The Disaffected Lib Mk. II

  Robert Reich says the corporate sector is trying to punish workers for today's inflation problem. The UC Berkley prof and former US Labor Secretary writes that big corporations are exploiting inflation as a smokescreen in order to raise prices. Inflation has broken out all over the world – the consequence of pent-up demand from more than two years of pandemic and of limited supplies of everything from computer chips to wheat, due to difficulties getting the world economy up and running. Add in Putin’s war in Ukraine driving up world energy and food prices, and China’s lockdowns against Covid, and you get a perfect conflagration. That’s not all. Big corporations are busily raising their prices because consumers have so little choice. Corporations are using inflation as cover. Reich contends that, whether it's the fossil energy giants or the food giants, it's a scam to manipulate prices and drive up profits. If markets were competitive, companies would keep their prices do...

  For the past half century the fossil energy giants have been logging an average daily profit of 3 billion dollars. Every day. $3 billion . Like clockwork. Since 1970 that comes to a tidy $52 trillion. Now that gas prices have gone through the roof it's estimated those profits have tripled. Some countries are considering a windfall profits tax to raise funds for social benefits such as health care.  Canada's Chamber of Commerce legislatures don't seem keen to pursue anything along these lines. The question remains why are Canadian governments, federal and provincial, lavishing such masssive subsidies and benefits on these fossil fuel giants? Why is the Liberal government picking up the tab for a $23-billion pipeline to push bitumen to tidewater? Why are we allowing these corporate  monsters to run up an obscene tab for remediation of the environmental disaster they've created? We're being taken for a ride and, at the end of the road, we'll be left with an envir...

Every season has its tell-tales.  In North America summer is heralded by blue-green algae blooms, toxic garbage that spreads through our lakes and rivers. This stuff poses a threat to vacationers, even their pets. This aerial photo captures what the bloom looks like on Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. The usual culprit is agricultural run off of fertilizer nutrient-rich water pouring into the water ways. Bad farmers, bad farmers, goddamnit!  But wait, there's blame enough to go around.  From Scientific American .  The culprit is pee - protein-rich urine. When we overconsume protein—whether it comes from lentils, supplements or steak—our body breaks the excess down into urea, a nitrogen-containing compound that exits the body via urine and ultimately ends up in sewage. Maya Almaraz, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues wanted to see how much of this nitrogen is being flushed into the U.S. sewage system because of a protein-heavy diet...

  Another Earth Overshoot Day is upon us.  Funny how they keep showing up earlier each year. This year's pitch is one partnership for the planet . Uh, yeah, sure. Overshoot - the day each year on which humanity exhausts an entire year's worth of natural resources. But, as with greenhouse gas emissions, all countries are not equal. July 28 is just the global average. As the graphic below reveals there are many countries that have a low ecological footprint. Then there are the gluttons.  Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and the Delusional States of America tipped into overshoot on March 13th this year. It's said that to meet mankind's rapacious consumption would require the resources of nearly two planet Earths.  However, if other nations consumed at Canada's rate we would apparently need eight or nine Earths to meet our demand. What does this all mean. I found one simple graph that illustrates our predicament. The horizontal line is the planet's resource capacit...

  James Lovelock is dead. The legendary climate scientist, best known for his Gaia Hypothesis, died on his 103rd birthday.  Fittingly, Lovelock died at home surrounded by family. Lovelock, who was one of the UK’s most respected independent scientists, had been in good health until six months ago, when he had a bad fall. Known as something of a maverick, he had been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory since the mid-1960s, and in his old age he continued to work. His Gaia hypothesis posits that life on Earth is a self-regulating community of organisms interacting with each other and their surroundings. He said two years ago that the biosphere was in the last 1% of its life.

 

The theme of this year's UN climate summit, COP27, will be adaptation, a very diplomatic way of saying what to do now that you've shit your pants. Adaptation is the red-headed step child when it comes to the climate emergency unfolding before our very eyes. Our leaders, including the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, are skilled at crafting a Potemkin facade to mask the dire and woefully unprepared dangers of the climate crisis.  Justin will tell us he's got this sorted. His government will focus on cutting emissions from the extraction and processing of bitumen from the Athabasca Death Sands.* That's Canada's commitment to emissions. That's not to say the Liberals aren't also focused on adaptation such as our aging and decaying essential infrastucture. A new bitumen pipeline to "tidewater" is infrastructure, isn't it? There's digging and welding galore, all that infrastructure stuff.  By the time the Canadian people have been fleeced, ...

