testy? cranky? or is it mere rage?

Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

a very old and dear friend says to me after a silence of ... years, "I never dumped you. I just backed away from your rage." what can I respond to that? rage? I dunno ... hell! I can't remember back that far? what did I do? what did I say? I guess I could wish she had taken it up with me at the time but maybe she did? this Alzhiemer's thing is embraceable alright, in a Buddhist kinda' way, everything is ever and always new ... but it has a definite down side,

but respond or not - she is not the only one who turns away, God too!

made me cranky and I began giving up on capital 'G' god altogether, even invented a term 'de-morphing' for the recycling of it from 'God' to 'god' and thought about publishing this nonsense on Mondays instead of Sundays, didn't, discovered no good reason to use the word with a capital letter in public anyway unless you've got something to prove ... all quite silly, obviously just a nit-wit, easily captured and obsessed with the trivial, simple enough to be convinced by the argument of the Watchmaker, that turned out to be some kind of heresy, ok, I found other arguments, not a waste of time at all, highly entertaining, eventually turned to reasons instead of arguments, be that as it may - God has about gone silent on me, the voice is mostly gone, delivered over the shoulder, and not just the voice either, the vision is dimmer too, either sunset or I guess I've gone crazy!

(zen take him to ze headshrinker! which is what they do with Riff in West Side Story , what comes to mind is whoever it was that fell through the hole in the flag in Hair? Berger was it?)

but still (revealing vestigial issues), I'm irritated by certain ... facile criticisms? ... I read Christopher Hitchen's God Is Not Great recently, slagging the Bible seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I will post a few excerpts if I can get the scanner going again ... even my favourite, André Dahmer, seems to have stepped off the edge with his latest:

We don't need weapons, we can transform people with books.
What will change a man more? Pablo Neruda or a shot in the balls?
But maybe it's possible to castrate a man with a book ...
Read the Bible.

okokok, the kiddie diddling priests with a trail leading all the way down to the pope himself (he definitely does not get a capital 'P' anymore!), the refusal to endorse or distribute condoms, the priests who conspired in the Rwandan genocide, the obvious failure of the christian church to live up to any sort of christian ideal (nope, no capital on christian anymore either), nevermind 'live up to' they are not even trying (beyond a certain kind of biblical castration maybe :-) blah blah blah and moslems are no better blah blah blah ... but it sure enough adds up - is this what they made of their Jesus Christ? is this what they made of the Good Samaritan? wankers!

here's a theory for you: it has to be transcendence one way or the other, nothing else will do, some kind of physiological imperative in action maybe demanding it? who cares what? and if you transcend the flatland via Shakespeare ("love is not love which alters when it alteration finds") or fuzzy-logic concepts & paradigms and what-not makes no difference either, meditation, flagellation, or even drugs I suppose, you can get liminal somehow, God whispers something completely incomprehensible, not to mention at the very threshold of audibility, you get a flash or a flicker, probably just incipient retinal detachment but who can say? but it's yours and yours alone and the mavens of correctitude can hate you for it and life can go on, all good.

I did follow up on Peter Carey, the speech I mentioned closing the Sydney Writers' Festival, even his stumbling mumbling & choking is eloquent, and with a minimum of twisting & distortion you can make it fit in with transcendence, you do have to actually watch the video of course, and I looked at Wim Wenders' awful film Until the end of the world which Carey co-wrote, you can download it here if you want, Wenders is fascinated with computer transformations, not only in this film but Land of plenty as well, sorry Wim but that's just not transcendence :-)

in Carey's speech he mentions Stephen Haff, who brings himself, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Still Waters in a Storm, I think they need donations & I think they deserve 'em too :-)

of course I'm going to mention Dylan Thomas and quote his

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

the poem was written in 1951, a few years before his death, after Hiroshima & Nagasaki but before the days of JFK & hard rain, even so he was not quite looking extinction full in the face was he? it was still a metaphor wasn't it? it is still a metaphor isn't it?

so ... yeah ... rage. only one worse than me is probably, dunno ... James Inhofe? but what I do know is we missed a chance, does it really matter if it was through rage or forbearance? more like we didn't really want the chance, here, hum a few bars of this, Step It Up And Go,

I know a little girl she lives upstairs
Tryin' to make a livin' by puttin' on airs.

Front door shut, back door too,
Blinds pulled down, what'cha gonna do?

I am working on it ok? digging and delving, big head breech birth & forceps, mother badly broken up, head-shrinker says I was blamed for existing, undt zat iss where ze neurotic incontinence comes from yah! but maybe he exaggerates, maybe it is just ADD & smoking? and a bruised arm which still aches 65 years later, on the other hand I met a Brasilian kid whose collar-bone, clavícula, was broken by forceps about the same way, no one noticed until it was too late, his arm permanently gimped, and he has turned out ok so far, better than ok, and on the symmetry side maybe naming hurt and anger as two sides of a coin (which is a useful insight) needs to name guilt as the reeded edge ... work in progress,

I can't say it any better than this, "we must love one another or die."

it is very slow work, not speeded up by failing memory, not entirely stopped by it either though, slow but sort of steady, like writing on amphetamines :-)

and ... humm ... this Internet is maybe not the best place to do it I am wondering, you have to be all the time thinking about not saying too much, sure there is a kind of honesty about speaking in public, but there are two kinds (at least) of care and here, the negative kind tends to take over ...

