The Disaffected Lib Mk. II

 The CBC captured a photo of Elizabeth May campaigning, sitting in her walker waving at passing cars.  Elizabeth May, whom Susan Riley extolled as the "hardest-working MP on Parliament Hill" now apparently laid low, alone at the side of the road. This may be a metaphor for the party itself that has managed to take last place, behind Maxime Bernier's PPC, even as the climate emergency rages unchecked across the world, pole to pole. Meanwhile the Greens' erstwhile leader, Annamie May, has campaigned in just two ridings - the one she's trying to win and a neighbouring riding in Toronto. Here come the Cops. As Ms. May enjoys the last of the summer sunshine, the Glasgow climate summit, COP 26, is just three months away. This summer has seen climate breakdown go into overdrive. Temperature records broken, entire towns literally erased, torrential rains triggering floods that resemble ocean breakers as they race through towns in Europe and eastern U.S. sweeping away cars...

  If you're poor you have to take your chances of possibly dying in place. If you're rich, you have options. Some wealthy Americans are already legging it , migrating away from early onset climate change.  They're looking in a new direction, north. For those who are already feeling the direct impact of global warming and can afford to relocate, climate change migration has begun. Nearly half of Americans who plan to move in the next year say natural disasters and extreme temperatures factored into their decision to relocate, according to a survey conducted by Redfin. One in 5 Americans believe climate change is already negatively impacting home values in their areas, and 35% of homeowners have already spent $5,000 or more protecting their homes against climate risk, according to Redfin.  Last month, the United Nations' climate panel delivered a dire report calling for immediate action. The agency warned that limiting global warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius or ev...

  Ten trillion dollars is a tidy amount of money.  We may soon see whether that kind of cash is enough to tame the fossil fuelers and their political enablers . Investors managing more than $10-trillion on Wednesday published an ambitious blueprint for energy companies seeking to tackle climate change, including sharp cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and a winding down of oil and gas production. The unprecedented initiative – dubbed the Net Zero Standard for Oil and Gas – details 10 required standards to help money managers compare companies’ strategies and understand whether they are aligned with United Nations-backed efforts to reduce global carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. With the next round of global climate talks taking place in November, concern is growing that too many plans are flaky and unlikely to provide material help by reducing absolute emissions at the rate needed to limit global warming. “We need to have a level playing field now on disclosure because it’s...

  Don Ivison is calling the election for the Trudeau Liberals. He figures we'll be back where we were before the writ was dropped. O'Toole dropped the ball on the climate issue. He, after all, pledged to drive through a second bitumen pipeline, the Northern Gateway. Trudeau is only inflicting one pipeline, the southern Trans-Mountain. Yippee. Trudeau has also had the benefit of Maxime's unruly degenerates. Canadians, it seems, find them repulsive. Quelle surprise! How long will another minority government last? We live in volatile times.

  A legend among comedians, Norm Macdonald has died, age 61. Wikipedia reports that Macdonald died of cancer. He had been diagnosed as having the disease nine years ago. The  "moth joke" - priceless

  Torrential rain flooded the approaches to London's venerable Tower Bridge today.  The nearby Tube station was flooded - of course. Meanwhile, "Don't Mess With Texas" is expecting up to 20 inches of rain today as Tropical Storm Nicholas makes landfall before moving on to Louisiana where they're still dealing with flooding from the last hurricane. It's thought that Nicholas could park itself for a while over the Lake Charles to New Orleans area. Events like these reveal the farcical nature of our political parties' approach to climate change. To them it's a matter of obliging some future government to slash greenhouse gas emissions by X per cent by Year Y. Even if political fairy tales could come true, it's not going to make an appreciable dent in this climate emergency. As the World Meteorological Organization reported two weeks ago, weather related disasters have increased five fold over the last 50 years. That's not going away. Emissions c...

  Okay, fair enough, it was the Globe & Mail.  The headline read: At Fairy Creek  protesters and police clash over old-growth logging in British Columbia. "Clash" now there's a loaded word. It conjures up images of angry confrontation, a mob taking on the man. Right. So, here are the Globe's own photos of the melee: That's a real insurrection, eh? Those evil scofflaws and their violent ways to be sure. 

  The Lancet Planetary Health has devoted its latest volume, "Breathing Fire," to the growing threat of wildfire smoke, the dangerous PM 2.5 that threatens the health, perhaps even survival, of people around the globe. Is this a ticking time bomb? The journal offers three core articles: The first compares the health costs of wild fires versus fires deliberately set for fuel management. The second examines the risk and burden of hospital admissions associated with PM 2.5 in Brazil from 2000 to 2015. The final offering is an ambitious study of mortality risk of PM 2.5 inhalation that looks at data from 749 cities. For this time series study, data on daily counts of deaths for all causes, cardiovascular causes, and respiratory causes were collected from 749 cities in 43 countries and regions during 2000–16. During the past 3 years, wildfires have been observed in many locations of the world, including Australia, British Columbia in Canada, the western USA, and the Amazon rai...

