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

The real price of oil

Incensed about high price of gas? For a quick reality check, take a trip to the corner store and have a look at what liquids you can you buy for a dollar a litre. Milk? Nope. Bottled water? Not likely. Roofing tar? No way. For all the shrill indignation about rising fuel prices, the simple fact is that gas remains by far the most outrageously under-priced commodity in the world.

Consider the long journey that a litre of gas makes from far-away oil fields to your local filling station. Add to that the expensive and destructive military adventures needed to secure foreign oil supplies, and the human and political strife that inevitably follows. Let’s not forget climate change and the mounting externalized costs from increasingly weird and violent weather around the world. Why then should gas cost about half as much as bottled water?

One reason is “perverse” government subsidies that promote things we are actually trying to discourage, such as fossil fuel consumption. Ottawa shovels $5.9 billion of your tax dollars annually to the fossil fuel industry. This is much more than current government support for sustainable energy technologies that will no doubt become the cornerstone of our future economy.

In the absence of either political will or personal restraint, we should be grateful that expensive gas might save us from ourselves. For instance, cheap gas and the continuing oil orgy would only encourage governments to throw more money at the oil sector. This would imperil the future of the Canadian economy by hitching our wagon to the dying horse.

Likewise, there is little doubt that drivers would continue to endanger the future health of our planet by choosing vehicles that that actually get far worse mileage than the Model T did, for the simple reason that gasoline happens to be cheaper than water.

Artificially low gas prices have long stifled conservation efforts and alternative technologies, while fueling a boom in vehicles so grotesquely inefficient that I suspect our children will someday marvel at them in a museum.

SUVs are a fine example of the irrational behavior in the waning days of cheap oil. The only reason such gas-guzzlers are even legal is that technically they are considered “farm implements” under a well-exploited industry loophole. Rather than investing in innovative technologies that would produce more efficient cars, automakers have shrewdly invested in highly successful lobbying efforts in order to ensure that they don’t have to.

The recent accord between the federal government and car makers is a good case in point. After literally years of gentle coddling from the federal government, the automakers agreed to voluntary efficiency requirements that will actually allow emissions to rise by 18% between 1990 and 2010.

The last time Ottawa signed such a non-binding agreement in 1982, it failed completely to improve the average fuel efficiency of Canadian vehicles because there was no legal requirement to do so. It is noteworthy that governments possess a unique power called “regulation” that makes such protracted and fruitless negotiations unnecessary.

Not to fear, the market of Adam Smith will succeed where all else has failed. Higher fuel costs will foster much needed interest, innovation and investment in conservation and alternative technologies.

In fact they already have. After years of flat sales, hybrid vehicles are now taking off. There is now a waiting list several months long to buy a Toyota Prius anywhere in Canada. In Germany and the UK that have much more expensive gas, that wait is more like ten to twelve months. Ballooning gas prices have even caused some used hybrid cars to increase in value from the original selling price.

Oil companies may turn their massive resources to developing these clean energy alternatives rather than choosing to go down with their ship. A study by Shell International found that renewable sources could supply 50% of the worlds energy needs by 2050.

Rather than posing for photo-ops with the car industry, the federal government should seize the opportunity to make some long overdue policy changes. These include shifting gasoline tax revenue to fund public transit, increasing green infrastructure investment in cities, and expanding investment in renewable energy – the fastest growing energy sector in the world.

A side benefit from this vast global shift away from oil is the small matter of the fate of the planet. Aside from a few well-known pseudo-scientists shilling on behalf of big oil, virtually the entire scientific community is united in the knowledge that climate is real, it is happening right now and that it is very, very dangerous.

Still enraged about expense gas? Rather than griping about how much it costs to top up your SUV, consider instead the simple fact that you might well have been an idiot to buy such a vehicle in the first place.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver. (Published in the Toronto Star in April 2005)

God and Disneyworld

Does God have it in for Disney World? It would seem so. The last time three hurricanes hit Florida in one month was…well, never. With three more storms now swirling around in the Mid-Atlantic, the obvious question is: “what the hell is going on with our weather?”

Given what we know about climate change and hurricanes, it looks like we might be in for more of the same. 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.

Research from the US National Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that climate change may result in a 12% increase in hurricane intensity and a 28% increase in rainfall from future hurricanes. The recent catastrophes in the Caribbean appear consistent with these scientific projections. Perhaps the future is now.