and anyway you know, so what? rage you say? is it being acted out then? is that it? does it figure somewhere on the scale between Hiroshima, Auschwitz, & Rwanda? is it a transmogrification to Viking Berserker fury? to Werewolf? is murder being committed? is it the turning of of the humble mathematician in Straw Dogs? rape? assault? property damage? are windows being smashed? doors slammed? are feelings being hurt? is that it? are feelings being hurt in an ideological mangle where hurt feelings come from being intentionally misunderstood? or the 'intention' was imagined maybe? from being misunderstood period? from not being listened to because you are stupid or inarticulate or crazy? is that it?

wrath is one of the Seven Deadly alright & figures in the Four Horsemen and all'a that, and with good reason I suppose ... oh my ... but maybe there is comfort in the notion that in all this secular flatness courage is still a virtue, at least according to Charles Taylor, the odd person finds a way through, not an acceptable or comfortable way necessarily (thinking of Ivan Illich) but a way nonetheless, a Tao let's say ... look at this girl, Honey Barbara/Helen Jones, one boob covered in bees, standing like a cross, how crazy is that? The Vision Splendid, but crazy doesn't figgure into it really except maybe for the aforementioned mavens, the struggle takes place somewhere else entirely, could be somewhere like Bob's "hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin."

whatever was slouching towards Bethlehem in Yeats' poem has gotten there already and been born, has grown up and taken control of most of the reins and levers and switches of political power, Kurt Vonnegut's PPs, his Pathological Personalities are firmly in the driver's seat,

so, taking flac on rage? well, could I please have a little Yin with that Yang? to stir into my Wuji? ... it didn't have to be this way did it? there were insights, warnings and warnings and warnings starting well before I was born (Yeats' The Second Coming was published in 1920), so what if much later on science checked in to confirm? science is cold comfort eh? and ... yeah, it seems natural to be ... angry?

tell you what - at this point what utterly confuses me (all to fuck!) is that so few are raging?

Pierre Trudeau once dismissed tribalism as 'mere' and Yeats did the same with anarchy in this poem, I was younger then and took these judgements up too easily, it was a mistake, Trudeau was subtly wrong about tribalism and Yeats is subtly wrong about anarchy ... comes out in the details.


Postscript:
the distinguished Senators of the k-k-Canadian Senate, the silly dinosaurs, have let Bill C-311 fall through a crack so they could get away on vacation, doh?!

I posted a list of their names & email addresses here, send 'em a note and tell 'em they're FIRED!

a note on procedure that I was not aware of, best to send individual emails rather than a single one with a list of copies, apparently the latter method is open to spam detection, didn't know that ...



the billboard is by an outfit called Corporate Ethics International who have picked up Ed Stelmach's gauntlet with a campaign to Rethink Alberta, and from the looks of the pooh-poohs here and there in the press maybe they are having an effect, here's their video: Rethink Alberta ... this is interesting, the Financial Post published a factual descriptive piece (U.S. environmental group warns tourists to avoid Alberta) without value judgements, while the Gazette, the only English-language liberal paper left in Quebec published this whingeing shite,
 
but the knife cuts both ways, we have Andrew Nikiforuk indulging (it seems to me) his rage and not informing the policy/economic dabate much if at all, so shrill ... and like Naomi Klein he 'praises with faint damning' which is a veritable vaccine against meaningful thought on the issue, he's now got himself a position at Tyee I understand, another gaggle of incompetent west-coast leftards à la NORML Marijuana Lobby, don't get me wrong, I love hippies, love to see 'em on the street, strung out and murmuring "help the poor" as they hold out a cup, but as I have quoted here once or twice before, "I seen pretty people disappear like smoke" ...


a-and finally, I am pleased to discover some Canadian men with balls, compassion, integrity, and a modicum of fairness: Captain Robert Semrau, Munir A. Sheikh, and (maybe even) Judge Lieutenant-Colonel Louis-Vincent d'Auteuil, here's Munir's letter ... oops! it has since been explained to me that the good judge may have had little to do with it - it was a panel of five who determined the verdict, oh well, maybe d'Auteuil set the tone at least.

okokok, one more, here's a bit of a bio of Shirley Sherrod and here she is speaking truth to the NAACP, she says, "I might say a little bit more to the young people, it's good to have you all here," and she says a lot more too,

she may say "you know" too much and she may not have the big picture on 100% mortgages, she may even brag a bit on herself, she may even be one of those bourgeois mavens of correctitude I was talking about, but in this story there is a change for the better and a willingness to change more still and to tell it like you flat-out see it, and that's good, even through the "blood-dimmed tide" I can see that much,

be well.


(love those spirals!)

The Situation in Zinigistan:

You only think about shooting? Why not fuck some cunts.
Rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
I didn't say shoot and fuck cunts at the same time, you monster!



Appendices:
1. It’s all about love, art and schools of fish, Stephen Haff, April 21 2010.
2-1. U.S. environmental group warns tourists to avoid Alberta, John Shmuel, July 14 2010.
2-2. Oil patch reeling from unfair attacks, L. Ian MacDonald, July 18 2010.
2-3. Washington Post Paid Advertisement, Ed Stelmach, July 1 2010.
2-4. Canada: The Saudi Arabia of the North?, Andrew Nikiforuk, July 7 2010.
3. Media advisory: 2011 Census, Munir A. Sheikh, July 21 2010.
4. Shirley Sherrod shaped by father's slaying, Rhonda Cook & Marcus Garner, July 22 2010.


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It’s all about love, art and schools of fish, Stephen Haff, April 21 2010.

Innovative educator Stephen Haff gave the keynote at today’s Arts/Business/Education Consortium Awards, and it proved to be inspiring, ruthlessly honest and self-critical and beyond all expectation. Here’s a transcript:

“We get to listen” by Stephen Haff

Thank you for including me.

