Made in Canada Sellout

Ever wonder why the Canadian government keeps saying it's impossible to meet our international commitments to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto accord?

The truth is Canada’s ability to comply with Kyoto was quietly killed on December 18, 2002 - just one day after our ratification papers for the global climate treaty were proudly presented to the United Nations.

This shocking betrayal came in the form of a personal letter from then Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It guaranteed such sweeping concessions to the oil and gas sector that complying with Kyoto was virtually impossible without shutting down large sectors of the rest of the economy.

Among other things, Ottawa committed to the fossil fuel sector that they would “set emission intensity targets for the oil and gas sector at no more than 15% below the projected business-as-usual levels for 2010.”

Industrial emitters like the oil sector account for over 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. This quiet corporate give-away meant that the rest of the Canadian economy, namely you and me, would have to cut our emissions by more 40% - assuming we want to comply with international law.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry has cheerfully increased their emissions by 47% since 1990, and they are set to double again in the next decade.

But wait, there's more. This letter also committed that the oil industry would pay no more than $15/tonne for greenhouse gas offsets until 2012. What a bargain! A study conducted for the National Climate Change Process estimated the true costs of such offsets are more like $250/tonne.

Given these sweeping concessions to the fossil fuel lobby, complying with Kyoto is now virtually impossible. For instance, we could shut down the entire transportation sector in Canada (a mere 25% of all emissions) and still not meet our Kyoto commitments.

This also creates the convenient situation where those pundits who appose any meaningful movement on climate policy can crow that Kyoto is not doable and never was.

Realistically, the likelihood of Stephen Harper, an Alberta Tory, reneging on this remarkable sellout to the oil industry is vanishingly small. The reason this deal was was so crucial to the oil sector is because the Alberta oil sands development produces such astronomical carbon emissions.

So energy intensive is this bitumen boondoggle, it takes up to 1,500 cubic feet of clean natural gas to produce one barrel of dirty crude. The oil sands now consume 600 million cubic feet of natural gas per day – enough to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes.

The gluttonous appetite of the tar sands for dwindling natural gas supplies is expected to more than triple by 2012. Hence the need for the proposed 1,200 km Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline from the Artic Ocean to Fort McMurray, at a cost of $7.5 billion.

Besides the fact that this outrageously inefficient project creates three times the carbon emissions of conventional oil development, why would it even make economic sense to convert our finite deposits of natural gas into oil? From an energy efficiency point of view, we are turning caviar into Kraft dinner.

The simple answer is that China needs oil to fuel their ballooning love affair with the automobile. There is only so much oil in the world and politicians are falling all over themselves to sell it, even as they publicly spout platitudes about climate change.

``So when Harper rolls out his “Made in Canada” strategy, don’t expect much. We will likely see the usual tough talk minus any deadlines. More cynically, the government spin-doctors will also attempt to deflect attention away from inaction on climate change by talking instead about smog.

This hoary tactic of attempting to confuse the public by talking about smog and greenhouse gases interchangeably is typically reserved for only the most desperate PR situations. That time is now.

If there is a bright side, it’s that this is what early childhood educators would call “a learning moment”. The planet’s life support systems do not fail all at once, or even gradually over time. Our environment is degraded incrementally – bad decision by bad decision. It is important to take note of such milestones. This one happens to be a doosey.

In their pedantic and qualified way, the world’s leading scientists are telling us that climate change is the nothing short of a hair-on-fire planetary emergency. The most recent study was presented last week by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, showing the Earth has not been this warm in the last 12,000 years.

"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.

Assuming we want to avoid that outcome, there are some practical options. While the Canadian oil and gas lobby has been spectacularly successful at bullying our government, their counterparts elsewhere in the world have taken a very different tack.

For instance, British Petroleum in the UK committed in 1998 to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 10% below 1990 levels by 2010 – a target they reached in 2003, seven years ahead of schedule. Thirteen major UK companies including PB and Shell also penned an open letter to Tony Blair urging clear and strong regulation of greenhouse gases, and a long term plan that would further reduce emissions by 60% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Another case in point is California, with a population similar to Canada. Many of us cringed when the “Terminator” became Governor, but Schwarzenegger last month signed a landmark deal that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020, making California the first US state to legislate a cap on emissions.

Regulation of greenhouse gases will come sooner or later, whether industry likes it or not. Business leaders in other countries have taken the long view that it is better to volunteer than be drafted. Governments elsewhere have provided clear goalposts to those industries and got on with the business of governing.

Ottawa can step back from our emerging image as a global climate pariah, and take a leadership role on creating a sustainable future. However, the first step must be to tear up the sweetheart deal with the oil industry.

Mitchell Anderosn is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. A related piece ran on the Tyee on October 4, 2006

The Satellite that Could Save the World

At a time when the Earth’s climate is at the top of practically every nation’s agenda, it might seem perplexing that there’s a $100-million, fully-completed climate-sensing spacecraft languishing in a warehouse in Maryland.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was supposed to be delivered five years ago to the L1 Lagrangian point—a gravity-neutral parking spot between the Earth and the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away that affords a continuous, sunlit view of the planet.

From that lofty vantage, DSCOVR would beam back our first-ever measurements of the entire planet’s energy balance and reflectivity, known as albedo. This is critical data for calibrating climate change models and monitoring the progress of global warming. Yet the mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite remains sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Could the decision to kill DSCOVR have anything to do with the politics of climate science? For years, Republicans have claimed the need for more data before acting to curb global warming. A letter President Bush wrote to four Republican senators in March 2001 (after DSCOVR’s endorsement by a National Academy of Sciences review panel) referred to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change.”

More recently, in a 2005 briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan asserted that “there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the science of climate change.” Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section at National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, “It is as if the administration prefers to continue to hide behind lack of definitive data as an
excuse for lack of action and leadership.”

According to Dr. Jonah Colman, who does climate modeling at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “the availability of DSCOVR for inter-comparison between other measurements” would reconcile discrepancies in data from low-earth orbit satellites. “Albedo is incredibly important,” he added. “It can change quickly, and we currently do not have a direct method for measuring it. DSCOVR would have given us that.”

Project leader Dr. Francisco P. J. Valero, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, describes the mission as “an urgent necessity.” Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, is even more blunt about the importance of DSCOVR’s data: “Not knowing may kill us.”

If we’re interested in understanding how climate changes and how to predict what’s going to happen next, DSCOVR would appear to be a crucial undertaking. So what happened? The loss of the Columbia shuttle certainly didn’t help, but the real killer of this project seems to have been partisan politics.

Back in 1998, Al Gore championed a probe that would broadcast real-time images of Earth to the Internet at the relatively cheap cost of $20 million. Named Triana (after the sailor on Columbus’ voyage who first spotted the New World), Gore hoped the probe would foster greater awareness of the fragility of the planet. The idea had come to him in a dream.

After peer review, the mission was upgraded to allow the spacecraft to continuously monitor the energy budget of the entire planet—the first one ever with this capability—making it a much more credible mission The name was later changed from Triana to DSCOVR—likely in the hope of jettisoning the Gore-dream political baggage.

Republicans didn’t buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, dubbing it the “Goresat,” a “multimillion-dollar screen saver.” Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader quipped, “This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn’t call up the Fish and Wildlife service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened.”

Lost in the partisan grandstanding was the critically important science behind DSCOVR. In January 2006, NASA quietly canceled DSCOVR altogether, citing “competing priorities.”

Many in the scientific community are incredulous that such an important mission might be lost to rank partisanship. “Gore favored it,” says Dr. Park. “This administration is determined that a Gore experiment is not going to happen. It’s inconceivable to me.” The director of public information for the American Physical Society, Dr. Park says, “I probably talk to more physicists than anyone else in the country. They all think this is tragic.” Climate analyst Trenbeth said, “It makes no sense to me at all either from an economic or a scientific viewpoint. That leaves politics.”