 

  In today's world of overpopulation, overdevelopment and ecological overshoot, chasing constant growth is wilful lunacy.  Yet our leaders, like those of every developed country, are obsessed with growing GDP, Gross Domestic Product. One dissenter who has, for more than 50 years championed the shift to a steady state economy, Herman Daly, makes the case for abandoning our GDP fetish while we still can. The former World Bank senior economist argues that growth has itself become uneconomic. The question is, Does growth, as currently practiced and measured, really increase wealth? Is it making us richer in any aggregate sense, or might it be increasing costs faster than benefits and making us poorer? Mainstream economists don’t have any answer to that. The reason they don’t have any answer to that is that they don’t measure costs. They only measure benefits. That’s what G.D.P. is.3 There’s nothing subtracted from G.D.P. But the libertarian notion is logical. If you’re going to b...

  Normal is a word that's lost most of its meaning. We imagine that it's just a matter of time until Covid-19 is just a bad memory allowing a "return to normal." Or the global supply chains will miraculously mend themselves and the economy will bounce back to normal. Or we're on the cusp of some great breakthrough that will tame our runaway climate and avert mass extinction. All of that stuff - it's utter nonsense. It's a delusion .  The environmental crisis isn’t going away. The best available projections from climate forecasters point to greater instability – more heatwaves, more floods, worse shortages of food, even an increased risk of future pandemics . Yet this unavoidable and hugely costly instability, now becoming a part of our daily lives, scarcely seems to register with the institutions charged with managing the economy. ...The assumption of a certain kind of stability over time is hardwired into many of the kinds of economic models used today. T...

  Donald Trump's on-again/off-again Grigori Rasputin, Steve Bannon, has been convicted of contempt of Congress. Bannon was found guilty of both contempt counts. He's heading for the Greybar Hotel as both offences stipulate a minimum 30-day, maximum one-year term of incarceration.

  It's toasty in Great Britain. Heathrow hit 40.2 Celsius, a national heat record. Where there's heat, there's fire. The London fire brigade has a Major Incident in response to a "huge surge in fires across the capital." It's thought the heatwave could last into August. Across the UK, flights are suspended and planes unable to land due to runways melting. RAF Brize Norton, Britain's largest air base, has suspended flights in and out. Meanwhile, president Biden is expected to declare a climate emergency tomorrow. Just wait until the stooges on the US Supreme Court get their teeth into that. The Liberal government declared a climate state of emergency in Canada some time ago and then wasted no time pushing through their new and improved bitumen pipeline and Newfoundland's Bay Nord seabed oil project. Unless your head is up your backside you might notice a certain morbid disconnect between what Trudeau says and what Trudeau does. It's funny how he ...

  The warnings just get ever more dire even as our leaders show an incredible capacity to ignore them. UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says humanity is on the fast lane to " collective suicide ." Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.” He added: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” Justin, are you listening? Just kidding. Traditionally weather-tepid Britain is expecting to get heat-hammered this week and the head of the UK's Met Office says this is the face of climate change in Britain. Exceptionally high temperatures expected across the UK on Monday and Tuesday are “entirely consistent” with climate change, the chief meteorologist at the Met Office has said, warning that such heat could become a regular f...

  Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, has been awarded the George Orwell award for journalism. The prize is awarded for commentary or reporting that comes closest to meeting the ambition of George Orwell , the novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, to “make political writing into an art”. Monbiot won the prize for his almost four-decade-long fight to raise the profiles of a wide range of neglected environmental issues, most recently leading the calls to rewild our desertified and sheep-scraped landscape. “In the finest tradition of George Orwell’s journalism, George Monbiot draws on a vast reserve of knowledge to write with wit, elegance, forensic insight, and sustained and justified anger about the most important, and most neglected, crisis facing humanity,” said Isabel Hilton, one of the prize’s judges.