The average number of intense (category 3 or higher) hurricanes in the south Atlantic is 2.5 per year. Halfway into the hurricane season we have already seen five such storms and counting. Devastation from storms this year and associated flooding now stretches from Venezuela to Pennsylvania

Besides the tragic loss of life, the sheer expense of all these hurricanes is adding up. The insured losses from Charlie, Frances and Ivan will collectively ring in at over $20 billion US. This is hardly pocket change, especially considering that insured losses are typically about half the actual property damage.

There is a certain irony in all these hurricanes pounding Florida. Governor Jeb Bush, like his brother in the White House, does not support the Kyoto Accord, and has urged the US government to “not sign or ratify any agreement that would result in serious harm to the US economy”. Yet Florida – the fourth most populous state in the union -- is a veritable theme park of the economic perils of climate change.

Ninety five percent of Florida’s 16 million people live on the coast – a bad place to be when sea levels are predicated to rise as much as two feet in the next fifty years. Some low-lying mangroves are predicted to retreat almost 20 kilometres miles inland. Coral reefs in Florida Keys are already being bleached bone white due to warming ocean temperatures. This is not good news for the Florida tourism industry, which is worth $47 billion US annually.

The 3 million seniors that live in Florida might be less inclined to do so when summer humidex-corrected temperatures rise by almost 14 degrees Celsius. Increasing incidence of tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and encephalitis will not sweeten the pot either. Florida Seniors contribute $70 billion to the state economy each year.

Increasingly destructive hurricanes are a central part of the climate change ensemble in store for the Sunshine State. The battering Florida has taken so far this year is a wake up call to the violent climate tempest that we are stirring up. One decent size hurricane packs a truly wrathful amount of power – over 200 times the collective electricity-generating capacity of the entire human race. The splintered buildings left in Ivan’s wake are a stark warning of what the future may hold.

The response from government officials to this looming global crisis has hardly been heroic. The Chair of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. blandly stated earlier this year: “I'm becoming more and more convinced...that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world.”

Smug words from compromised politicians will not help us. Such climate change deniers seem ever more offensive in light of the increasing environmental casualties around the world.

Here in Canada, the upcoming Throne Speech will reveal how Paul Martin intends to implement the now long-in-the-tooth Kyoto Accord. He has a real opportunity to take a much more visionary path than our neighbors to the south and begin to chart a truly sustainable course for Canada.

One thing is certain. If we and our elected political leaders choose to ignore climate change, we will have to answer to a higher power – an increasingly violent planet.

Does God hate Disney World? As always, it is difficult to figure out what is on God’s mind. Mother Nature, on the other hand – she might be trying to make a point.

Published in August 2004 in the National Post

In praise of expensive gas

As gas prices loft into the stratosphere, likely never to come down, we can expect much indignant outrage about how this will end the world as we know it. Let’s hope it will.

Our long addiction to cheap oil has cost us dearly in terms of health, global security, human rights and a changing climate. Given our lack of self-restraint, maybe we should see expensive gas is a godsend rather than a calamity.

First, let’s remember that fuel prices will likely continue to rise and there is nothing we can do about it. Public proclamations aside, OPEC members are quietly admitting that they have little excess production capacity. Major oil companies such as Shell have recently had to “revise” their reserve figures. Couple this with ballooning demand in China and it all adds up to a simple fact: we are finally running out of cheap oil.

Like a drunk on a bender, it may not be welcome news that our favorite liquid is in short supply. There will be a hangover no doubt, but we should think about the benefits of kicking the habit. We may realize that our addiction has cost us far more than we realized.

The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) estimates that provincial air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes 43 million sick days, 13,000 hospital visits, 9,800 hospital visits, and 1,900 premature deaths each year. Asthma, bronchitis, and congestive heart failure all are made worse by smog, estimated by the OMA to cost the provincial economy a staggering $12 billion each year and rising. Let’s not forget car crashes, which cost the Ontario economy $9.1 billion each year, and cause 1,000 deaths and almost 90,000 injuries.

The costs associated with climate change are also adding up. Climate related disasters rose by 10% between 2002 and 2003, totaling over $60 billion. The heat wave in Europe last summer killed an incredible 20,000 people. Swiss Re, one of the largest re-insurance companies in the world announced last month that it expects that weather disasters to climb to $150 billion per year in the next ten years. As much as we love our cars, as they say: there’s no free lunch.

And then there’s the ugly business of securing foreign oil supplies. An obvious case in point is the clumsy and tragic intervention in Iraq that now seems likely to sow the seeds of war and hatred for generations. Over 700 Americans have been killed and probably around 10,000 Iraqi civilians – the US is not counting. The monetary cost is a staggering $113 billion and counting.