The Ukrainian government offered to launch DSCOVR free of charge aboard a Tsyklon II rocket, the most reliable launch vehicle in the world. France made a similar offer using one of its rockets. But NASA’s response so far has been “no thanks.” Not helping matters, Congress recently raided the NASA budget to the tune of $568.5 million for 198 non-peer reviewed “Congressional interest items”—otherwise known as pure political pork.

DSCOVR is not entirely dead yet. The NOAA is considering bankrolling the launch because DSCOVR could better warn of solar storms, protecting expensive communications satellites. Until then, assuming it’s not stripped for parts, DSCOVR will remain in a box at Goddard until a change in the political winds sends it to its rightful place at L1.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran in the August/September issue of SEED Magazine.

Harper's Big Lie

What a difference an election makes. Just five short months ago Stephen Harper was on the campaign trail, apparently sincerely indignant about entrenched Ottawa secrecy. Now as Prime Minister, he has executed an accountability flip-flop that would give an Olympic gymnast whiplash.

The “Federal Accountability Act”, the cornerstone of Harper’s successful election campaign, was revealed last month as a not only a sham, but a dangerous step backwards for government transparency.

This scathing critique came from none other than the federal Information Commissioner John Reid, the man who holds the duty of reporting to parliament on the issue.

In a town known for it’s bureaucratic doublespeak, Reid was refreshing frank: "No previous government has put forward a more retrograde and dangerous set of proposals to change the Access to Information Act.”

Instead of increasing government accountability and transparency, Commissioner Reid said this highly hyped bill will instead "reduce the amount of information available to the public, weaken the role of the information commissioner and increase the government's ability to cover up wrongdoing, shield itself from embarrassment and control the flow of information to Canadians."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the official government overseer on transparency issues. Why is Reid so outraged?

The new act adds fully ten new exemptions for the government to refuse public access to documents – eight of which would allow bureaucrats to withhold documents without providing any reason, or without any provision for a public interest over-ride. Bureaucrats are also not obligated to create records that could later be requested by the public. Draft audits will not be released for 15 years. Documents relating to investigations of government wrongdoing would be sealed forever.

Harper is also seeking to exclude documents from the PMO or minister offices from the pesky information requests altogether. According to Reid, “it is clear that the government is seeking to find a way to appear to give a right of access to records held in the PMO and ministers’ offices, without actually doing so.”

Lets try and peel back the onion-layers of irony in all this. Harper shrewdly campaigned and won on an agenda of cleaning up Ottawa corruption. He pledged to the Canadian electorate that the passage of a meaningful accountability act was his number-one priority. Many Canadians, myself included, strongly supported rooting out Ottawa rot and implementing sweeping changes to increase government transparency and public access to information.

This makes the recent revelations not merely disappointing, but alarming. In the words of Commissioner Reid, “the new government has done exactly the things for which its predecessor had been ridiculed…All of the positions the government now takes in the discussion paper are contrary to the positions the Conservative Party took, and its leader espoused, during the election campaign.”

It seems that federal conservatives were subscribing to the “Big Lie” school of public discourse in the last election. Rather than creating a new covenant of openness, the bill appears instead to be a Trojan horse to significantly increase the potential for governments to indulge in secrecy and arrogance.

What has been lost in this deception is the opportunity to finally entrench a culture of honesty and transparency in Ottawa. As became abundantly clear under the Liberals, all governments have a finite shelf life before unseemly ethical rot sets in. Meaningful safeguards of public access to information are critical to avoid the need for tawdry spectacles like the Gomery Inquiry.

In contrast, Harper has revealed an almost paranoid fixation on concealing information from the public in general, and from the media in particular. More troubling still is the resemblance of what is happening here to the wholesale erosion of information rights south of the border. This does not bode well for avoiding future scandals, or for protecting the underpinnings of our free and open society. In the words of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Protecting information rights is like doing the dishes – its a chore that never ends, but you don’t want to stop doing it either. Commissioner Reid deserves our thanks and gratitude for his courageous frankness. Now it falls on the Canadian public to ensure that we do not meekly allow the government to take away our information rights, while deceiving us in the process.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

The Joy of Not Knowing

I love science, but it has a lot to answer for. Like a heckler at a magic show, rational western thought has rudely unmasked many of the mysteries of the universe that were the basis of our collective wonder for millennia. Many of us were given the grim impression that everything had been figured out, even if the answers were incredibly boring.

This has taken a heavy spiritual toll. Many people, myself included, have drooped under the burden of living in a world where everything seems to be known, where all mysteries have been answered. The basis of spiritual belief is wonder. How can we live in a world without it?

Yet something remarkable is happening in laboratories around the world. Wonder is making a comeback. The evolving world of quantum physics is making us question the very nature of reality, the universe and ourselves.

Quantum physics is the study of the very small and the very fast. When we look at things on that scale the world is a very different place than the one familiar to us.

Try to imagine that tiny particles of matter don’t actually exist in any one place - that they instead exist only in an ethereal cloud of “probabilities”- a kind of quantum limbo.

While these probabilities give a good idea of where to look for a given speck of matter, these tiny bits of the universe don’t snap into existence until we look at them.

It gets weirder.

Particles can become “entangled”– even if they are on opposite sides of the universe. If you change one by observing it, the other instantaneously changes to have the exactly same properties – ignoring the speed of light.

All this was too much even for Einstein – a man who believed “imagination is more important than knowledge”. He called such entanglements “spooky” and spent much of his latter life trying in vain to disprove quantum theory. Yet it is now described as “the most precisely tested and most successful theory in the history of science”. And the more we look, the weirder it gets.

A recent poll showed most physicists believe many parallel universes exist, that they are superimposed on each other and interact in some way.

Or how about “wormholes”? These are imagined cosmic shortcuts through space and time, or perhaps between different universes. Again they are widely considered possible, if not likely, by mainstream scientists.

While Quantum theory does a superb job of predicting what will happen at a very small scale, the why’s and how’s of this weird world remain completely unknown.

It seems that science is not just exploring the outer limits of human knowledge, but human imagination as well. " As the famous physicist Neils Bohr said, “Anyone who is not shocked by the quantum theory has not understood it."

So what does this have to do with spirituality? Many people are drawing spiritual inspiration from the possibilities posed by quantum physics. For instance, the film “What the Bleep Do We Know” made a big splash – grossing over $12 million.

The film makes the case that because quantum physics indicates an infinite number of possible realities exist, and we need only choose a positive one rather than be pulled along by a destructive one.

I don’t think anyone would dispute the power of positive thought. The world is certainly a very different place depending on your attitude. But what does that have to do with quantum physics? And what does quantum physics have to do with our day-to-day lives?

Not much, according to Dr. David Albert, a professor of physics and philosophy at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Albert appeared both the original “What the Bleep” film and the recently released director’s cut.

According to Albert, the film is “swarming with scientific inaccuracies, and its overall thesis is in my opinion wildly and irresponsibly wrong.” Not a great review, especially from one of the featured scientists in film. He also maintains that most scientists would find the conclusions of the film “preposterous”.

While Albert specializes in philosophical problems of quantum mechanics, he remains very skeptical of any leap from quantum physics to New Age spirituality. He feels that main flaw with the film and many New Age beliefs is that they do not “resist the temptation to see us in the see ourselves in the centre of everything”, something he equates it to the struggle between Galileo and the Vatican.

Albert feels the only truly respectful way to regard the universe is to exercise detachment - to see it for what it is, rather than part of our pre-existing beliefs. “There is immense wonder there, but you are not going to see it if you insist on being vague and hand wavy and touchy feely about it.”