This speech is based on my personal experiences. Whenever I assert a universal truth, please take it with a grain of salt.

You may have seen a flock of birds, maybe starlings, thousands of them, flying wing-to-wing in breathtaking formations, folding in on themselves, then flowering, blossoming out, like a rose opening layer after layer; they swirl like a tornado, then spread into a long skinny string and alight along a power line. The flock is a being, a being that makes decisions without a leader. How do they know when to go this way or that way, up or down, spin or fly straight, land or take off?

You may also have seen a school of fish, say mackerel, doing the same kind of thing, forming, disbanding, reforming, hundreds of silver flashes moving swiftly as one, finding food, avoiding predators; no one’s crashing into anyone, and no one’s giving orders. How can this be?

My understanding is that the individual starling or mackerel responds to the movements of neighbors left, right, above, below and in front; according to their movements, a basic algorithm or function in the brain of the starling or mackerel processes what to do, and it’s instantaneous–there’s no real thinking going on, apart from the algorithm doing its work. They’re just BEING–in relation to their neighbors.

Over the years of my career as a teacher, in classrooms and rehearsals and now in the meetings of Still Waters in a Storm, I have preached compassion. When schools generated oppressive lists of rules and standards, and mind-crushing rubrics for grading everything children do, I threw those charts and lists in the garbage and asked young people to follow only one rule: LOVE EACH OTHER. I believe that if we respond to our neighbors according to this rule, everything’s going to be all right.

But what does it mean to love each other?

I don’t know.

I do think that part of love is respect–not in the typical school sense of obedience to institutional authority, but in the sense of making room for our neighbors to be who they are.

I also believe that trust is a big part of love. If we’re to become who we really are, our best beautiful self, we need to trust each other, to know that we’re allowed to be us.

In my experience, the single most important part of love is listening. Real listening, with patience, requires compassion, builds trust, and demonstrates respect.

The group I started two years ago in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn is called Still Waters in a Storm, and we operate on this algorithm: everyone hears everyone. That’s it. We meet, no more than 12 people at a given meeting, ages 6 to 52, with most in their teens and 20s, we eat pizza, and we write, about anything, in any style or genre, any number of words. Then, we take turns reading our writing out loud and listening to each other. After each reading, the group responds, not by judging or grading or liking or disliking, but by saying what we noticed, what we felt, what we related to, and by asking questions that encourage fullness and precision of expression. These responses say that we are listening with care.

We are practicing love.

During a recent meeting, a 16-year old girl passed me a note on a folded piece of paper. It said, “Can I call you Dad?”

Models for this group include Alcoholics Anonymous, Quaker meetings, the one-room schoolhouse, our pre-agricultural tribes, the wolf pack, group therapy and all-night conversations with good friends.

In public school classrooms, where I worked for 10 years, I would often go bananas trying to make students “listen.” Now, having left the big system, the New York Department of Education, I understand that this was a struggle because the school system values control, and the silence of students is evidence of their being under control. So of course the kids rebelled. It’s cruel and inhuman to put a group of highly social primates in an enclosed space, elbow to elbow, and forbid their free communication. It hurts them.

The title of this speech, “We get to listen,” quotes a statement by the youngest member of the group, 6-year old Angie. “We GET to listen.” What in school was oppression here is privilege. “We GET to listen.” We’re LUCKY.

Why lucky? Because if we think of ourselves as the Stone-Age beings we are when we’re born–we haven’t evolved since the Stone Age; same body, same brain–we’re wired for interdependent life in a village or extended tribe, and we naturally want and NEED to know what’s going on inside those around us, so that we can all be synchronized.

We need to need each other.

Children want to know what grown-ups are up to, and grown-ups have a real responsibility to guide and take care of the youngins. This is what we are, even now, despite the many separations that have unraveled our tribes.

It’s unnatural to segregate children by age, robbing them of the full range of perspectives in their village, as unnatural as it is to put away our elders in “homes.”

No wonder depression and other mental illnesses are rising and swallowing us like a dark tide. We’re separated from each other and from our own true nature.

Schools, offices, hospitals, nursing homes, iPods and television all keep us from being together and listening to each other. Even if we don’t know this consciously, our brain stem knows, our primal intuition knows, and we suffer.

Art, be it painting, music, writing, acting, photography, sculpture, dance or architecture, makes room for us to know each other. Our imaginations meet. And no matter how much personal pain we carry inside us for reference, compassion always requires an effort of imagination. Art trains us in imagining each other’s inner life. We get to listen, we get to see, we get to feel.

What does this have to do with learning?

In my personal experience, deep learning happens in the context of loving relationships.

My grandfather, who passed away at age 95 eight years ago, told me a story about love and learning. At age 10, in 1917, he had won a bamboo fishing pole in a small-town raffle, way up in the mountains of northern Idaho. His father told him he would need to wrap the pole in thread, an intricate procedure. His father also told him that he, my great-grandfather, needed to rewrap his own pole, too. They sat side-by-side on the porch and wound thread around bamboo. My grandfather added, at the end of the story, that, looking back, he suspected that his father didn’t really need to rewrap his own fishing pole.

Love isn’t something that happens to you, like falling asleep in a hammock on a lazy summer afternoon. It’s day labor. Every morning, before you’re ready, you wake up in the dark and you’re an immigrant, lining up for a day’s work, with no guarantee that the job will be there for you when the sun comes up.

A recent study of monkeys revealed that a given monkey will exhibit loyalty not necessarily to blood relatives but to those monkeys who reliably groom him or her. Reciprocal altruism is a powerful bond, and I think it’s the key to sustainable learning.