Here at home many of our civil liberties are being sacrificed on the altar of the so-called “war on terror”. This nebulous conflict has sprouted directly from our dependence on foreign oil and is eroding many of the constitutional protections that define our free and open society.

Given the long list of externalized costs, a dollar a litre seems dangerously cheap for this popular poison. Our oil addiction has cost us dearly yet there seems very little hope that we can kick the habit on our own.

That point was made abundantly clear recently by US Senator James Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. At an international climate change conference last year he made a brazen statement typical of an addict in denial: “I'm becoming more and more convinced... that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world.”

Hmmm… Who to believe? The leading climate scientists in the world, or a senator from an oil-producing state in an election year?

Rising fuel prices will succeed where moral suasion has failed. In fact, they already have. Sales of the automotive monstrosity, the Hummer H2 have fallen 24% in the first four months of this year. I can think of no better index of an improving planet.

Higher costs will also foster much needed interest, innovation and investment in conservation and alternative technologies. Some oil companies may turn their massive resources to developing these clean energy alternatives rather than choosing to go down with their ship. A study by Shell International found that renewable sources could supply 50% of the worlds energy needs by 2050.

Such investment would be money well spent here in BC, which has been estimated by the World Energy Congress as having the greatest potential for wind power in the world. This ignored potential is particularly galling given that Canada currently produces less than 0.1% of its electricity from wind power compared with 20% in Denmark.

Our governments need to play an important role in this transformation by bringing in smart subsidies and progressive tax shifting that favour conservation and innovation, but there is a long way to go. The Canadian government still provides $5.9 billion in annual subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Such “perverse” subsidies contribute to our substance abuse problem by ensuring that Canada and the US have the lowest energy prices in the G8.

There are some obvious places to start our recovery. The federal government could shift gasoline tax revenue to public transit, increase green infrastructure investment in cities, and expand investment in renewable energy – the fastest growing source of energy in the world.

Many of these changes are detailed in an excellent report “Sustainability Within a Generation – A New Vision For Canada” produced recently by the David Suzuki Foundation. Courageous vision seems to be a commodity sorely lacking in Canadian politics. In lieu of their own ideas, our election bound politicians would do well to crib shamelessly from this fine document.

Canada has an opportunity to become a leader in alternative technologies that will sprout from the ashes of our oil economy. A cleaner and safer world awaits if we have to vision to embrace the future rather than cling to the past.

Change will come, and we should welcome it. When it comes to cheap oil, the developed world has been like a bad drunk on a bender. Thank God the booze is running out.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. Published in the Toronto Star, May 2004

Rex Murphy is Stupid

Perhaps the most disheartening part of being an “environmentalist” are times when otherwise intelligent and insightful people take contrary positions that can only be summed up by such dowdy words as “stupid”. Such garish vernacular could only enrage the likes of Rex Murphy, but he has it coming.

His piece of April 24th (“Praise the green god from whom all blessings flow”) is sadly typical of many that seem to hold to view that environmentalists are some kind of doomsday cult holed up in sanctimonious intellectual bunkers awaiting the end-times.

The view from our side of the fence is somewhat more mundane. Imagine yourself doing dishes at a loud but rather uninteresting party. Occasionally drunken revelers will stumble into the kitchen with more dishes, tell you how grateful they are you are doing righteous work on behalf of us all, get another beer from the fridge and head back to the dance floor.

Most of us so-called environmentalists are over worked, burned out, underpaid (if at all) and occasionally wondering why the hell we bother. What keeps us going is not some irrational religious belief that we are right and everyone else is wrong. It is the very rational and not particularly happy knowledge that to do nothing would be irresponsible, if not suicidal.

This is not opportunistic hyperbole; it is based on our best emerging knowledge to date. For instance, a study published last year in the prominent journal Science showed that global commercial fish stocks have declined 90% in the last 50 years. Another study published this January in Nature predicted that by 2050, we may lose 25% of all land plants and animals due to climate change. The list goes on. These are not well-compensated pseudo scientists shilling on behalf of industry, but leading researchers publishing in world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

It is clearly in our own best interests to show our one and only planet more respect. Yet we seem to continue to sass off to Mother Nature even as we are led by the hand towards the woodshed. The global ecosystem is already beginning to paddle our collective bottoms yet the response from our national governments is neither visionary nor courageous.