We should remember however that science can be very stiff at dealing with issues that it doesn’t yet understand. For instance, most physicists subscribe to the “shut up and calculate” school of thought, which maintains that trying to interpret the weirdness of quantum physics is not just pointless, it should be avoided.

To get another perspective, I contacted Dr. Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut and the 6th person to walk on the moon. He is also the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, which seeks to understand the nature of consciousness through science. Many of the experts featured in “What the Bleep” are associated with the institute.

Like many people who traveled in space, Mitchell had a powerful epiphany looking down on our beautiful planet from the vantage of 300,000 km – what he calls the “ultimate mountain-top experience”.

“When I got back this experience was so powerful I couldn’t ignore it. So I established the institute to do research into the area of consciousness, which had been a no-no subject in science up until that time. It is an effort to bring science and spirituality into a common understanding.”

He is currently focusing on what he calls the quantum hologram – a kind of experiential hard drive in the sky he believes allows people to access the experiences of other conscious beings. He believes that what we experience as consciousness is an artifact of the complexity of our brains and quantum physics. According to Mitchell our understanding of the universe has a long way to go. “We are only really scratching the surface, we are just barely out of the trees for heavens sake.”

Is he correct? One thing is certain, no physicist would claim that we really yet understand what is going on. My reluctant skepticism will not allow me to embrace many of his beliefs, such as energy healing at a distance. The $200 entrance fee for these workshops sets off some obvious alarm bells. Yet I find myself questioning many of my own beliefs and what we experience as reality.

I have no doubt that many of the people reading this will be lucky enough to be around when some truly astounding truths about our universe are revealed. It seems that science is returning the scene of the crime and restoring some of the wonder of the world that was so coldly demystified.

As one who has drooped in the absence of wonder, I am comforted to learn how little we understand about the universe, even if those mysteries seem to have little to do with us. At least not yet.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver. This piece was published in Shared Vision in April 2005.

Mohammed and the Media

They are hardly high art. Nor do they purport to reveal some profound truth.

The now-famously controversial cartoons of Mohammed are simply crudely drawn caricatures, some apparently designed to offend – which they obviously do superbly.

To their credit, no major Canadian paper has so-far chosen to jump on the gratuitous bandwagon of cultural insensitivity and reprint the drawings.

However, some media outlets worldwide seem not so principled. One reporter in the UK had this blunt assessment of how his paper determined what the public should see: "The ideal Daily Mail story leaves the reader hating someone or something".

By that cynical yardstick, the cartoons, and the violent reaction to them, make this story a winner. No matter where you side in this highly volatile debate, this story is bound to make you angry.

Which brings us to the highly questionable role of the media in this escalating crisis. Where is the actual “news” here? Is it news that Muslims find depiction of their Prophet highly offensive? That story is a bit stale, given that such portrayals have been verboten in Islam since the Koran was written about 1,400 years ago.

In the chorus of finger jabbing and indignation around the world, few seem to be aiming their vitriol in the appropriate direction. It was a small number of media outlets that started this “crisis” by publishing these inflammatory cartoons in the first place. Certain media in both the Western and Islamic world continue to stoke the flames by endlessly reprinting the cartoons, or reporting on the violent reaction to them.

It is analogous to locking two family members in a room and only allowing them to talk about what they hate about each other. It might make for great reality TV, but would hardly be responsible journalism.

Listening to the indignant rationales given by the publisher of the Calgary-based Western Standard, who this week chose to reprint the cartoons, only reinforced my strongly held belief that this non-debate is in many cases merely an opportunity for egotistical imbeciles to bump up the circulation on their very marginal publications.

The histrionics about free speech in this case are particularly grating given the additional danger it may put on Canadian troops, on an already dangerous mission in Afghanistan. To read an excellent post on this, please go to: http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_storring/20060214.html

It is also significant that the Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons was apparently uninterested in dialogue, which might have helped to avoid this mess. After the offending cartoons were published, local Muslims in Copenhagen requested a meeting with editors of the offending Danish paper to express their concerns in person. They were ignored.

To make matter worse, papers throughout Europe also felt the need to grab a hockey stick and begin whacking the hornets’ nest, then expressed righteous indignation when the highly predicable came to pass.

The most frequent defence of this debacle is “freedom of the press”. Very few are seriously suggesting that the press should not have the freedom to print almost anything they want.

That said, it is ridiculous to suggest that the media does not make editorial choices based on good taste and respect every day.

Does the media broadcast video of Western hostages being decapitated? Why have we not seen footage of 9-11 victims falling from the doomed towers? The obvious difference in this case is that is another culture being offended, not our own.

It has also been suggested that this controversy is an important chance for dialogue. No doubt there is a need for greater understanding and respect between the diverse cultures of the world.

There is also no doubt that highly offensive cartoons about Christians and Jews appear regularly in the Middle East media. But this is not a credible rationale for publishing equally offensive material to Muslims.

You do not start a constructive discussion with a slap in the face. Not surprisingly, what we now have instead is a barroom brawl.

With no sense of irony, some are portraying these cartoons as a principled fight against intolerance, rather than a cause for it. If that is in fact the motive, we have chosen a poor route towards mutual understanding.

Those radical leaders in the Islamic world who subsist on intolerance are no doubt delighted that they have been given such a pregnant opportunity to show that Western countries are hostile and ignorant of their religion, and apparently wish to remain so.

From the comfortable vantage point of Canada, it is also easy to forget that many people live in societies where street protest and violence is one of few options available for expressing anger.

The path to tolerance is both slow and faint. The cultures of the world move toward mutual respect against our ancient instincts of tribalism and fear. We in Canada seem to have made better progress on this tenuous journey that any other country in the world.

If this mess illustrates anything, it shows how easy it is to lose our way.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

Oil and Addiction

Surrounded by billowing smoke and flaming timbers, George Bush has finally admitted the house is on fire.

“America is addicted to oil”, Bush told the world in his State of the Union address this week. While this might seem a bold statement coming from the most fossil-fuel-friendly president in history, it is hardy news to the rest of us.

The US uses one quarter of the world’s oil – an incredible 20 million barrels a day, or enough to fill the Toronto Skydome twice.

And like any addiction, that insatiable oil habit has some nasty consequences.

Last week, an international study revealed that pollution from burning fossil fuels is contributing to ballooning childhood asthma rates throughout North America. One in five Canadian boys between the ages of 8 and 11 are afflicted with this terrible condition. Worldwide asthma rates are now climbing by 50% each decade.

Bush also raised the thorny issue of America’s dependence on oil from politically "unstable" countries in the Middle East. Perhaps he is alluding to the over 2,200 American soldiers that have been so far died in Iraq, not to mention about 30,000 Iraqi civilians – the US government is not keeping count. The monetary cost of this oil-driven military adventure is $237 billion and counting.

Here at home many of civil liberties are being sacrificed on the altar of the so-called “war on terror”. This nebulous conflict has sprouted directly from dependence on foreign oil and is eroding many of the constitutional protections that define free and open societies. A recent case in point was the recent domestic spying scandal in the US that even many Republican senators are calling illegal.

And then there is the small matter of the fate of the planet. Aside from a well-known cabal of pseudo-scientists shilling on behalf of Big Oil, virtually the entire scientific community is united in the knowledge that climate change is real, is happening now and is very dangerous.

Almost every week comes another disturbing study showing that our oil addiction is putting the life support systems of our planet at risk. This week’s installment came from British government researchers who found that the Greenland ice sheet is very likely going to entirely melt, raising global sea levels by seven metres – enough to obliterate such well-known landmarks as Florida and Bangladesh.

