starting to be accepted for admission to western universities including the University of Toronto and McGill.

Judging by my own teaching experience, a significant fraction of people admitted to university on the basis of Chinese credentials don’t have the English language and other skills necessary to succeed in an undergraduate program taught in English. It’s even more uncomfortable to think that people will be getting in using scores that were awarded for properly parroting back the ideological preferences of the Chinese government.

Explaining climate inaction

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a long and controversial article by Nathaniel Rich which purports to explain why, despite decades of strong scientific consensus about the seriousness of climate change and the action needed to keep it under control, we’re still on track for catastrophic warming: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

The account is disputed, among others by Naomi Klein who questions the idea that ‘human nature’ is to blame: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.

The Economist‘s cover story has a similar theme: The world is losing the war against climate change. I have written before about how inconsistent their coverage is and, in particular, how they have never reconciled their acceptance of the need to confront climate change with the unfaltering priority they accord to continued economic growth.

The question of control

The question of control is a touchy one. No segment of the population feels powerlessness more acutely than Downtown Eastside drug addicts. Even the average citizen finds it difficult to question medical authority, for a host of cultural and psychological reasons. As an authority figure, the doctor triggers deeply ingrained feelings of childhood powerlessness in many of us—I had that experience even years after completing medical training when I needed care for myself. But in the case of the drug addict, the disempowerment is real, palpable and quite in the present. Engaged in illegal activities to support her habit—her very habit being illegal—she is on all sides hemmed in by laws, rules and regulations. It occurs to me at times that, in the view of my addicted patients, the roles of detective, prosecutor and judge are grafted onto my duties as a physician. I am there not only as a healer, but also as an enforcer.

Coming most commonly from a socially deprived background and having passed through courts and prisons repeatedly, the Downtown Eastside addict is unaccustomed to challenging authority directly. Dependent on the physician for her lifeline methadone prescription, she is in no position to assert herself. If she doesn’t like her doctor, she has little latitude to seek care elsewhere: downtown clinics are not eager to accept each other’s “problem” clients. Many addicts speak bitterly about medical personnel who, they find, impose their “my-way-or-the-highway” authority with arrogance and insensitivity. In any confrontation with authority, be it nurse, doctor, police officer or hospital security guard, the addict is virtually helpless. No one will accept her side of the story—or act on it even if they do.

Maté, Gabor. In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. 2012. p. 48–9

“Transition” isn’t adequate for what climate change will mean

On universal postal services

Universal mail services are interesting to consider, both in terms of the relationship between universal social needs and the government provision of services and because of how they illustrate connections between public policy and technology.

It’s important to define what I mean, because it’s distinct from the broader category of delivery services, which are provided by everyone from pizza places to courier companies. In some cases, these delivery services are included in the price of a product, like a desk chair delivered from a shop or home food delivery. In other cases, it’s for a point-to-point transfer of objects provided by the customer to a specific destination, generally with a specific price charged for every pair of start and end locations. The method of delivery also distinguishes universal mail services, since their delivery systems are prepared to deliver an item to every address in the area covered every time they circulate with mail, whereas couriers and house moving companies go from point to point.

My understanding is that the London Penny Post was the earliest universal mail service, naming itself after the innovation of charging a single price for delivery of an envelope between any two points covered by the system. This cuts down a lot on necessary infrastructure, since the envelopes can be deposited in unstaffed depots (mail boxes) and customers can calculate and affix their own postage.

A contemporary system like Canada Post almost certainly could raise more revenue by charging differential rates for delivery across different distances. Even if you think the net benefit is very much worth it for society, you have to admit that shipping anything from Miramichi, New Brunswick to Dawson’s Landing, British Columbia costs the shipper more than delivering from downtown Vancouver to a suburb, or even between two major urban centres. We choose to keep the price the same perhaps partly for simplicity and customer satisfaction, but also as a social policy choice: deciding to emphasize the connectedness of some places, specifically all mail delivery addresses in Canada.