I say “sustainable” because I’ve put an awful lot of time and energy into curricula and lesson plans and the latest magical program with its mandatory buzz words–“accountable talk,” “text rich environment,” “literacy across the curriculum,” “activating schema,” “the new continuum,” and on and on–the third magical program in one year that will fix everything. But one condition abides: almost none of the students want to be in school, and those who do are often seeking refuge from unhealthy homes. It’s so familiar that it feels normal: kids. hate. school.

For years I made a spectacular effort in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Bushwick, at the infamous Bushwick High School, a grand old six-storey red brick tower that looks like a prison or an antiquated mental hospital, where students would set hallway bulletin boards on fire and once threw a dog out of a 5th floor window. On the way down, the dog struck a flag pole that was sticking out the side of the building, broke his back, then fell to his gut-spilling death on the sidewalk below.

In addition to my classroom teaching, I ran a collective called Real People Theater, or RPT, a group of neighborhood youth who rewrote Shakespeare, Milton and other classics, remixing the original text with Spanish and Street. The success, by every measure, was astonishing. Kids who otherwise refused to read or write were choosing to master Shakespeare. We received a lot of acclaim in the press and among renowned theater artists. The VILLAGE VOICE called us “Nothing less than a revolution,” and THE BROOKLYN RAIL said we were “One of the most respected theater collectives in New York City.” Graciela Daniele, a Broadway director and choreographer, thanked us for “bringing theater back to life.” We were even adopted as the official apprentice company of the Wooster Group. We traveled the world. Kids who had been barely literate attended elite colleges.

Then, all of us had to live the next day.

And the day after that.

Now, taking inventory of that group today, a few have started families, work decent jobs, or are continuing their formal education. One young woman has lost her mind, two young men are drug dealers, one is a coke addict who has beaten at least one woman after sex, and another young man is locked up for a couple of years for riding around with a loaded gun.

Ours was a story that Hollywood loves–the ghetto kids rise up, overcome, and are happy. Except, well, no.

I had several successive major breakdowns and fell into suicidal depression when the youngins I had given my heart to turned on me, tried to take over and call the shots. Having lived powerless their whole lives, they were drunk on all the praise and their own surging confidence, and acted according to the ethos of the street, which told them to gun for the big dog, which was me.

You could also just say that I had unrealistic expectations.

Following about three years of recuperation in my native Canada, including lots of cognitive therapy training and Taoist meditation, I needed to go back to Brooklyn and make things right somehow.

After several teaching jobs in Bronx and Brooklyn schools, I finally left the system, burning bridges as I just walked away, admitting that my being did not belong there, as an agent of control.

I started something then that is growing now, a group designed to accommodate comings and goings, to be patient, a voluntary one-room schoolhouse, a neighborhood within the neighborhood, where people listen to each other. It’s simple, deep and therapeutic, for all of us. The students say that this is what gets them through the week. But it’s not easy.

Power struggles rise up, usually as challenges to my authority–natural authority, based on experience and expertise, but authority nonetheless–challenges from young men who argue that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. They call this “freedom,” not considering how their unlimited freedom might affect the freedom of people around them, and that total license, like an asteroid heedless of what lies in its path, will collide with the planet of someone else’s desires or needs.

For humans who’ve been trained away from reciprocal love, there needs to be a retraining before they can fly like starlings or swim like mackerel, simultaneously free and together, making decisions collectively.

I guess that many kids are sick of being bossed around by teachers and parents, and they’re desperate to do as they wish. But that’s not freedom–although television advertising tells them that doing as they please is their birthright and even their patriotic duty–it’s not freedom any more than being “responsible” means doing your homework. Perhaps this is counter-intuitive, but I believe that real freedom is achieved by taking real responsibility for each other, that real freedom is a result of interdependence, of relationships, of love. I’ve kicked out three young men from the group already, for being narcissistic and having no conscience.

I used to take my 9th graders down the street every week to work with 1st graders; they would read and write stories together, and answer each other’s questions. Grumpy teenagers who wanted to be home in bed and balked at mentoring small children were visibly happy when they saw the little ones waving at them and smiling, as they, the teenagers, awkwardly entered a room whose furniture they had long outgrown. The little ones helped the big ones belong somewhere, be needed by a real person, set them free from a life of abstraction, free from segregation, free from a donkey’s burden of textbooks, free from competition with their peers, free from measurement, free from lovelessness.

Reminding myself daily to carry no agenda but love, I see my job as defending the sanctity of listening, against laziness and carelessness and a whole buncha things that fall under the heading of “B.S.,” and asking myself and my students to keep asking ourselves what it means to love each other. If we can keep the asking alive, petal after petal of the rose of our relationship opens. By caring for this flower, we make beauty, we make living art.

I believe that art is a human effort to re-enter paradise, to recreate universal understanding and universal interdependence. Artists are trying to get us back to the Garden, where the grace of being was installed in the gallery of nature, and everything was everything.

Maybe if we can see our relationships themselves as art, we might begin to treat each other with gratitude and reverence, begin to heal from the cutting of the umbilical cord that made us individuals and left us longing to be lost again in someone else, and begin to be not as lonely, after all.

The last words I leave to a student from my 9th grade English class at Bushwick High School eight years ago. She belonged to a gang called the Crips, so she wore all blue clothing and had her name tattooed on her neck in blue ink.

I had recently returned from visiting my 95-year old grandfather as he was dying in a San Francisco hospital, and I guess my grief was apparent.