While this massive melt may take up to 1,000 years, scientists made it clear that the time to act is now. The authors warned a delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even in the next five years "could be significant".

Also released this week was a chilling sequel by scientific icon Dr. James Lovelock, of Gaia hypothesis fame, called “The Revenge of Gaia”. His disturbing message: global climate change is already too far-gone, and civilization is very likely doomed by the end of this century.

He believes that the US, China and India will not curb their oil addiction soon enough to avoid the Earth’s climate reaching an irreversible tipping point in the next few years..

Dr. Lovelock believes that runaway climate change will leave the living organism of our planet with a “morbid fever” that may last as long as 100,000 years, and leave humans dying by the “billions” by the end of this century.

Dr, Lovelock ‘s logic is both horrifying and compelling. I must say it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario where we collectively choose to leave remaining oil in the ground. Given our past and present behavior, we seem to know already how much oil we will burn, and when we will burn it: all of it, and as fast as possible.

That said, humans are curious creatures. Long before civilization, our ancestors dispersed from the tropics and thrived in every ecosystem on the planet. We may be the most adaptable species that has ever evolved. That remarkable adaptability is something we urgently need to beat our oil addiction -not just for our own survival, but for every species on the planet as well.

Moving quickly to an oil free world will take courage, vision and leadership. George Bush’s record thus far on dealing with climate change is nothing short of disgraceful. It is noteworthy that he did not mention climate change once in his State of the Union address.

That said, the first step in dealing with an addiction is admitting you have a problem. His admission this week regarding our oil addiction was small progress, but progress nonetheless.

Now that we know the house is on fire, perhaps we should focus on putting it out...

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

Clearing the Air

Smog sucks.

I am paraphrasing, of course, but that is the gist of an exhaustive report released last week by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) on the effects of pollution on our children’s health.

“Children’s Health and the Environment in North America” found that air pollution such as ground-level ozone, particulates and pesticides are leading to ballooning rates of childhood asthma throughout North America.

In some parts of the US, the incidence of childhood asthma had increased four fold in last 20 years. Here in Canada, one in five boys between the ages of 8 and 11 now suffers from asthma.

Our children are more at risk because they spend more time outdoors, are more active, and proportionately burn through far more air than adults. Their developing lungs and immune systems also put them at additional risk. Worldwide asthma rates are now climbing by an incredible 50% each decade –linked to declining air quality.

This is not just a human tragedy, it is an enormous economic burden as well.

Asthma costs the Canadian taxpayer a whopping $600 million each year in direct medical expenses. It is the leading cause of emergency room visits to our beleaguered health care system – an incredible 146,000 each year. Asthma is also the leading cause of absenteeism at school, and the third leading cause at work.

The asthma epidemic is not the only problem with our skanky air.

According to the CEC report, there is emerging evidence that poor air quality is also linked to host of other health issues, including miscarriages, premature births, low birth weights, and impaired lung development later in life.

The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) estimates that provincial air pollution causes 60,000 emergency room visits, 16,000 hospital admissions, and 5,800 premature deaths each year. Smog is estimated to cost the provincial economy a staggering $7.8 billion each year and rising.

What can we do? Plenty.

Transportation is the largest single source of air pollution in the country. Yet recommended efficiency standards for cars in Canada have not been changed for the last twenty years.

In a triumph of corporate lobbying, the largest SUV’s remain exempt from efficiency standards altogether even though these automotive monstrosities spew out 47% more pollution than cars.

Car ownership in Canada is also going in the wrong direction. The number of vehicles in Canada has more than doubled since 1970 - many of these additional vehicles being gas-guzzling SUVs.

As far as the major components of asthma-causing smog, Canada has a particularly dismal in limiting the chemicals that are poisoning our children.

Out of the 28 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Canada ranks third last for limiting emissions of nitrogen oxides, second last for sulfur dioxide emissions, and second last again for volatile organic compounds – a major contributor to ground-level ozone. Our sulfur dioxide emissions are more than double that OECD average per capita.

Energy generation is another problem. Last year the Ontario government announced that it was delaying the closure of the massive Nanticoke coal-fire generating plant on Lake Erie until at least 2009. This bitumen-burning behemoth spews out fully 14% of the airborne particulates in the entire province -a leading cause of asthma.

Canada also ranks towards the basement in terms of the efficient use of pesticide. Of the 28 countries in the OECD, only five use more pesticide per capita than Canada. Accurate Canadian trends are difficult to track we are one of the few countries in the OECD that does not track pesticide sales.

Stephen Harper, a self-described life-long sufferer of asthma, can appreciate the importance of moving quickly on improving Canadian air quality.

Perhaps the first order of business is to improve air quality monitoring. The CEC was unable to compare information on local air quality with relevant population data because we simply don’t keep such records.

We need mandatory emission standards on Canadian vehicles – something this country should have enacted years ago rather than continuing to coddle the auto industry with utterly ineffectual voluntary targets.

Government s need to invest in transport options other than continuing to pour tax dollars into infrastructure for the almighty auto. And of course, individuals really need to lay off the commuting alone in their cars every day.

We need to improve emissions from industrial polluters rather than continuing to tolerate having one of worst records for toxic emissions in the developed world.

Lastly, we need to focus on green energy and conservation so we can finally shut down the coal-fired dinosaurs that are turning our air blue.

Smog sucks. We can do something about it. Let’s get on with it.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

Ditching First Past the Post

Like passing a gallstone, the end of 12 years of Liberal rule had to happen sooner or later.

While this was a painful outcome for some, there is an undeniable elegance to our election results. In their wisdom, the people of Canada collectively decided for the second election in a row to send a minority government to Ottawa.

To those who equate electoral success with unfettered power, this might seem a disappointing outcome. Yet there is an underlying intelligence to what is happening in Canada.

Even more than the last parliament, the political survival of Stephen Harper’s minority government will depend on being flexible, accountable and willing to engage in good faith dialogue and compromise.

This is no accident. I believe it is clear evidence of an important evolution of our democracy – a process being led not by politicians but by the Canadian public.

The Canadians have grown weary of the excesses of absolute power and the childish squabbling of partisan politics. More and more, we expect our politicians to actually listen to each other and cooperate like adults.

The commitment by all leaders on election night to try and make this fractured parliament work was not just a nicety; it was an acknowledgement of a growing political imperative.

For the time being, the Canadian electorate managed again to fashion a silk purse from a sow’s ear. However, our antiqued and unfair “first past the post” voting system also produced the usual litany of democratic causalities.

According to Fair Vote Canada, the big losers in this week’s vote included:

- 500,000 voters in Alberta who did not vote conservative, yet elected no one.

- 400,000 urban Conservative voters who did not elect a single representative in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver.

- The more than 650,000 Green party voters who should have elected 12 MPs, and ended up wasting their votes yet again.

- NDP voters, who outnumbered Bloc supporters by one million, yet elected 22 fewer MPs.

- Women, whose representation dropped to less than 20% in our new parliament, with only 62 MPs .

Structural changes to our voting system are both needed and long overdue. Our “first past the post” system was long-in-the-tooth when we inherited it from the British 139 years ago. Canada remains one of three developed western nations still saddled with this electoral museum piece.

Strangely, some Canadians (and of course all politicians) still yearn for majority governments. To those puzzling souls, I can only suggest casting your mind back to the dark days of trough wallowing under the Mulroney Conservatives. Let’s also not forget the Versailles-like arrogance of the Chretien government and the abundant political rot that inevitably followed.

“Majority” governments are in fact a misnomer. Since 1921, Canada has had 15 “majority” governments of which only 4 garnered more than 50% of the popular vote. In all other cases over 50% of Canadians who bothered to vote, voted against whatever government enjoyed virtual dictatorial powers during their “majority” rule.