With the decline of lettermail the part of the postal system that is under threat is this routine door-to-door delivery to all addresses several times a week. Canada Post already runs point-to-point package services which compete with Fedex and UPS, with the same feature of a variable rate depending on source and destination. Routine delivery to every address costs the postal service a great deal and is currently the main basis of their whole logistical system, down to trucks circling the streets and mail carriers delivering to doors and mailboxes.

The decline in lettermail is pretty convincingly attributable to the rise of electronic forms of correspondence, particularly for things like utility bills. The volume of letters is falling, but the system still largely costs the same amount to operate. The choice to end routine delivery and switch to a courier service model would probably mean significantly reducing the staff. If maintaining this kind of mail delivery is a public priority, Canadians can doubtless insist that it happen. Canada Post is a Crown corporation, so while its operation has elements of a commercial firm, it’s ultimately state-owned and government controlled.

There are elements of universal mail that are definitely appealing to me, both in terms of the simplicity of being able to buy single units of postage in advance to ship envelopes at your discretion and in terms of the assertion of national community it represents, as an implicit subsidy from those whose shipping addresses can be cheaply reached to those whose addresses are remote, like smaller communities and communities in Canada’s north.

Canada and losers in a global transition to climate-safe energy

Canada’s continued enthusiasm for new fossil fuel production not only helps undermine the world’s chances of dealing with climate change, but it also threatens Canada’s future economic prosperity as one of the dirtiest and highest-cost producers of a commodity that may see sharply declining demand.

A recent special report in The Economist said:

Yet the transition has plenty of potential to cause geopolitical friction, too. The most obvious example is the challenge it will pose to economies that depend on petroleum. A new book, “The Geopolitics of Renewables”, edited by Daniel Scholten of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, argues that the clearest losers will be those blessed with ample fossil-fuel reserves and those who bet on oil for too long without reforming their economies.

Reforming the economy means doing several politically difficult things, including progressively shutting down the politically powerful bitumen sands, getting consumers to accept higher prices for fossil fuel energy, and working with enthusiasm and determination to curtail fossil fuel energy demand. There is little sign at present that Canada’s politicians are up to any of these tasks, or that the minority of voters who really understand the need to decarbonize will be able to bring them around, especially in time to live up to commitments like the Paris Agreement.

Canada Day and nationalism

I cannot uncritically say “Happy Canada Day”. In part, that’s because of Canada’s genocidal and otherwise unjust history, but there is also my broader skepticism about nationalism itself.

It seems a bit akin to following professional sports. It may not appeal to me personally, but I have no reasonable objection to people who support a local baseball or hockey team. By all means, follow their games, wear their clothes, and memorize their player stats. Just don’t become fanatical to the point that you dehumanize others because of their different allegiances. And, especially, don’t use your loyalty as justification for violence.

That’s where nationalism really diverges from other forms of partisan enthusiasm: the fundamental connection between the state and violence. At its most benign form, that’s what empowers the courts and police to imprison people involuntarily and even do them harm in circumstances we consider justified. It has also justified a lot of senseless slaughter, however, even in democracies. In an interview in 1914 George Bernard Shaw said of the first world war:

In both armies, the soldiers should shoot their officers and go home, the agriculturalist to his land and the townsman to his painting and glazing… we always learn from war that we never learn from war.

I wish that had been closer to the lesson that we took from WWI, not the nonsense about a war to end all wars of making the world safe for democracy. Similarly not the nonsense about Canada becoming a nation because of Vimy Ridge, or generally because of our participation in that slaughter. Canada fought by default on behalf of one empire against another empire: neither noble nor necessary.

Critically in the rest of this century humanity desperately needs to counter its twin tendencies to sort people into boxes and say that the people in other boxes don’t matter. There’s no sensible Canadian response to climate change or nuclear proliferation or pandemic illness or global poverty absent a concomitant effort from other countries. For a few people perhaps nationalism supports international humanitarianism and cosmopolitan ethics, because they have defined the substantive content of what it means to hold their nationality to include those values. I would rather see people embracing a cosmopolitan ethic wholeheartedly, recognizing that the government that represents them is especially morally and practically important, but that their national identification simultaneously means a lot less than being human, being part of the biosphere, being part of the species that will need to change so much if we’re going to endure beyond the lifetime of today’s children and live in a world that any of us would recognize or welcome.