The girl handed me a piece of paper folded in four, as it is here and now. All I want to say before reading it to you is, THIS is what I’m talking about:

“Dear Mr. Haff,

Please try to be happy because you are my happiness in school. Even though you always smiling I can see. I know what is like to lose someone. One day they there, then they not. My aunt comes back at night to bother me but it’s okay.

Love, Lydia
p.s. Eat more fruits!”

Thank you.



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FP Marketing: U.S. environmental group warns tourists to avoid Alberta, John Shmuel, July 14 2010.

Planning a trip to see pristine wildlife in Alberta this summer? Well, you should probably reconsider, according to an American environmental group.

San Francisco-based Corporate Ethics International launched a new ad campaign Wednesday, urging tourists to avoid the province due to the destructive oil sands.

The ad campaign features a minute-and-a-half long video that begins by showing images of Alberta’s landscapes and wildlife. It then becomes more sinister when the focus switches to scenes of oil-covered birds, massive tailing ponds and barren fields. The video concludes with the words, “Think of visiting Alberta? Think again.”

Corporate Ethics also has billboards going up as part of the campaign. They’ll be featured in American cities that produce a large number of tourists to Canada, including Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis. In two weeks, the campaign will expand to the U.K.

“There is another oil disaster going on in Alberta every day and as more Americans become aware of it we believe they’ll be less willing to support the province with their tourist dollars,” said Michael Marx, executive director of Corporate Ethics, in a statement.

The campaign will also have an aggressive online presence. Corporate Ethics has paid for Google sponsored links, and will feature ads prominently on travel websites. The online component of the campaign compares Alberta’s oil sands to BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, with the tagline: “Alberta: the Other Oil Disaster.”

This isn’t the first time Corporate Ethics has launched a large scale attack on the oil sands. Last year, the group was behind an ad calling for an Oscar to be given to director James Cameron for his movie, Avatar. The ad compared the plundering of the fictional planet in the film, Pandora, to the exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands.



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Oil patch reeling from unfair attacks, L. Ian MacDonald, July 18 2010.

Alberta is being slagged by anti-oilsands ads and criticized by eastern premiers and politicians

A San Francisco public advocacy group called Corporate Ethics International launched a video and billboard campaign to "rethink" visiting Alberta and Canada because of the "tarsands." Alberta and the oil industry have spent a decade rebranding the resource as the oilsands, precisely to avoid the suggestion of tar sticking on ducks.

"Think of visiting Canada?" the ad asks. "Think again."

Remember those ducks? Billboards are going up in several major markets with the headline: "Alberta: the Other Oil Disaster" over two images of birds soaked in oil. One bird image is captioned "Gulf Oil Spill Disaster," and the other is labelled "Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster."

So the oilsands, ominously labelled the tarsands, is compared to the worst environmental disaster in American history, which has for three months been spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, posing a major threat to the economy and environment of five states from Texas to Florida. And the companies extracting oil outof bitumeninFortMcMurray are compared to BP.

Everyone likes ducks. But more of them apparently die from flying into wind power turbines than from being soaked in tailing ponds in the oilsands.

Enough already, say Albertans. They are still shaking their heads at the performance of Quebec Premier Jean Charest, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Toronto Mayor David Miller, trashing the oilsands on the world stage at the Copenhagen conference on climate change last December.

Since then, Albertans have started pointing out that Ontario and Quebec are beneficiary provinces of equalization, paid for by four donor provinces led by Alberta. Cheap tuition at universities, private high schools half-funded by Quebec, $7-a-day child care and now, in-vitro fertilization treatments in public health care, are all partly supported by Alberta tax dollars. This is what happens when politicians play a short game for easy headlines, rather than the long game that serves everyone's interests.

And it wasn't a good day for Michael Ignatieff when the Liberal leader said he wouldn't permit trans-Pacific shipment of oil on tankers from the coast of northern British Columbia. The next time Iggy goes to China, they'll want to talk to him about that, because they'll buy as much product from the oilsands as Alberta is not shipping to the United States. In the oilpatch and pipeline industry, they're simply gob-smacked by the stupidity of Ignatieff being in favour of the oilsands on the one hand, but against building a northern pipeline and shipping it overseas on the other.

There's no doubt that there are significant environmental and reputational issues to be managed around the oilsands. But they also have to be kept in perspective. Canada produces two per cent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and the oilsands account for about five per cent of that. The problem is the visuals of oilsands production -smokestacks, water use, tailing ponds, and those darn birds.

But the economic benefits of the oilsands are compelling. As a paper by University of Calgary's Canada School of Energy and Environment points out: "The Canadian Energy Research Institute estimates that the oilsands industry alone will add three per cent to Canada's GDP during the period to 2020, 5.4-million person years of employment, 44 per cent of which will be outside Alberta."

Three per cent of GDP in today's terms is $50 billion a year, and with normal growth would come in at $75 billion in a decade's time.

Underlying all this is the importance of Canada's energy trade with the United States. Oil and gas are now by far Canada's largest export to the U.S. As David Mc-Laughlin and Bob Page of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy pointed out in a piece for Policy Options magazine last month, oil and gas exports to the U.S. in 2008 totalled nearly $70 billion in 2008, compared with $36 billion in auto exports.

In other words, energy exports from Alberta are now nearly twice the level of auto exports from Ontario.

But the other significant bullet point is that nearly half the industrial and employments of the oilsands go to manufacturers and suppliers in provinces like Ontario and Quebec. SNC-Lavalin, for instance, is a huge supplier of engineering services to the oilpatch, in the order of $1 billion a year.

Alberta and the energy industry both need to do a better job of telling this story, both in terms of the messenger and the message. But bottom line, what's good for Alberta is good for Canada.