In contrast, virtually every government in Europe now uses some form of proportional representation, which typically results in representative, accountable and stable coalition governments as a matter of course.

These coalitions are not accidental shotgun weddings like the wary alliance between the Liberals and NDP in the last parliament, but are true coalition governments typically with a shared cabinet and caucus meetings.

Because different parties know that they may one day have to work together, the public debate tends to be more respectful than the embarrassing spectacles for which Ottawa has become infamous. Coalitions also mean that governments are more accountable to the people between elections – not just on voting day.

Countries that use proportional representation also have far better representation from women – up to 42% in Sweden. This system has also been shown to significantly increase voter participation – over 80% in countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and the Belgium.

In contrast, the turnout in this week’s election was a mere 65%. This is admittedly up from the dismal figure of 61% in the 2004 vote, the worst showing since 1898. But by global standards, our voter participation remains frankly, pathetic.

An electoral system such as “mixed member proportional” representation (MMP) would be a good fit for Canada because it provides for local representation while also ensuring that elected seats accurately reflect the popular vote.

Stephen Harper says he is serious about changing how things are done in Ottawa. Many Canadians want to believe him. Bringing in MMP would be a fitting and elegant legacy of this diverse parliament, and our evolving democracy.

Or perhaps he is just another politician...

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece was published in the Ottawa Citizen on Jan. 26.

Harper and the Environment: Be Afraid.

With the prospect of Prime Minister Stephen Harper looming large – perhaps with a Conservative majority– Canadians should be asking themselves what this would mean for our environment.

Lord knows there were many failings of the Liberal regime on environmental issues. However, a close look at the Conservative platform relating to the environment is truly alarming.

Enshrining property rights in the constitution.
This might sound fairly innocuous, but this one act would have enormous implications for the effective enforcement of environmental regulations throughout the country.

First of all, the constitution is the “prime directive” of government. It overrides all other federal, provincial, and municipal laws, and is not something to be tinkered with lightly.

The Conservative plan would put property rights on the same legal footing as human rights. The result could be demands for compensation whenever an environmental law prohibits a property owner from doing something (like putting toxic site in the middle of a community), or requires them to do something extra (like building subdivisions to a higher density to prevent urban sprawl).

This has already come to pass in the State of Oregon, where “Measure 37” voted property rights into the State constitution in 2004.

The Washington Post commented, “the property-rights law …is on the brink of wrecking Oregon's best-in-the-nation record of reining in sprawl, according to state officials and national planning experts." Put more bluntly, “Measure 37 blew up our land-use system," said Democrat Senator Charlie Ringo, from suburban Portland.

In Canada, such a measure would undermine the ability of all levels of government to encourage smart growth of sustainable cities – a major challenge of the 21st century. Since property rights would be in the constitution and protection of the environment is not, it could also effectively trump any environmental law in the country.

Nor is this intervention even needed. Our common law system of justice was primarily designed to protect private property, and it does a superb job of doing just that. What Canada needs instead is a constitutional guarantee of a clean environment.

Climate change
Harper has said that he will “address the issue [of climate change]…with a made-in-Canada plan, emphasizing new technologies, developed in concert with the provinces and in coordination with other major industrial countries.” He also told Radio Canada this month that the Kyoto protocol is “not the right approach” to combat climate change.

This coded message is music to the ears of oil executives everywhere, and is clearly the type of shameful retreat from mandatory emissions targets that has taken root south of the border.

The science behind climate change is clear and becoming more worrisome almost every day. Every additional delay will make future solutions more difficult.

Fiscal conservatives like Stephen Harper should understand the simple principle of living within our means. His apparent retreat on mandatory emission reductions would damn future generations of Canadians to deal with the environmental deficits we are recklessly racking up today, while wasting time looking for technological fixes to our oil addiction.

The management of resources.
The Conservative platform states that they will allow stronger involvement of the provinces in the management of natural resources. This is also not necessarily great news given the shoddy environmental records of many provincial governments.

Consider the plight of the critically endangered spotted owl in BC. There are only 23 of these birds left in the country – all in the province of British Columbia. The destruction of remaining old growth forests through industrial logging is the overwhelming reason for their decline.

The leading logger of remaining spotted owl habitat in BC? The British Columbia government, through their BC Timber Sales Program. Even companies such as International Forest Products have stopped logging owl habitat and therefore have a better record at protecting this imperiled species.

Enforcement and staffing
Lastly, consider the infamous environmental record of record of the Mike Harris government in Ontario. Canadians might well expect the type of widespread gutting of environmental staff and enforcement that Ontario became famous for in the 1990’s should the Conservatives be given free rein. Laws to protect the environment mean nothing unless there is the political will, backed up by the necessary resources, to enforce them.

Disasters such as Walkerton happened not so much because environmental laws were changed, but because enforcement staff were cut, and responsibility for environmental quality was devolved away from central governments without the required increase in local resources.

The environment may well become the defining issue of the 21st century. We need a bold and progressive vision to build a future Canada that will be able to meet these national and global challenges.

When you cast your vote on January 23, ask yourself: is a conservative majority government is really up to this important task?

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece was published on The Tyee on Jan. 20, 2006

Fishing Down the Food Web

The utter failure of Canadian fishing policy was laid bare last week by the plight of a very homely fish.

The onion-eye grenadier looks like it swam out of a Dr. Seuss book, lives at deeps up to 3,000 ft, and is about as far from desirable seafood as you can get. Its scales are so tough it can only be economically processed for its liver.

Yet researchers at Memorial University in Newfoundland recently reported in the prestigious journal Nature that populations of this obscure fish had declined in Canadian waters by an incredible 93.3% over the last 26 years.

Why would such an unpalatable fish living up to a kilometre underwater be so threatened?

Because we are fishing for it.

Demonstrating that it has learned exactly nothing from the infamous collapse of the cod stocks, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) continues to allow an unregulated fishery for onion-eyed grenadiers for the simple reason that in many areas there is virtually nothing left to fish for.

DFO is best known to many as the department that killed the cod, and it seems they will not allow dragger boats to sit idle until the ocean is truly empty.

“Draggers” are so named because they do exactly that, drag a weighted net across the bottom of the ocean and pull up dead whatever happens to end up inside.

Huge amounts of so-called “by-catch” fish and other marine life are hauled up in dragger nets and typically pitched over the side because they are caught accidentally or are simply inedible.

The onion-eye grenadier is primarily caught and kept as by-catch, but that in itself is indicative of a larger problem.

For instance, there is a “moratorium” on fishing for a related and critically endangered species of grenadier, however these fish continue to be hauled up dead in dragger nets. It is now estimated that both these grenadier species will disappear from Canadian waters in as little as 20 years.

The scientists at Memorial further lamented that the plundering of deep-sea ecosystems by dragger boats could lead to many other species being lost before they can even be identified.

Given the on-going pillage of the deep ocean, perhaps scientists should focus future research efforts on the freezer section of their local supermarket.

Hyperbole? Hardly.

A researcher at Dalhousie University was alarmed several years ago to find a species of deep-sea octopus unknown to science in the seafood section of his local Safeway.

Dragging a net that weighs several thousand kilograms across the ocean floor also has predictable effects on areas with sensitive bottom habitat. Unlike other more progressive jurisdictions such as Norway, the Canadian government continues to indiscriminately permit the use of dragger gear regardless of the ocean floor habitat.

In fact it was revealed in December 2005 that Canada worked behind the scenes to scuttle a UN ban on dragging on the high seas. This is in spite of a poll released this week by conservation groups showing that 78% of Canadians would support such a ban.

DFO is apparently worried that such a prohibition might undermine their ability to allow the continued scouring of the ocean floor within Canadian waters.

