…

At today’s oil prices, every 10 percent increase in trip distance translates into a 4.5 percent increase in transport costs. The duration of a typical sea voyage from China to North America is four weeks. Including inland costs, shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to the U.S. eastern seaboard now costs $8,000. In 2000, when oil prices were $20 per barrel, it cost only $3,000 to ship the same container. But at $200 per barrel, it will soon cost $15,000 in transport costs to ship from China to the U.S. eastern seaboard.

So the same energy costs that are pummeling low-income and working-class Americans are also responsible for changes in global terms of trade that will make the economics of manufacturing in the United States much more favorable. Who wouldn’t want to make that trade: a good job in exchange for high gas prices?

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Maybe the crazy prices of oil and gas are good for something afterall? Kids it is time to start building things again. No more will we drown in “made in China” crap. Soon we can drown in our own crap instead. The need to consume won’t retreat, that is here to stay, ingrained in our wiring, and now that we will all have jobs making crap we will be able to buy all that much more of the crap we make. Hmmm, this was supposed to be a positive shift. At least the reduction in pollution from less transportation is an environmental positive.

Why risk our rivers to satisfy US energy hunger?

A few weeks ago I wrote an article saying, in essence, that proceeding with Site “C” to meet our power requirements was better than mucking up hundreds of smaller rivers and streams in the hands of rapacious private power groups. I blew it because I’d fallen for the Campbell government gup that it was either one or the other. It isn’t. In fact, B.C. has no immediate need for power and as our needs increase we will have plenty of time to meet our requirements.

Before I go on, the Campbell bunch has misled us all. On the need for power issue, they point to the amount of power imports during the year without telling you that sometimes that’s because Hydro can make a hell of a good deal by importing power from Alberta and selling it to great profit below the line; other times they import power because it is, at that moment, cheaper than the cost to make our own.

Look at it this way. Suppose you are a power company for a city and you create the power for $50 a unit and sell it at $75. You find out that the company who creates power for a neighbouring city will sell it to you for $40; you’d be a damned fool not to take it and make $10 while conserving your own power system.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » There is no doubt we are going to need more electricity in the very near future to compensate for the ridiculous price of gas and the seemingly limited supply of global oil resources, but destroying our rivers for this cause is asinine even with the cleanliness of hydroelectricity over oil. There must be another way to produce enough energy. Better get Bush out of there and start innovating, the last seven years has been a write-off. (And besides maybe our very wealthiest citizens, who would want to privatize BC Hydro, should not the government (ie. the people) control our most important resources and not some profit-hungry corporation that doesn’t care about our environment?)

Bill C51 is being debated in the House of Commons; it’s passed first reading. This Bill blatantly serves only the interest of the Pharmaceutical Companies. Our MP’s have been successfully lobbied by Big Pharma. Their spin doctors are telling us it is all for our protection…it’s good for us. Their clever arguments and justifications are, of course, lies. It’s about MONEY.

Via Bill C51;

• Big Pharma will control and exclusively sell natural remedies, vitamins, supplements and herbs which are currently public domain.
• Big Pharma will have no competition from natural products for their expensive, patented, pharmaceutical inventions.
• Many public domain health products will simply become unavailable by any legal means in Canada.
• Our health will suffer and our rights will be eroded; the cost of these everyday health products will certainly rise.
• Our homes can be searched without warrant by Federal agents if we are suspected of having “non-approved” remedies.
• We can be jailed for using “non-approved” products or for giving them to our children.

This will be Big Pharma’s equivalent to George Bush’s Patriot Act.

Visit: www.stopc51.com

LS » When push comes to shove in our own lives most of will side with science and thus the pharmaceutical industry but Mother Nature is also a chemist and to make her products illegal at the expense of our health and for the benefit of corporations is asinine.  If you are a Canadian you might want to look further into this issue.

With the days of indiscriminate fish consumption long gone, food writer Taras Grescoe explains how to eat seafood ethically. (Hint: Order mussels; skip shrimp.)

On the subject of seafood, I’d always been well intentioned but underinformed. It’s not that I didn’t care, didn’t hear the dispatches about avoiding Chilean sea bass or the antibiotics in shrimp, but I felt overwhelmed by a stream of investigative reports and gloomy forecasts. Overwhelmed is how a lot of us feel these days, as food-related crises proliferate in the news — potentially contaminated beef from sick cows, possibly toxic crop spraying in California, food riots in Haiti. The bleak onslaught can make eating ethically seem like a daunting, if not impossible, goal. It was with this sense of doom that I began Taras Grescoe’s “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.” But by the time I was done, I found myself holding court in the canned fish aisle explaining to fellow shoppers the difference between skipjack and albacore tuna.