The Canadian government still indiscriminately licences destructive and wasteful fishing technology in spite of mounting scientific evidence that such gear-types are contributing to global fisheries collapse. The US government has chosen to opt out of the Kyoto Agreement and seems fully committed to an oil and gas-based economy. Consumers continue to purchase some of the most fuel inefficient vehicles ever made while hybrid cars are both available and affordable.

As for the seal hunt, this has been a favorite straw-man of anti-environmentalists for years. The seal hunt is an animal rights issue, not an environmental issue. Population estimates vary but harp seals are certainly in no immediate danger of extinction. It is much more illustrative to consider another high-profile issue from Mr. Murphy’s homeland: the tragic destruction of the once legendary cod stocks.

Cod were the backbone of the Newfoundland economy for generations and supported a 400 year-old sustainable fishery. In the short span of about 40 years, this almost unimaginably abundant resource was decimated by destructive new fishing technology and incompetent management by our federal government. Incredibly, Newfoundland cod stocks were quietly listed as an endangered species last year.

This ecological catastrophe was an economic and social disaster as well. Over 40,000 jobs were permanently lost, $4 billion dollars of federal aid money was spent, and thousands of Newfoundlanders were forced to leave their communities in search of work elsewhere - impoverishing a rich and unique culture.

When we kill the golden goose, it is ultimately ourselves we harm. We ignore such plain and tragic lessons at our peril.

Most environmentalists would dearly love to be doing something else. Being the harbingers of bad news is not particularly fun, nor rewarding. But rather than assail the messenger, consider instead that we might be trying to say something very important. Bad news can be an opportunity and perhaps we should see the increasing imperatives to change our lifestyle as an opportunity to increase our happiness, not just our affluence.

Rex, you are an otherwise insightful and intelligent commentator. But on this particular issue, it must be stated plainly: you are being stupid.

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

Why go to Mars?

Sometimes there’s nothing like a good long trip to make you realize that there is no place like home. Take Mars for instance. Having traveled over 450 million kilometers, the two rovers that NASA has sent there have sent back photos that seem in comparison the anything on earth, well… boring.

Not surprisingly, NASA seems more enthusiastic about these rather dreary vistas, using words like: “Amazing!” “Mind-blowing!” “Eye-popping!”

Eye-popping?? That’s a little much. The Martian rovers are working well and finding many interesting things but perhaps the biggest discovery they’ve made is how incredibly beautiful our own planet is in comparison to the lifeless monotony of Mars.

Let’s turn the situation around. Suppose some hypothetical Martians sent a lander to Earth. Assuming it didn’t get immediately trampled by a passing animal or human, virtually every single place it might alight it would find bristling with tenacious life– every drop in the ocean, every thimbleful of soil, every puff of air.

Life defines Earth and in many important ways, our planet seems to behave like a single organism. The regulation of atmospheric gases, global temperatures and ocean chemistry are all mediated in part by life, in impossibly complex ways that we are only beginning to understand. With climate change breathing down our necks, figuring out how this planet works is not merely an academic exercise.

So why all the fuss to go to Mars and look and look for life there, when we haven’t come close to cataloguing all the life on our own beautiful planet? It is currently estimated that we have identified as little as 1.5% of all the species on Earth. At the current pokey rate, we might finish documenting all the life here in about 500 years.

The problem is that species are vanishing on Earth at a disconcerting rate – and almost all before we even have a chance to identify them. The current rate of extinction due to human factors is about 1000 times above what is considered “normal” in the geologic record. Scientists now fear that this shocking loss of species may increase by another factor of ten as climate change kicks in, resulting in the loss of one quarter of all land plants and animals by 2050.

The irony is that we currently spending far more money exploring for life on other planets that we do on our own. The annual budget of NASA is over $15 billion – many times more than what we are spending looking for life in our own backyard.

Now word comes from President Bush that the US government is committing a further $12 billion towards eventually putting a man on Mars. Apart from the fact that this budget reallocation will result in the much loved Hubble Space Telescope falling from the sky, how much would that money accomplish here on Earth?

The All Species Foundation estimates that we could document all the life on the planet in as little as 25 years. Cost estimates for this mammoth task range up to a mere $2 billion per year – only slightly more than 10% of NASA’s annual budget.

We literally have no idea what we could find in the astounding profusion of life on Earth. Unknown insects, plants, fish, birds, mammals, literally hundreds of millions of them are waiting to be discovered. Apart from better knowing and loving our beautiful home, there are also very pragmatic reasons for wanting to have a better look around.