Canadians should not simply accept this on-going culture of incompetence within DFO. It is the important responsibility of the federal government to set and enforce clear conservation goals so that sustainable commercial fishing does not instead become fish mining.

While the collapse of the cod is the most notorious blunder of DFO, we should also not forget the decimation of the west coast wild salmon stocks, and the massive outbreaks of sea lice from net pen aquaculture.

The impressive list of Canadian fisheries disasters is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Fisheries ministers come and go but the upper bureaucracy of DFO - in some cases the same individuals that presided over the collapse of the cod fourteen years ago - remain stubbornly in place.

A thorough housecleaning of senior DFO bureaucracy is long overdue. Yet the response from our campaigning politicians is sadly lacking. Both the Liberals and Conservatives seem content to blame the state of offshore fish stocks on foreign interlopers – a favourite political straw man to distract attention away from ineptitude exhibited by both parties when they were in power.

Instead what the researchers at Memorial University are calling for is perhaps the only hope for the delicate deep-sea ecosystems: marine protected areas that would prohibit the relentless scouring of the ocean floor by dragger nets, while there still fish stocks left to save.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece ran in the National Post on January 19, 2006

Corporate Canada's change of heart on global warming

Better late than never. Like St. Paul seeing light on the road to Damascus, Canada’s business leaders last week demanded tough action from the federal government on dealing with climate change.

"The world must act urgently to stabilize the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and minimize the global impacts of climate change", proclaimed a letter to Prime Minister Martin from such Canadian corporate giants as Alcan, Bombardier, Falconbridge, and Power Corp.

This conspicuous corporate flip-flop in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal is a welcome change from previous foot dragging from the business community.

Just three years ago the “Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions”, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and 40 other business groups began an on-line petition to the Prime Minister opposing the ratification of the Kyoto protocol.

The corporate epiphany last week may simply be a realpolitik admission that action on climate change is inevitable and it is more seemly to catch up to the bandwagon before it gets too far down the road.

However, it might also be a genuine recognition that climate change menaces the entire world, including the business community, their families and their children.

Whatever the reason, this latest development now only leaves one significant interest group that needs to demonstrate their commitment to dealing with climate change: the federal government.

Canada has the ignoble distinction on ranking dead last in the G8 in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That shoddy record may be difficult for Paul Martin to gloss over as he hosts the United Nations in Montreal, where our filthy linen will be on display for all the world to see.

Canada has pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions by 6% below 1990 level by 2012. They have instead risen by 24%. Ottawa spent over $3 billion of taxpayer’s dollars on various voluntary compliance programs to achieve this negative result.

One reason for our lack of progress is that Canadian government is both sucking and blowing on fossil fuel consumption.

While publicly proclaiming the urgent need to reduce emissions, Ottawa shovels $1.4 billion of your tax dollars annually to the oil and gas industry. This is much more than current government support for sustainable energy technologies that will no doubt become the cornerstone of our future economy.

It is impossible for the Canadian economy to move in a progressive direction when Ottawa intervenes in the marketplace with such antiquated, expensive, and perverse subsidies.

Meanwhile other governments around the world are seeing Kyoto as an opportunity to become global leaders in emerging energy technologies. The UK for instance has already managed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 15% below 1990, while their economy grew by 36%.

Germany has become a world leader in wind-power generation – a rapidly growing sector now worth over $28 billion worldwide. Like other renewable energy sources, it produces no pollutants to cause smog and diseases such as childhood asthma. In Europe alone, the wind power industry employs more than 80,000 people.

Here in BC, the World Energy Council has estimated that our province has the greatest potential for wind power in the world, yet we have not built a single commercial wind turbine here. Country-wide, Canada currently produces less than 0.1% of its electricity from wind power compared with 20% in Denmark.

The sad irony is that climate change actually presents a fine opportunity to improve our economy and our quality of life. A recent study by the David Suzuki Foundation showed that investing in clean renewable energy could actually contribute $9 billion to Ontario’s economy by 2010, while creating 25,000 jobs new jobs.

With this newfound support from the business community, the Canadian government should now join the global movement towards sustainability. Improved emission standards for vehicles, clear and enforceable caps for industry, progressive tax reforms that encourage innovation and investment in emerging energy technologies are just some of the policy tools that already working elsewhere in the world.

Canada risks being left behind in this shifting world economy. A recent example is the wind turbine prominently installed on Toronto’s waterfront. There are currently no Canadian companies producing such technology and the city instead had to cut a cheque for $1.6 million to a Danish company that is no doubt doing a brisk business around the world.

What is driving this global transformation is a remarkable consensus that climate change is real, it is happening now and it is very dangerous. It is not just another political hot potato to be “managed”; it is a global emergency that will define this century.

The Canadian business community should be applauded for it’s recent change of heart regarding climate change. Now that the captains of industry have seen the light on the road to Damascus, there is a serious challenge for Mr. Martin. He no longer has any excuse for inaction.

Published on The Tyee, in Nov. 2005

Galileo in Kansas - "intelligent design" and the renaissance of ignorance

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)

Galileo might find the political mood in 21st century America strangely familiar.

The Renaissance astronomer was famously convicted of heresy by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for rest of his life. His crime? Maintaining that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Science seems similarly assailed 400 years later.

The evangelical Rev. Robertson suggested last week that the town of Dover, Pennsylvania might expect divine retribution for voting out their entire school board who supported the neo-medieval notion of “intelligent design”.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God… you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there,” Robertson said on his daily television show.

There is little doubt that America is a strange place, and Mr. Robertson is one of its weirder fixtures. He called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” He has also opined for the abolition of Halloween and the assassination of Hugo Chavez.

But is he fringe? Hardly. His TV show claims to have an audience of over one million world-wide, translated into over 70 languages. As far as US public opinion, a recent poll found that 53% of Americans believe that humans were created “exactly as the Bible describes". Lets not kid ourselves – the States is weird.

Last week, the state of Kansas adopted new science standards to not only allow the teaching of intelligent design as science, but to subtly redefine the word “science” in the classroom to potentially include the supernatural.

This throwback to the infamous Scopes Monkey trial was accomplished under the pretext of a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution - perhaps the most robust scientific theory in history. So offended were real scientists about this ruse that they declined to even make submissions to the kangaroo court in Kansas –perhaps to the delight of their opponents.

Duly elected school boards should of course be allowed to teach students whatever the hell they want, but they should not truss up intelligent design as science, let alone redefine the word to accommodate their own superstitions. High school is confusing enough.

This is just the latest example of how the troubling assault on rational thought in George Bush’s America is becoming ever more mainstream. There have been even more alarming examples where brute political force was used to in an attempt to shoehorn scientific reality into a predetermined worldview.

This summer, the Republican controlled congress launched a far-reaching inquiry into the careers of three prominent US climate scientists. In a bizarre throwback to days of McCarthy, these scientists were required to provide details on their entire careers dating back decades, including all publications, sources of funding, whereabouts of raw data, and computer source codes.

Their presumed transgression? Holding scientific opinions on climate change that were at odds with the uniquely “conservative” view that unlimited burning of fossil fuels poses no threat to the planet.

Career politicians demanding to scrutinize raw scientific data is like Paris Hilton demanding to take the controls of her Lear jet. It’s not just stupid, but dangerous.

This dubious investigation is being led by Joe Barton, chairman of the House of Representatives committee on energy and commerce, and a Texas Republican long associated with the fossil fuel lobby. In his eleven years in this position, Mr. Barton has the distinction of opposing every single piece of legislation designed to combat global climate change.

Even Republican Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the house science committee wrote to "express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation…to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them."