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Washington Post Paid Advertisement, Ed Stelmach, July 1 2010.

A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar. A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.

Yesterday was Canada Day, and my province, along with the rest of our country, celebrated the 143rd anniversary of our nation. It serves as a reminder of our shared values and the bonds of friendship and co-operation we enjoy with the U.S. The Government of Alberta considers our friends to the south to be a strong ally, and sustaining this relationship is very important to Albertans.

It is with great interest that the province of Alberta has been following the development of the proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. Though the pipeline could carry oil from various sources in Canada and the U.S., a lot of the debate during the permitting process seems to be centered specifically on the transportation of oil from Alberta’s oil sands.

The oil sands have been developed because there is an ongoing demand for oil. We can all agree that alternative energy sources are part of the supply equation that will power our future. But until those alternatives are developed commercially, and readily available at a price consumers can afford, we still require oil and gas to power our everyday lives.

Continuing to develop Alberta’s oil sands has many tangible benefits to the U.S. The obvious benefit is that it provides the U.S. with access to a secure and reliable supply of energy. In 2009, Alberta was the largest supplier of crude to the U.S. When considered in the context of other leading suppliers of crude, including Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Angola and Algeria, the energy security benefits of oil from Alberta are clear.

Today’s economic and security realities make the U.S. the natural market for the majority of Alberta oil exports. Improved access via projects like the Keystone XL pipeline will benefit the U.S. economically and allow your country to continue to receive oil from a country whose environmental and social goals are similar to yours.

There are also economic benefits to Americans. As the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, oil purchased from Canada delivers far more economic benefits to the U.S. than oil purchased from overseas sources. As recently forecast by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, over the next five years, oil sands development will result in an additional 343,000 jobs in the U.S. and, over the next 15 years, an average annual increase in U.S. GDP of over $30 billion.

Allow me to clarify a few misconceptions around Alberta’s oil sands.

Alberta is — and continues to be — a safe, reliable and responsible energy producer. We stand virtually alone in North America with respect to the regulation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from large industrial facilities. Only in Alberta will you find mandatory GHG reporting requirements, legislation requiring mandatory GHG reductions, and a price on carbon emissions. We reinvest the carbon revenue into clean energy research and technology development, which one day can be used all over the world, including the United States.

Technological developments continue to reduce the carbon-intensity of the oil sands, while “conventional”
crudes are getting more carbon intensive. In fact, between 1990 and 2008, the oil sands industry has reduced average per barrel GHG emissions from production by 39 per cent. In the final analysis, total greenhouse gas emissions from all Alberta’s oil sands projects account for less than one-tenth of one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The most recent and comprehensive studies on the subject of oil sands-related GHG emissions have found that average oil sands lifecycle carbon intensity is comparable to numerous other U.S. crude sources, both domestically produced and imported. The Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ report Growth in the Canadian Oil Sands: Finding the New Balance concluded that the United States consumes crude oils with a wide range of lifecycle GHG emissions, some with emissions higher than those from the oil sands. The report also found that when measuring GHG emissions in a wells-to-wheels or lifecycle basis, total GHG emissions from oil sands are comparable to other imported and domestic crude oil sources used in the United States and are, in fact, superior to some of these sources.

Alberta has accomplished a lot through innovation and technology, but we recognize that much work still lies ahead. We want to make responsible energy choices, just as you do. I believe my province and your country are on the same team when it comes to responsible development, energy security and jobs. Let’s work together to develop a North American energy solution that is realistic and secure, now and into the future.

Ed Stelmach
Premier of the Province of Alberta



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Canada: The Saudi Arabia of the North?, Andrew Nikiforuk, July 7 2010.

Canada's road to becoming a petro-state is lined with lies, greed, and pollution.

Canada now suffers from an advanced state of “petromania,” a condition of rank moral dishonesty compounded by visions of oily grandeur.

When a nation becomes the number one supplier of petroleum to the United States as well as a gleeful addict of its associated trade revenue ($40 billion), it can’t do so without carbonizing its political and economic character.

According to Stanford political scientist Terry Karl any country that relies on “an unsustainable development trajectory” for oil routinely degenerates into a petro-state defined by cancerous networks of complicity between public sector and private oil companies. We’re now living that peril with the tar sands.

The resource curse, a topic verboten in the national media, probably explains why Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice and the Alberta government, a northern Saudi kingdom, have become gleeful marketing representatives for the world’s riskiest energy project.

In recent speeches and newspaper advertisements that could have been written by the Canadian Association for Petroleum Producers, Canada’s oil bullies declare that the tar sands are safe, secure and responsible. The claims might even cause BP's Tony Hayward to blanche.

For starters the resource's dirty character mocks such open deceit. Chemical engineers typically describe bitumen as a “difficult” and “extreme” hydrocarbon trapped in sand and clay that requires brute force to extract. It is not oil floating on sand. Unlike conventional crude, bitumen is so damn impure and carbon-rich that an ugly processing system vomits up a mountain of five million tonnes of petroleum coke a year or more than the coal industry. Bitumen reminds us that the era of cheap oil is over and that business as usual is a mirage.

Next come the bogus safety claims. Approximately six billion barrels of toxic mining waste now sit in more than 20 dams covering 170 square kilometers of forest along the Athabasca River. That’s enough waste to fill a 10-by-10 metre canal stretching across the Canada-U.S. border from sea to sea. Just to separate the water from this sludge will cost between $20 to $40 billion dollars. Reclamation of the dams will cost billions more. A breach in one of these insecure impoundments by an earthquake, extreme weather, or engineering failure would have catastrophic Deepwater Horizon consequences downstream. Does this sound safe?