Grescoe, a Canadian nonfiction writer and respected food and travel journalist, takes us on an international tour of controversial cuisines — shark fin soup in China, whale sashimi in Japan, monkfish tail in New York City — meanwhile offering an overview of the corrupt practices that have put the oceans (and our health) in danger. The portrait he paints is grim: oceanic dead zones that, because of pollution and overfishing, can no longer support organic life; salmon farms polluted by pesticides and disease; ruthless bottom trawlers with nets that can destroy entire ecosystems.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » The kind of information laid out in this book should become common cultural knowledge asap.

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

The earth is certainly not important enough to qualify for an ABC debate question. Who wears an Earth lapel pin? Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. Only bitter environmentalists cling to Earth Day. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS »  How about we call it “Save My @#$%ing Grandkids Day”?

Earth Hour could have been sold so much better.

Reading about this Saturday’s international Earth Hour in the Globe and Mail leads me to one conclusion: it’s time to invest in Saskatchewan prairie, because it’s bound to be waterfront.

Am I alone in thinking the environmental movement is doomed to fail because it just doesn’t understand that most people are not interested in donning hair-shirts for carbon reduction?

When the World Wildlife Fund asks us to turn out the lights for an hour on Sat., March 29 at 8 p.m. local time, what do they propose we do instead? Other than virtuously calculate the impact our actions will have on the collective carbon footprint, that is.

They suggest organizing our very own Earth Hour events with humiliation parties including karaoke or trivia games. Suffering-with-questions? What is this: the Environmental Inquisition?

Source : www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » An excellent idea, as we know, sex sells. The only problem is that the last thing this planet needs is a human population explosion, there is already going to be 9 billion of us within a hundred years or something and if we are all living in Saskatchewan I don’t know how we are going to feed everybody.

… But my attempt to maintain a skeptical stance melted away faster than a Greenland glacier when I took a closer look at the source of Greenie Watch’s contrarian take, a Web site called ICECAP run by a retired meteorologist named Joseph D’Aleo.

ICECAP is an acronym for International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, and it is as festering a hotbed for notorious climate change denialists as I have seen outside of JunkScience. On its home page, ICECAP prominently features articles by Christopher Monckton and D’Aleo, both of whom are closely associated with the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). SPPI, in turn, is an offshoot of the right-wing Frontiers of Freedom think tank. According to Wikipedia, SPPI was formerly named the Center for Science and Public Policy and was originally created with the help of a $100,000 donation from ExxonMobil.

It’s amazing, really. Pick a random datapoint of climate skepticism floating through the infosphere, and you can almost invariably connect the dots back to Exxon.

Source: www..salon.com/…

LS » You can read the first part of the article at the above link but it is the last 3 paragraphs that are most interesting. What is it that they say in cop shows, ‘always follow the money’?

We do it with beer. Why not vino?

I don’t usually have much difficulty in liquor stores; after all, the only product they sell is one of my favourite things. This time, though, I wanted to buy my red table wine in a refilled bottle — Bordeaux in a burgundy bottle, oh my! Sadly, my search left me dry.

It shouldn’t be so hard; after all, refilling bottles is a giant success story. Canadian beer bottles have a 97 per cent return rate and each is refilled 15-20 times in its lifetime. In Germany, Coca-Cola is sold in refillable plastic bottles. Prince Edward Island has required all carbonated beverages to be sold in refillable containers since 1984.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » Some good points and interesting tidbits, but mostly I like the style and tone, more writers should use humour even for serious subjects.

Earth, that is. Our energy expert cracks open the Democratic candidates’ proposals on global warming — and is impressed.

The most important call for the next president won’t come at 3 a.m., and it won’t involve military security.

The gravest threat to the American way of life is posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global warming threatens to put the Southwest into a permanent drought, raise sea levels by 6 or more inches a decade, generate hundreds of millions of environmental refugees at home and abroad, wipe out half the planet’s species, and increase average temperatures in the nation’s interior 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit. And these impacts would likely get steadily worse for hundreds of years or longer.

No enemy, foreign or domestic, poses a threat to us that is so devastating, so irreversible. Top climate scientists tell us the threat might be all but unstoppable if the nation and the world don’t take serious steps over the next decade to restrict GHG emissions. For all the urgent crises the next president has to deal with in the middle of the night, the most important calls he or she will have to make concern how to stop global warming.