Controlling “truth” is of course an ancient political ploy favored by despots throughout history. Having the opportunity to objectively explore this beautiful world is a luxury that has not always been possible, or prudent.

Which brings us back to Galileo. The father of astronomy and icon of the Renaissance was also a devout Catholic. Sacrifices by him and others like him allowed rational thought and spiritual belief to peacefully coexist for over 400 years - for perhaps the first time in human history,

Is the US taking a detour towards the Dark Ages? Lets hope the Renaissance does not have to be fought for all over again.

Mitch Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

Hurricanes, oil and the politics of denial

Slightly more than halfway through the 2005 hurricane season and the US National Hurricane Center is already running out of letters in the alphabet.

The latest is Hurricane Rita, the third most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean with winds of over 280 km/hr, currently bearing down on the beleaguered Gulf Coast. This, even while the gruesome accounting of Katrina’s deadly wrath is still being itemized.

The obvious question is: what the hell is going on with our climate?

Given what we know about hurricanes and climate change, it looks like we could be in for nasty weather.

Simply put, hurricanes are heat engines. When tropical ocean temperatures heat up due to human induced climate change, hurricanes have more fuel and can become much more powerful. Ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are now the second highest on record.

Professor Kerry Emmanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported in the journal Nature in August that warmer oceans worldwide are making devastating storms such as Katrina and Rita more likely, by making hurricanes on average more powerful and longer lasting. He found that the destructive power of Hurricanes worldwide had increased by 70% in the last 30 years.

Another paper was published this month in the prestigious journal Science, backing up Emmanuel’s disturbing findings. These researchers found that the number of deadly Category 4 and 5 storms worldwide has almost doubled in the last 35 years.

This is no act of God. The authors of both these papers attributed this disturbing trend at least in part to human-induced climate change.

Professor Emmanuel states that “ future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential, and taking into account an increasing coastal population a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty first century .”

Imagining hurricanes becoming more powerful is like imaging Don Cherry with a louder wardrobe. Even an average sized hurricane packs 200 times more energy than the electrical generating capacity of the entire planet.

While this cold statistic is hard to imagine, the physical evidence of that massive power sadly is not.

The city of Biloxi lay directly in the wake of Katrina and was almost wiped off the map. In one neighborhood virtually every building was entirely gone, swept away by a 20 metre wall of water and winds in excess of 250 km/hr.

The emerging science raises an obvious point: our addiction to fossil fuels is making future disasters like Katrina more likely. Yet President Bush commented this summer with no sense of irony that he chose not to sign the Kyoto protocol because if would have “wrecked the economy”.

It is hard to imagine that the unprecedented destruction of hurricanes like Katrina is a bargain in the eyes of the President. This is already the most expensive disaster in US history – with up $35 billion in insured property losses.

Estimates of total economic losses from Katrina are as high as $300 billion - as much as the combined US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last four years, with fully 400,000 lost jobs. If our best science is correct, we can expect more such expensive and deadly calamities in the future.

While the US administration continues to believe that we cannot afford to deal seriously with climate change, the simple fact is that we cannot afford not to.

In the same way that initial Katrina relief efforts were woefully inadequate, the US government’s response to the looming crisis of climate change is similarly meager. The US government spends less than $5 billion annually on alternative fuel research – less than 2% of what Katrina might ultimately cost.

Canada is arguably faring even worse. Of all of the G7 nations, Canada ranks dead last in reducing our emissions. Ottawa has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. They have instead increased by 20%.

The bottom line is that there is no free lunch. Oil has been remarkably lucrative source of cheap energy for a long time but we are beginning to see some of the externalized costs of our massive consumption.

The bright side - if there is one - is that Mother Nature is trying to tell us something very important. We have an opportunity to both learn and act. Weaning ourselves off our oil addiction will have to happen sooner or later. Further delay it is only going to cause this inevitable transition to be more expensive, and ultimately more tragic.

While no single storm can be attributed to climate change, Katrina and Rita have an important message for us. We ignore that message at our peril.

Will 2005 be remembered as the year of the hurricane? Actually, that was last year…

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. (Published in the Toronto Star, September 2005)

Africa and the hypocrisy of climate change

Want to help Africa? Stop driving your car. That may be unwelcome news to those who burned through a tank driving to the Live 8 gig, but the simple truth is that the fate of Africa depends as much on dealing with global warming as it does with increased aid.

The recent report “Africa: Up in Smoke?” co-authoured by Oxfam with a preface from Archbishop Desmond Tutu makes that very point, and details the many reasons with the world’s poorest continent is also the most threatened by the impacts of human induced climate change.

Fourteen countries in Africa already endure devastating water shortages. This number is expected to increase to twenty-five by 2030. Recent research shows that global warming will reduce overall rainfall in southern Africa 10% by 2050.

Small-scale farming produces most of the food in Africa. It also provides employment for 70% of the working people. Global climate change will dangerously undermine the ability of Africans to feed and support themselves by making these droughts far more likely.

“In our models, the Indian Ocean shows very clear and dramatic warming into the future, which means more and more drought for southern Africa,” said Dr. James W. Hurrell, author of a recent study by the US-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Dr. Richard Washington, of Oxford University is somewhat more blunt: “When the rains fail, people die.” The last major drought in southern Africa in 2002 left over 14 million people in need of direct food aid.

African coastal areas are also at risk from extreme weather and rising sea levels. We can expect more frequent disasters like Mozambique’s devastating floods of February 2000, which affected the livelihoods of 1.5 million people and cost $550 million in reconstruction and emergency relief.

It is no small irony that human induced climate change is as much of an imposition on the developing world as oppressive economic policies of the World Bank and the IMF.

The average American produces sixty five times as much carbon dioxide per capita as someone who lives in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, between 1980 and 2001, Africa was one of very few areas of the world to experience a decline in per capita carbon dioxide emissions – not because of conservation efforts but due to increasing poverty.

Incredibly, the developed world actually provides far more aid to their domestic fossil fuel industries than to impoverished Africa. In the late 1990’s, rich countries subsidized their domestic, fossil-fuel industries to the tune of $73 billion per year.

In contrast, the recent debt relief program announced with great fanfare will amount to only about $1.5 billion per year shared between eighteen debtor countries.

The plight of Africa is ostensibly a top priority in the up coming G8 meeting. So what are the leading economies of the world pledging to collectively do to halt climate change? The short answer is absolutely nothing.

A draft communiqué leaked last week for the upcoming G8 meeting in Gleneagles Scotland speaks volumes. The US is apparently seeking to remove even such milquetoast statements as: “Our world is warming", "The problem is urgent", “The increase is due in large part to human activity", and most tellingly, "The world's developed economies have a responsibility to show leadership".

Not content with merely doing nothing about climate change, the most powerful nations on earth also appear intent on saying nothing as well. In light of the very public hand wringing about the plight of beleaguered Africans, this collective cowardice truly explores the upper stratosphere of hypocrisy.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said eloquently in the preface to this report, “The richest countries of the world, as represented by the G8, have a responsibility to help the poorest. This is not just charity, but a moral obligation.”

We need to hear those words and act on them. This means debt relief, increased aid and fair trade practices. Just as importantly, it means dealing with the massive and looming crisis facing the entire planet and Africa in particular resulting from our addiction to oil.

The West needs to help Africa to leapfrog “dirty development” by directing new investment to renewable sources of energy, and removing obstacles to technology transfer. These renewable energy sources also have added benefits for human health by reducing air pollution, and the need to cut local forests for fuel.

There is also an urgent need to provide directed aid to small-scale farmers that will allow them to adapt to some degree of climate change that is now inevitable.

And finally, the developed world needs to drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption. Want to help Africa? Get out of your car.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.

