The Disaffected Lib Mk. II

A Leger poll finds Canadians aren't warming to that cold fish, Pierre Poilievre .  Another recent poll finds we're none too fond of the other guy either. Both results are easy to understand.  Canadians, it seems, are tired of Justin's empty platitudes and uneasy at Pete's radical right rants. Does this mean we're out of the woods? Hardly. The American Contagion unleashed by decades of Republican perfidy (going back to Gingrich) culminating in the election of that nation's worst president ever has crossed our border and embedded itself with a segment of our population mainly from one geographical heartland.  The Freedom Convoy mob and Poilievre are testament to its resilience. So, what are we up against? This seems almost farcical, counterintuitive, illogical. True, but as the NYT columnist, Thomas Edsall, writes, we're facing the age of " belief polarization " that is immune to arguments of logic or fact. In their May 2021 paper, “Belief polarizat...

  There was a time they wouldn't shut up. Now, except for when they're safely inside some Republican festung , they're a lot less talkative. Trump showed up to a scheduled deposition today, after repeatedly trying to get out of it. Then he went mute, claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer any  questions. Like other dons, he's not talking. Rudy Giuliani is supposed to appear before a Grand Jury in Atlanta. Predictably, he sent his lawyers to court with a doctor's note claiming he's not fit to travel. The judge said if he can't fly he can always get there by car or bus or Amtrack. If need be he should call an Uber. Daily Kos reports that the Fulton County DA doesn't believe "America's Mayor." Giuliani “purchased multiple airline tickets with cash, including tickets to Rome, Italy and Zurich Switzerland, for travel dates ranging between July 22, 2022 and July 29, 2022. All of these dates were after [his] medical pr...

  Seabed trawlers are almost universally reviled. Their lead-weighted nets scour the seabed, in the process destroying almost everything in their path. This 2014 article from The Guardian focuses on the problem: The Firth of Forth was once home to vast beds of oysters, for example. None remains. Similarly, the Firth of Clyde once abounded with fish, shellfish, whales and porpoises. Today its seabed is barren and its fish stocks have disappeared. "Nothing worth catching is left," states Callum Roberts in his book, Ocean of Life . "The Firth of Clyde gives us a stark vision of a life without fish." And as bottom trawling and dredging continues, such a fate awaits most other UK inshore fisheries. "Trawlers have transformed life on the seabed, converting three-dimensional, complex habitats rich in coral, sponge and sea fan to endless monotonous expanses of shifting gravel, sand and mud," adds Roberts. Nor is the damage confined to the seabed. Stocks of fish –...

  CNN is reporting that FBI agents just raided Donald Trump's compound at Mar-a-Lardo. Trump apparently said the agents even broke into his safe.

  A New Yorker article explores former president Donald Trump's contempt for his own generals.  Ever a fan of the Austrian paper-hanger, Trump had this exchange with his then chief of staff, John Kelly. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” “Which generals?” Kelly asked. “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded. “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

  George Monbiot calls it the " conspiracy of silence that dominates public life ."  Governments dodge dealing with problems, existential threats, and puts it down to the "power of incumbency." ...those politicians and media barons deploy every imaginable wile and ruse to prevent decisive action from being taken. They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency . Those who hold power today do so by stamping out challenges, regardless of the form they take. And, in their obsessive quest to attain and hold onto power, the public is treated as fodder for short-termism, policies geared to electoral cycle upon electoral cycle with scant regard to the future. We need to see past this political perfidy if we're to have any chance of survival. This point is illustrated in an essay published on ...

   A report from PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), urges governments to take off the blinders and begin evaluating climate breakdown  from a worst case scenario. Despite 30 y of efforts and some progress under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to increase. Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100.    ...Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations ( 14 ) that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 ( 15 ), carbon loss due to intense droughts ...

  The climate science community is finally coming out of the closet. Three weeks ago I had an exchange with a prominent climate scientist.  I asked what were our chances of world governments rising to the challenge of climate breakdown in time to avert real disaster. My correspondent recommended that I watch de Caprio's NetFlix movie, "Don't Look Up." After watching the flick I chided my aquaintance for fear-mongering. Surely he was pulling my leg. No, he maintained. He was deadly serious. An article in the Guardian/Observer mirrors this exchange. University College London emeritus professor, Bill McGuire , pulls no punches. The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot,...

  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, ...