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » Clinton or Obama, either way the really important question is can the Democrats take out the Republicans in the upcoming election. They have to win, we can’t let the oil-mongers continue to drive the bus in their pollution-spewing manner any longer.

What should we do with the carbon we produce when we burn fossil fuels? Some experts say we should fight climate change by putting the carbon back underground, whence it came.

In late January, a blue-ribbon panel recommended that Canadian governments spend $2-billion to begin deploying carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). This technology injects the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels into exhausted oil and gas fields or salty aquifers deep underground.

As is true of any large-scale energy technology, CCS carries costs and risks. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, the world’s leading expert body on these topics, has estimated that CCS’s costs are competitive with other leading ways to cut emissions and that its risks are small compared to those of related
industries, such as underground storage of natural gas. CCS is not a magic bullet. But many climate and energy experts think that it’s among humanity’s best tools to control carbon emissions.

Source: www.homerdixon.com/…

LS » Of course we would rather have technology that eliminates the creation of carbon but a multi-pronged approach is necessary while reality works to catch up to our ideas, so in the mean time, like it or not, we also have to rely on technology that can sequester carbon.

Alberta’s greed is a threat to Canada and the world.

As Canada’s premiers gather in Vancouver this coming Monday for the Council of the Federation meeting, the future of Canada is again at stake. But this time the threat isn’t Quebec nationalism so much as it’s global warming pollution from the Alberta tar sands.

And Western Canada’s traditional complaint is bang on: it’s Ottawa’s fault.

Stephen Harper refuses to show leadership and put hard caps on Canada’s global warming emissions — all so the tar sands can keep growing. No matter how much Canadians clamor to join the global fight against climate change, we are being held hostage by the tar sands.

The tar sands have quickly grown to become the most destructive project on Earth. Their greenhouse gas emissions are the main reason Canada’s emissions keep rising, the main reason we cannot live up to international agreements, the main reason we are becoming an international pariah on the most important issue facing humanity.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » Prime Minister Steve and pretty much everyone from the province of Alberta seem to be drunk on tar sands oil and it is getting gross. I think it might be time for an election …

Driven by quality, ingenuity and the goal of bringing the finest zero-emission vehicles to the market, the company combines global technology with a North American vision for the future of electric vehicles.

» www.zenncars.com

Rick Mercer tours our St. Jérome manufacturing facility and discovers Canada’s best kept secret: the all-electric ZENN!

» Watch on YouTube

LS » Finally! The future is beginning, see you later gasoline …

Fed up with politicians and the media, scientists are pleading to the world to wake up to the imminent threats of global warming.

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.

In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?

Source: www.salon.com/…

LS » If this kind of stuff is even half true I hope we get some political leaders with the cajones to do something significant by 2012. I am optimistic we can overcome droughts with desalination and stuff and the loss of 50% of the world’s species would be a brutally depressing fact to have to live with as a civilization but if the sea levels rise as they are expected to, that is going to f@#$ people up; most of us live on the coast, after all.

Trash is a choice. Time for ‘Cradle to Cradle’ design.

A month after Vancouver finally settled its garbage strike, people are breathing easier as their cans once again fill and miraculously empty every week.

Which means we’ve missed a huge opportunity here. We should still be asking the true question raised by all that smelly inconvenience:

Why do we have garbage in the first place?

In fact, there is no reason we have garbage — that is, no good reason. In fact, a world without garbage may be as easy as the red-faced emperor pulling on pants and a t-shirt.

It turns out that garbage is a choice — and not just in the “do you recycle” kind of way. Garbage is the product of how we have decided to produce things and run our society.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » How cool would that be if we could keep a lot of our consumptive behaviour and not have to turn old products into crap that we toss into a landfill after its utility is finished. There is no time like the present for a paradigm shift in the modus operandi of how we design products including the life-cycle of those products.

It swirls. It grows. It’s a massive, floating ‘garbage patch.’

Located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and measuring in at roughly twice the size of Texas, this elusive mass is home to hundreds of species of marine life and is constantly expanding. It has tripled in size since the middle of the 1990s and could grow tenfold in the next decade.

Although no official title has been given to the mass yet, a popular label thus far has been “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

As suggested by the name, the island is almost entirely comprises human-made trash. It currently weighs approximately 3.5 million tons with a concentration of 3.34 million pieces of garbage per square kilometer, 80 per cent of which is plastic.

Source: www.thetyee.ca/…

LS » If that isn’t a huge indication of how stupid, self-centered and plain gross and obnoxious our species can be then I don’t know what is. Do you think we could collect it in tanker ships and take all that plastic to the recycling depot?