Fully one quarter of our prescription drugs are derived from just forty plants. Less than 1% of all flowering plants have been tested for pharmaceutical properties. Life being resourceful as it is, many bacteria have evolved resistance to our most popular antibiotics and there is an increasing need to find replacements. The best place by far to look for interesting and useful new compounds is the laboratory of life.

There is also a moral imperative. We are now living in the midst of the biggest global extinction since the end of the dinosaurs, and the reason quite frankly is us. For better or worse, we are in charge around here and the least we can do is itemize what is being lost before it is gone forever. Our children deserve at least that much.

We all love the excitement of exploring the unknown. If we want to take on a truly heroic task, let’s fully explore the marvel of life here on Earth. Completing the noble feat would a far greater accomplishment than putting a boot print on Mars. We don’t need to cast a covetous gaze at other planets – we may well be living on the most remarkable piece of real estate in the universe. Let’s have a look around.

Mitchell Anderson is freelance writer living in Vancouver. Published in the Globe and Mail, April, 2004.

The Pentagon and Greenpeace - in bed together at last

Those of us trying to raise the alarm on perils of climate change got some help from a very strange quarter recently: the Pentagon.

It seems the US military is worried about their increased workload when the global climate becomes unhinged. Last fall the Pentagon commissioned a secret report called “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security”, which lays out a possible scenario of rapid climate change, leading to widespread global war, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, mass starvation, and (incidentally) the end of Canada.

When this shocking document was leaked to the press last month, the largest war machine in the world inadvertently joined the ranks of Greenpeace in warning of the frightening consequences of ignoring our addiction to fossil fuels.

And nobody says doomsday quite like the Pentagon…

“Abrupt climate change is likely to stretch (the Earth’s ecological) carrying capacity well beyond its already precarious limits...aggressive wars are likely to be fought over food, water, and energy. Deaths from war as well as starvation and disease will decrease population size, which overtime, will re-balance with carrying capacity.”

In other words as the global ecosystem falls apart, several of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will saddle-up and go for a little ride.

Among other calamities, this remarkable document predicts that millions could die in wars over diminishing resources, much of Europe may have the climate of Siberia by 2020 and mega-droughts and famine could be widespread in large parts of Asia. Cities such as The Hague could be made uninhabitable as early as 2007 due to fierce storms that destroy coastal levees.

The authors further intone: “nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves…disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life”.

Canada with our abundant supply of water and energy would potentially be included within this fortress-America and cease to exist altogether. Rick Mercer would be amused to know that the demise of Canada garners one single line from the Pentagon: “the United States and Canada may become one, simplifying border controls.”

Thanks for letting us know.

The impetus for this study is the growing realization that climate change may happen far faster than we ever imagined. Conventional wisdom has been that it will be slow and if unpleasant, at least manageable. However there is an alternate and much more drastic scenario that climate change will instead happen very rapidly, and in parts of the world such as Europe, it will lead to rapid and catastrophic cooling.

Important parts of the Earth’s thermostat are only now becoming understood. For instance Northern Europe is the happy beneficiary of the Gulf Stream – an enormous ocean current that carries warm water north from the Caribbean and across the North Atlantic. Without it, Europe would have a climate much like Labrador, which shares the same latitude.

Recent troubling evidence from the geologic record shows that the Gulf Stream is not something we should take for granted. There have been episodes in the not-so-distant past where the forces driving this current crossed an unknown point of equilibrium and it simply stopped flowing within a matter of years. The fear now is that due to steady build-up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere we are now very close to the same the tipping point. Not good.

The optics of this doomsday scenario certainly raise some awkward contradictions for George Bush and his boss Dick Cheney. The White House has all but dismissed climate change as some kind of liberal hoax. Their attentions are instead largely focused on foreign policy adventures such as the military intervention in Iraq - seen by many as a thin-veiled effort to secure foreign oil reserves. Meanwhile the pinkos over at the Pentagon are warning that long-term consequences of burning fossil fuels could pose a far graver threat to national security than terrorism. No irony in any of that.

The good news from all this is sooner we are able to dismiss the specious arguments of climate change deniers, the quicker that we can start getting serious about doing something about it. Having the Pentagon lay out a worst case scenario will carry far more weight in some circles than having environmentalists say the same thing. At the end of the day, we are all in this together.

We can still carve out a very different future than the grim predictions of famine and war. Ending our addiction to fossil fuels will not be easy, but it won’t be all hard either. Smog, childhood asthma and gridlock are all something that we could do without. We humans are enormously resourceful and there seems nothing we can’t do if really want to. Now that both Greenpeace and the Pentagon agree on something, lets get on with it.

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