Security is another myth. How can a resource that costs between $60-80 a barrel to produce, or twenty times more than conventional oil, engender anything but insecurity in an economy? In addition it takes one barrel of energy to extract five barrels of bitumen while conventional oil enjoys profitable returns of one to 20. Civilizations that increasingly rely on complicated and capital draining projects that offer diminishing energy returns have invested in the petroleum equivalent of toxic derivatives. They will not remain civilized for long.

Perhaps the most preposterous lie is that Alberta and Canada magically belong to an exclusive club known as the “responsible energy producer.” In fact the whole saga of rapid tar sands development reeks of BP-style irresponsibility. The project has become a carbon-making nation within Canada and will soon foul the atmosphere with more ocean acidifying emissions than Canada’s transportation sector or industrial European nations with 10 million people. When a doctor raises concerns about documented increases in rare cancers downstream from the bitumen complex, Health Canada attacks him. When scientists raise concerns about rising levels of pollution on the Athabasca River (a slow spill of 5,000 barrels of bitumen every year), Alberta Environment calls them liars. And just how responsible is it for Alberta’s Environment Minister Rob Renner to tour the United States and belittle low carbon fuel standards?

By their very crude nature, petro-states invariably come to represent and defend the devil’s excrement because it fills government coffers with easy loot. In the process these same governments actively disenfranchise their citizens.

Until Canada recognizes and addresses the peril of the resource curse, we will lie to U.S. consumers and to ourselves. But by calling what is dirty “clean”; what is difficult “safe”; and what is extreme “secure,” we have already imperiled the future of our children.



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Media advisory: 2011 Census, Munir A. Sheikh, July 21 2010.

OTTAWA — There has been considerable discussion in the media regarding the 2011 Census of Population.

There has also been commentary on the advice that Statistics Canada and I gave the government on this subject.

I cannot reveal and comment on this advice because this information is protected under the law. However, the government can make this information public if it so wishes.

I have always honoured my oath and responsibilities as a public servant as well as those specific to the Statistics Act.

I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.

It can not.

Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister.

I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity of serving him as the Chief Statistician of Canada, heading an agency that is a symbol of pride for our country.

To you, the men and women of Statistics Canada – thank you for giving me your full support and your dedication in serving Canadians. Without your contribution, day in and day out, in producing data of the highest quality, Canada would not have this institution that is our pride.

I also want to thank Canadians. We do remember, every single day, that it is because of you providing us with your information, we can function as a statistical agency. I am attaching an earlier message that I sent to Canadians in this regard.

In closing, I wish the best to my successor. I promise not to comment on how he/she should do the job. I do sincerely hope that my successor’s professionalism will help run this great organization while defending its reputation.

Munir A. Sheikh.


Message from the Chief Statistician of Canada [the 'earlier message'he refers to above]

At Statistics Canada, our goal is to provide the best and most reliable information possible on our society, our economy, our environment and other dimensions of our country.

We follow the highest technical standards in collecting information from you as individuals, businesses and institutions and in reporting it back to you. In addition, we work neutrally and objectively, without interference or influence from any groups or individuals. Finally, we place a very high value on the confidentiality of the information we collect and on the privacy of those who provide it. For these reasons, we are rated as the best statistical agency in the world.

Our data serve a very useful role in the functioning of our country, allowing Canadians to make informed decisions and governments of all levels to develop appropriate policies. We take this role very seriously indeed.

As always, our focus at Statistics Canada is on data quality—which includes key features such as relevance, accuracy, timeliness, accessibility, interpretability and coherence.

And, finally, I take this opportunity to thank all those who give us their data. It is because of them that we can produce statistics that benefit all Canadians.

Munir A. Sheikh
Chief Statistician of Canada



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Shirley Sherrod shaped by father's slaying, Rhonda Cook & Marcus Garner, July 22 2010.

Shirley Sherrod’s 17th year probably did more to mold her personality and set her on a path that traveled through the dangerous, volatile world of race.

That year, 1965, her father was shot and killed by a white man in a dispute over cows, the family says.

That year, she was one of the first black students to integrate the high school in Baker County in rural southwest Georgia.

That year, she decided to become involved in the civil rights movement in that area of the state.

And in later years, like some of the farmers she helped when she worked for a non-profit, Sherrod and her husband lost a group farm to bankruptcy.

Now the former Georgia director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture is fending off allegations that she is racist because of something she said during a speech before the NAACP last spring. It was a few sentences in a story she told about an epiphany that changed her way of thinking two dozen years ago; the problems of farmers were not defined as black vs. white but “poor vs. those who have.”

She was asked to resign her job with the Obama administration earlier this week when a conservative blogger posted some of her comments. Her boss, the secretary of agriculture, said he would look at the situation again once complaints were raised that those sentences needed to be considered in the context of her 43-minute talk to an NAACP meeting in Douglas, in far south Georgia. Wednesday afternoon, the White House said USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Sherrod, but stopped short of saying whether she will get her job back.

“Things would be in her favor, even if she didn’t get her job back. She will always have a place in the movement for justice," said Jerry Pennick, head of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, based in East Point. Sherrod was the director of the Georgia field office for that organization before she was appointed to work with the USDA.

Pennick said Sherrod helped thousands of farmers, not only in Georgia, but around the country.

He said he talked to Sherrod after she was forced out.

“She was hurt in the beginning and surprised at the reaction to it," he said. "But she’s a strong person. We had no doubt that she would get through it and she would come out a better person. And it seems like that’s what going to happen.”