Cancer and Chemicals

Cancer. There is scarcely one of us that have not been touched in someway by this dreadful disease. In Canada, it is now projected to afflict one in every 2.2 men and one in every 2.6 women in their lifetime. In the 1930’s, those numbers were less that one in ten. What’s happening? Why are we now seeing what many are calling a “cancer epidemic”?

Some would suggest that we are simply an aging population and cancer is a disease of the old. Not true. Recent statistics show that the net incidence rate of cancer has increased 25% for males 20% for females from 1974 to 2005 - after correcting for the effects of aging.

Children are increasingly the victims. Researchers in the UK have shown that certain childhood cancers such as leukemia and brain cancer have increased by over one third since the 1950’s.

In Canada, hundreds of millions of dollars are raised and spent for cancer research and treatment. It has become a shared Canadian value to run, wear ribbons, and donate money - all towards mitigating cancer.

The elephant in the room however is the contribution of environmental toxins, and whether many of the cancers striking Canadians can be avoided rather than simply managed.

The World Health Organization estimates that fully one quarter of cancers worldwide are caused by occupational and environmental factors other than smoking. You don’t have to look far for some potential chemical culprits.

There are over 85,000 chemicals that are currently licenced for use in North America. Less than half have ever been tested for human health risk, and even fewer for potential environmental impacts.

The US Centers For Disease Control and Prevention recently turned their attention towards pollution detection – not in the environment, but within the human body. Their study in 2002 found the presence of 81 different toxic chemicals, including PCBs, benzene and other carcinogens in their sampling of 2500 people tested.

It is somewhat of a no-brainer that reducing exposure to known carcinogens will reduce the risk of developing cancer. Surprisingly, this simple logic seems to have been lost on our federal government.

Many chemicals that are scientifically demonstrated carcinogens or otherwise toxic are freely used in Canada here without any legal obligation to even identify them on the label. Some of these same chemicals are entirely banned elsewhere. A trip to your local supermarket reveals a small sample of these hidden poisons:

- Mothballs contain either naphthalene or paradichlorobenzene, both of which are carcinogenic. A recent U.S. study linked mothball use to an increased incidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

- Polycarbonate plastics used in food-grade plastic containers such as water bottles can leach Bisphenol A, an estrogen-mimicking chemical linked to a variety of disorders including hormone-related birth defects, learning disabilities, prostate cancer and neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

- Several leading perfumes, nail polishes and other cosmetic products sold in Canada contain the endocrine-disrupting phthalates DBP and DEHP, both of which have been banned for use in cosmetic products in European Union countries.

- Polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs are very commonly chemical fire retardants found in everything from foam mattresses to computer parts. They have similar properties to the now outlawed PCBs, and are known neurotoxins and hormone disrupters. The most dangerous forms are now banned in the European Union, though they remain completely legal here in Canada.

- Many leading brands of household laundry detergent contain trisodium nitrilotriacetate, another suspected carcinogen as well as an environmental pollutant.

Besides being a human tragedy, cancer and other chemical related disorders are also an enormous burden to our public health care system. It is estimated that cancer alone costs the country over $14 billion each year in treatment costs and lost productivity.

Chemicals that endanger human life also go down the drain and impact the environment. A somewhat gruesome example involved a dead orca that washed up south of Vancouver in 2000 that was so contaminated with persistent chemicals that the federal government considered shipping the carcass to the Swan Hills toxic waste facility for incineration.

Like orcas, we are perched at the top of the food chain and are becoming the unwitting receptacles of many of the chemicals designed to make our lives more convenient. Ballooning cancers rates are simply not worth whiter clothes or fewer moths.

Cancer must be fought on many fronts. Research and treatment are undeniably important but so is environmental cancer prevention. It is therefore shocking that our government is not moving faster to ban known and suspected carcinogens, and requiring mandatory “right to know” labeling so that Canadians can better protect themselves and their families.

Anything less is quite simply putting the interests of the chemical industry ahead of human life.

Mitchell Anderson is a board member of the Labour Environmental Allinace Society (www.leas.ca). This piece was published in the Toronto Star in June 2005.

In praise of whistleblowers

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Those words must ring particularly true for Allan Cutler, a career public servant who tried unsuccessfully to blow the whistle on early abuses in the sponsorship program over ten years ago.

Mr. Cutler was a public servant for over two decades. As a procurement manager for Public Works department in 1994, he objected to many irregularities he witnessed and eventually refused to sign his name to flurry of questionable contracts coming across his desk.

His then boss Chuck Guite was not amused. Soon after Mr. Cutler refused to cooperate, he found himself declared “surplus”. That’s bureau jargon for “you’re fired”. Thankfully for Cutler, he managed to be re-hired in another government job. The public however lost a fateful chance to shed some early disinfecting sunlight on the growing political rot.

Ten years later the full extent of abuses is being revealed to the general disgust of all Canadians, and may well lead to the downfall of the now moribund Liberal Party. It is no small irony that this scandal has rekindled interest in Quebec separatism.

Testifying this week at a Commons public accounts committee, Mr. Cutler must feel a certain amount of schadenfreude at the unraveling fortunes of his former bosses. However the larger question remains: how could he have been so easily silenced on an issue so explosive it now threatens to bring down the government?

Easy. Without meaningful legal protection as a whistleblower, he was a sitting duck for retribution from those who did not appreciate his desire to reveal the truth.

Despite all the gallons of media ink spilled on this issue, it is certainly not news that governments regularly abuse power and become corrupt. Cast your mind back to the sickening days of trough-wallowing under the Mulroney Conservatives when fully ten cabinet ministers were forced to resign in disgrace

All institutions run the risk of becoming decadent unless there are meaningful checks and balances to ensure ethical behavior. On that front, whistleblower protection for public servants is absolutely essential.

Scandals like sponsorship do not just happen. They are known by dozens of public employees who, like other Canadians, do not appreciate public institutions being abused. The sad lesson learned by Mr. Cutler and by many others is that unless you are willing to be fired, there is little recourse but to keep your mouth shut.

Incredibly in spite of all that has unfolded, very little has changed. After all the public crowing from Mr. Martin about accountability, and the $80 million likely to be spent on the Gomery Inquiry, Canada remains one of the few western democracies without meaningful legal protection for whistleblowers.

Ironically, the battered Liberals seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. Rather than embracing transparency as governing principle, they are trying to quietly pass a shamefully weak whistleblower bill that would have done nothing to prevent what is unfolding today.

For starters, the proposed bill would force whistleblowers to first exhaust internal department processes before being able to complain to a whistleblower agency - a delay that could literally take years.

This bill also fails to provide whistleblower protection for all government employees. Political staff such as ministerial assistants are on their own, quite likely because they are uniquely placed to expose political wrongdoing.

In 2003 the government also quietly passed the “Public Service Modernization Act” that among other things precludes whistleblowers from accessing the courts, as Health Canada whistleblowers successfully did in 1999 when their employer punished them for telling the truth.

This change was not accidental – nothing in law is. The government knows that if potential whistleblowers realize how limited their legal options are, they will likely choose to remain silent rather than speak out.

Canada needs whistleblower protection laws that we can be proud of. This requires nothing less than an independent public interest commissioner who reports directly to parliament. The courageous people that speak out in the public interest deserve at least that much.

If such protections been on the books years ago when Mr. Cutler was trying to do the right thing, recent events might have turned out very differently.

The country could have been spared the tawdry scandal being unearthed daily by Mr. Justice Gomery. The Liberal party might have avoided their looming exile into the political wilderness. And many political insiders might not be looking at a well-deserved trip to jail.

I suspect that even the most corrupt self-dealers behind the current scandal would have preferred that to the fate now unfolding before them.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. Published in the National Post, Arpil 2005