The US has caused roughly two trillion dollars in greenhouse gas emissions related damages since 1990. The huge volume of planet-heating gases pumped out by the US, the largest historical emitter, has caused such harm to other, mostly poor, countries through heatwaves, crop failures and other consequences that the US is responsible for $1.91tn in lost global income since 1990, the study found. Canada, at roughly a tenth the population, is said to be on the hook for $247 billion. The Dartmouth researchers combined a number of different models, showing factors such as emissions, local climate conditions and economic changes, to ascertain the precise impact of an individual country’s contribution to the climate crisis. They looked for these links over a period spanning 1990 to 2014, with the research published in the journal Climatic Change. What they found was a perniciously uneven picture – rich nations in northerly latitudes, such as those in north America and Europe, have done the mo...

Last Friday's fiasco with Rogers network sure caused a ruckus for the cashless society.  Merchants posted makeshift cardboard signs on their front doors warning customers they better have a valid credit card or cash or else. The plebs weren't able to hit the ATM to get a few bucks for the weekend. Not what the immediate gratification crowd wanted to hear. Everywhere it was the slap, slap, slap of the flat-footed from Rogers to the banks to the purveyors of all we need and yearn for to - our political caste. Through the rumble of blame dodging and the smokescreen of "no one saw it coming" emerged the vague outline of the no longer invisible hand of the marketplace and the now familiar sound of shareholder value clashing against resilience. As I read all the sincere apologies and promises, one name came to mind - Donald J. Kessler. He was the NASA geek who first warned of the mathematical certainty of the destruction of most if not all of our satellite networks. It'...

Okay, does this guy look like a Bond villain?  

  Is America on the verge of another civil war?  A professor who studies such things contends it's too close to tell . UC San Diego professor, Barbara Walter, is interviewed in the latest Washington Post magazine.  Since WaPo is often under an airtight firewall, I will generously excerpt the article. Walter says that predicting civil unrest has been boiled down to just a couple of variables. One is "anocracy." We were surprised. The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things related to the quality of the governments around the world. How autocratic or how democratic a country is. And it has this scale that goes from negative 10 to positive 10. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic. This, of course, is where you want to be. This would be Denmark, Switzerland, Canad...

 

  We can't go on living this way. That's the warning from Sir Patrick Vallance , the UK's chief science officer. The relationship between humans and nature is under intense and increasing strain. The report released today by Ipbes, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (akin to the IPCC reports on climate change ), provides compelling evidence that humans are overexploiting wild species and habitats. Harmful activities, including habitat destruction, poor farming practices and pollution, have altered ecosystems significantly, driving many species past the point of recovery. In Great Britain alone, of the 8,431 species assessed in the 2019 State of Nature report , 1,188 are threatened with extinction. Globally, there are an estimated one million at risk , with biodiversity declining at a faster rate than at any time in human history. Alongside overexploitation, humans are driving biodiversity loss by destroying, polluting and f...

Boris Johnson's experiment in premiership is drawing to a close. It was a matter of one gaffe upon another until his cabinet finally took away the keys to No. 10. With that the big oaf took to the airwaves to announce his retirement . In other news, it looks like Spaceship Earth will narrowly avoid colliding with a 40 foot asteroid. The rock is travelling at some 25,000 miles per hour and will miss our little tushies by an astronomical whisker, barely 55,000 miles. Meanwhile, it seems we're in a mad rush to render this same Spaceship Earth a ball of greenhouse gas. I read a piece on CBC's website about the  Keeling Curve , a measurement of changes in atmospheric CO2 levels.  During the 20th century we went from around 260 parts per million all the way to 370 ppm.  Over the first two decades of the 21st century we've hit 420 ppm. What got my attention was the prediction that we will likely hit 450 ppm by the end of this decade. Climate activist Bill McKibbin created a ...

  Sorry Developments on the climate crisis have not been encouraging.  Greenhouse gas emissions that are supposed to be plunging are heading in the wrong direction. Chris Hedges put it this way: It is hard to be sanguine about the future. The breakdown of the ecosystem is well documented. So is the refusal of the global ruling elite to pursue measures that might mitigate the devastation. We accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels, wallow in profligate consumption, including our consumption of livestock, and make new wars as if we are gripped by a Freudian death wish. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and Death – gallop into the 21rst century. Andew Nikiforuk dished up a two-part article on the Fossil Cult we've become. At the beginning of last month, Canadian-born climate scientist, Katherine Keyhoe , warned that we've already left it too late to deal with climate breakdown. The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on...