  We don't remember very well.  It's human nature to forget even the not so distant past and, instead, consider the present as normal. There's a term for it - "creeping normalcy."  Usually, creeping normalcy is of no great significance. Who cares if we don't remember double-knit leisure suits? Some things are best forgotten. There are times, however, when allowing the present to obscure the past can blind us to what's really going on. This is particularly relevant to how we react to the climate emergency. Weather disasters have become five times more common since 1970, due in large part to climate change, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “The number of weather, climate, and water extremes are increasing and will become more frequent and severe in many parts of the world as a result of climate change,” WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “That means more heatwaves, drought, and forest fires ...

  It's hard to know how this will play out but it could be a corner stone to Joe Biden's presidential legacy. Late Saturday night, Biden took the lid off a long-secret FBI report into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Lawyers for families of the 9/11 victims, who are suing the Saudi kingdom in federal court, said the document provided important support to their theory that a handful of Saudis connected to their government worked in concert to assist the first two Qaida hijackers sent to the United States in January 2000. “This validates what we have been saying,” said James Kreindler, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “The FBI agents working this case detailed a Saudi government support network that was working in 1999, 2000 and 2001 to provide the hijackers with everything they needed to mount the attacks — apartments, money, English lessons, flight school.” ...FBI agents found evidence that several Saudi religious officials working in t...

  They have only themselves to blame but there's no point dwelling on that.  Old School or what I call patrician Republicans are realizing that, even with Trump gone, the GOP they once knew is over . In 2017, the longtime conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted : “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?” A camp divided against itself - forever? Maybe the future pro-Trump Republican was always slightly more sympathetic to authoritarianism, maybe slightly more tolerant of corruption than the future anti-Trump Republican. Then Trump shoved authoritarianism and corruption into the political debate—and suddenly people who liked Trump were forced into positions they had never planned to take. The price they paid. They found themselves political exiles, banished or self-banished from the political home of a lifetime. This was a metaph...

 

  Like the jackass who threw gravel at Justin Trudeau we're plainly becoming unruly but that's not the point. Are we, as a nation, a society, becoming ungovernable? Are we disposed to do what is required to achieve the best continuation of our nation and our people? This election has revealed the blithe disregard our leaders show to the looming existential threat, climate change.  The candidates all have the same refrain. They're all talking shit when it comes to adaptation and mitigation. Each of them recites some promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by X per cent by year Y and that's about it. These are not serious people whether it's Justin or Erin, Jagmeet or Annamie.  Don't get me wrong. Cutting emissions, decarbonizing our society and our economy, is vitally important but, without more, it will accomplish very little. It's sort of like battling the fire in the kitchen while ignoring the blaze consuming the rest of the house. You can gauge our leader...

  Jay Kaufman, McGill professor of epidemiology, writes that science alone cannot heal a sick society . The story begins in 1828 when a young Prussian pathologist was tasked with investigating a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia.  The doctor, Rudolf Virchow, wrote a 900 page report blaming poverty and social exclusion for the epidemic. “I am convinced that if you changed these conditions, the epidemic would not recur,” he wrote. Dr. Virchow was only a few years out of medical school, but his report became the foundational document of the new discipline of social medicine . His vision for health went far beyond individuals and the pathogens lurking inside them: He pioneered the careful epidemiological examination of social conditions such as housing, education, diet and lifestyle, and he denounced the rigid social stratification perpetuated at the time by the Catholic Church. Today, Virchow's theories are again put to the test with Covid-19. It appears that the more salient feat...

  I spent some time reading about the candidates in my riding. Two of them, the Green and the Liberal, seemed impressive.  Sadly, my riding is a shoot out between the incumbent New Democrat and his Conservative rival. Reading their profiles, they mostly seemed almost identical. Housing has become a flavour du jour. And climate change, they're all very worried and concerned. If elected they'll get right on to that climate change eventually, maybe.  The woman running for the Tories, a retired Canadian Forces major, was a little different. Her party, she claims, will fight climate change but not "on the backs" of working men and women.  Apparently the Conservatives have some magic formula that will change everything yet keep everything unchanged. Wowser! As I read her spiel I was reminded of an article on how the fossil fuel industry has switched from outright denialism to something even more insidious - " wokewashing ". In a paper published in the journal Glo...