Politics – Page 86 – a sibilant intake of breath

Canada’s Liberals and NDP should merge

Can the Liberals and the NDP please just merge already?

The Liberal and New Democratic parties have now spent years operating under the apparent assumption that the key issue is leadership and that if they can just find the right leader they will be able to form a government.

I think a much bigger problem is vote splitting. Different voters have the NDP, Liberals, and Greens as their top choice. Probably, the second-place preferences of these voters are also for one of those three parties. And yet, because votes get split between left-leaning parties, the Conservatives end up governing.

Arguably, it would be preferable to reform the electoral system, rather than respond to the united right by uniting the left. What this alternative proposal lacks is practicality: the federal Conservative Party is unlikely to replace an electoral system that has allowed them to govern with a minority of support for so long, and no other party is in a position to influence legislation.

Shell ad parody generator

With this website, you can make your own satirical version of Shell’s “Let’s go” ads:

Shell is one of the most enthusiastic companies taking advantage of how climate change is melting the arctic in order to drill for oil there and thus cause even more warming. Shell is also the largest single investment in the portfolio of the University of Toronto.

Toronto 350.org is calling on the University of Toronto to sell its stock in Shell, as a starting point for a general campaign of fossil fuel divestment.

What’s in your bedroom v. what’s in your politics

Apparently, the contents of your bedroom may be indicative of your political leanings:

The items at the top correlate with a conservative leaning, while those at the bottom correlate with a liberal leaning. The strength of the correlation is indicated by the number of stars.

Source: Jost, John. “The End of the End of Ideology.” American Psychologist. October 2006. Vol. 61, No. 7, 651–670 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.7.651.

350.org Global Power Shift

This looks rather interesting:

“Global Power Shift (GPS) will be a multi-pronged project to scale up our movement and establish a new course, like never before. The basic plan is this:

In June of 2013, 500 of us will gather in Turkey — from leaders to engaged community members

We’ll train in grassroots and digital organizing, share our stories, and chart a strategy for the coming year

Attendees will then return to their home countries in teams to organize mobilizations

These national or regional events will be launchpads for new, highly-coordinated campaigns targeting political and corporate levers of power

Together, we will truly shift the power and spark the kind of visionary transformation we need to fight the climate crisis

I hesitate to endorse any event that requires so much travel to attend, but this may be a case where the emissions associated with getting there are justifiable.

American unconventional oil and the economic viability of the oil sands

Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of tight and shale oil in the United States may be the biggest economic force determining the future of Canada’s bitumen sands. The Globe and Mail recently printed an interesting article on how the development of unconventional oil in the United States could undermine the business model of the oil sands: “a belief in unfettered access to an insatiably oil-hungry U.S. market has been a central underlying assumption of the great energy expansion under way in Alberta.” If the U.S. can satisfy domestic oil demand with their own unconventional sources, the huge investment that has been made in Canada’s oil sands may never produce a reasonable economic return.

This is one more risk that should be borne in mind when making energy investment decisions. Unfortunately, the climate system doesn’t care about the source of greenhouse gas emissions. America’s newfound bounty of unconventional oil and gas will probably make it even harder to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Conference on Enbridge Line 9 today

Today I am attending a conference on opposing Enbridge’s plan to reverse their Line 9 pipeline in order to carry diluted bitumen from the oil sands to Montreal.

I will be posting detailed notes on the Toronto 350.org planning forum.

If you are in Toronto and have some time before 5pm, I recommend coming out. It is happening in Sidney Smith Hall at the University of Toronto, at 100 St. George Street. This is a five minute walk from the St. George subway station.

IEA: We can only burn 1/3 of the remaining fossil fuel

The International Energy Agency is now mirroring the claim made by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and others: we cannot burn all the world’s fossil fuels. In their World Energy Outlook 2012, they claim:

“No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal, unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is widely deployed”

Carbon capture and storage is arguably more of a rhetorical device which allows companies and governments to assume fossil fuel use than a real technology capable of reducing emissions. As such, it seems fair to say that we face a stark choice between dangerous climate change and abandoning fossil fuels.

Given that the value of fossil fuel companies is based on the assumption that they will be able to dig up and sell all the reserves they own, now might be an especially appropriate time to start divesting from fossil fuels.

The ‘better out than in’ free speech argument

In Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie describes the debate in the U.K. about whether to censor a film called International Gorillay which depicts a group of terrorists seeking to kill a character named Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie the author wrote to the BBC pledging that he would not sue them for libel if they showed the film. In his memoir, Rushdie calls the experience: “an object lesson in the importance of the ‘better out than in’ free speech argument – that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad. If International Gorillay had been banned, it would have become the hottest of hot videos and in the parlors of Bradford and Whitechapel young Muslim men would have gathered behind closed drapes to rejoice in the frying of the apostate. Out in the open, subjected to the judgment of the market, it shrivelled like a vampire in sunlight, and was gone.”

Obama and Romney on fossil fuels

President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both think their best odds of winning the election arise from a full-throated endorsement of fossil fuels, with no mention of climate change:

Mr Obama’s energy policy goes beyond a new-found enthusiasm for oil and gas. He has even borrowed a phrase from the McCain-Palin campaign—“All of the above” (rather than “Drill, baby, drill”). “Most of the above” is more accurate. And it may hurt him. Clean Air Act rules administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are accelerating the retirement of coal-fired power stations while cheap gas eats away at coal’s share of electricity generation. This is the main reason that Kentucky and West Virginia, once states where the Democrats were competitive, have swung firmly to the Republicans. Mr Romney is far friendlier to coal mining, an industry he praises for employing 200,000 people. He wants to develop coal aggressively and roll back the environmental regulations that have battered it.

Hopefully both candidates are lying. That is fairly plausible when it comes to coal, which Mr. Romney also sought to restrict as governor of Massachusetts. The perceived need to pander to the coal industry is revealing. The immediate benefits of coal production – in the form of profits and jobs – completely overpower the reality that coal kills vast numbers of people through air pollution and threatens the entire world through climate change.

Defend Our Coast protest, Victoria, B.C.

Today, thousands of British Columbians and allies will be outside the provincial legislature to protest the egregious Northern Gateway pipeline.

The pipeline is a bad idea for so many reasons: because it will fuel the destructive growth of the bitumen sands, because of the forests that will be affected by the spills that are certain to happen, because of the dangerous and biologically important waters where hundreds of oil tankers will need to run, and because this is the wrong time to be making giant new investments in fossil fuels.

The time has come for us to behave smarter. Hopefully, these protests will help more people see that.