Grace Miller, Sherrod’s mother, said she remembers the night that most likely nudged her daughter into public service. Until then, Sherrod has said several times, she was determined to move out of the South and away from farming.

She changed her mind a few days after her father was killed, an event Sherrod often includes in her talks.

Sherrod’s father, Jose Miller, had a dispute with a man over cows that had come into his pasture. The neighbor insisted that three of Miller’s cows were his. Miller said he would call the “law” to settle the dispute. As Jose Miller was closing the gate, he was shot in the back, the family says.

Grace Miller said that the neighbor was not held accountable.

After the shooting, “Shirley would be off by herself,” Grace Miller said about her daughter, the oldest of four girls and a son.

“One night she was outside," Miller said. "The moon was shining. And it was going through her mind, what would she do? She decided she would stay [in south Georgia] and make a difference.”

She enrolled in Fort Valley State College. She later went on to receive a B.A. in sociology from Albany State University and an M.A. in community development from Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

“She was not able to go to jail like the rest of them [protesters],” Grace Miller said. “She was off at school. She really wanted to go [to jail].”

While she was at Fort Valley, one night about 40 white men burned a cross in her family’s yard, Miller said, and that added to her daughter's distress over race relations in her home county of Baker.

After graduation, Sherrod married a minister and immersed herself more in the civil rights movement, according to her son, Kenyatta.

“She was a little more strict on us because of the calls they got … from people saying they were going to snatch us [Kenyatta Sherrod and his older sister] because of what my father was doing.”

Sherrod also took a position working with farmers in trouble.

“I want to do all I can to help rural communities be what they can,” Sherrod said in the videotaped talk last March. “When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people and to black people only. ... But you know God will show you things and he’ll put things in your path that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.”

Kenyatta Sherrod remembers when his family’s farm was in foreclosure in the early 1980s. It was huge -- 6,000 acres -- and several people lived on it, raising vegetables and livestock that they would share with each other. Though several people had a stake in it, the property was in the Sherrods' names.

“They lost the farm,” Kenyatta Sherrod said. “Life was different after that. We didn’t have a lot after that.”

He remembers his parents having trouble paying for utilities.

“Early on, sometime after we lost our farm, I caught her crying over the bills," he said. "We had a real low time after we lost the farm.”

Now Sherrod is a grandmother to four girls, her son's children.

“Her granddaughters are her world. They do nothing wrong,” Kenyatta Sherrod said of his children’s relationship with their grandmother.

When the controversy started over Sherrod’s comments, she was more concerned with the reaction the children -- ages 11, 7, 5 and 16 months -- would have.

“She was worried about what my daughters would think when they heard it,” Kenyatta Sherrod said.

The biggest concern for three of the girls was that they wanted to continue coming to Athens to visit their grandmother, who kept an apartment there for work.

“So I [explained] she’s deciding to come back, so well have fun with her here [in Albany],” Kenyatta Sherrod said.

it's mighty funny, the end of time has just begun

or damned with faint praise
or not with a bang but a whimper
(and it's not even Christmas yet)
Up, Down.

well, that was a bust ... (skip to Peter Sinclair Crock of the Week videos)

Advent was very different this year, waiting to see the (foregone) conclusion at Copenhagen instead of waiting for Christmas, I was like Lula da Silva, "Eu não sei se algum anjo ou algum sábio descerá neste plenário e irá colocar na nossa cabeça a inteligência que nos faltou até a hora de agora. Não sei. Eu acredito, como eu acredito em Deus, eu acredito em milagre, ele pode acontecer, e quero fazer parte dele. / I don't know if some angel or some wise man will descend into this meeting room and will put into our heads the intelligence that we have been missing until this very hour. I do not know. I believe, as I believe in God, I believe in miracles, it could happen, and I want to be a part of it."

hoping right up to the last minute, believing in miracles, and in good company

Advent is mostly about music for me, Handel's Messiah, even if it is continuous in its insistence on a physical rebirth, "yet in my flesh shall I see God," even though it has been co-opted by shallow bourgeois sensibility, still there are always a least a few sublime moments when the musicians' and singers' efforts to fuse, to integrate, and to transcend are successful and I am lifted for a moment out of time

there are a few tunes that I can sometimes still sing from memory: Good King Wenceslas (1, 2, 3) The Swallow, Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming, and Barrett's Privateers; and I have been singing them off and on this week, crazy old fuck, I have often thought of re-writing Barrett's Privateers with a love theme - I have never managed it, but when I sing it, that is what I am thinking about

I have been low lately, even moreso since Copenhagen, and I have noticed that I resent seeing and even hearing stories about people who are complacent about ... the fact that they have a house, or are married to a loving spouse, or get to walk with their grand-children, whatever ... and my tourettes kicks in and I find myself muttering obscenities - BUT - when I discovered the other day that Marina Silva was indeed married, with four children (two from a previous marriage :-) I was delighted ...

so, "tens of thousands" of demostrators in Britain ... not enough by far ...

maybe this is all just a confusion of microcosm/macrocosm ... whatever ...

Jim Prentice said, "There's always a lot of hype and drama that gets built into this sort of international event, much of it intended to force the hand of participants. We aren't going to buy into that. We are not going to panic. We are confident about the actions we are taking on the domestic and the continental fronts," and he has told a bunch of lies since the conference, foremost among them that the tar sands are not going to get a free pass, outright bare-faced lies

but it is nothing but par - dig this, Ontario Power Generation - OPG dumps 300,000 gallons of water polluted with tritium from the Darlington Nuclear plant into Lake Ontario which is the water supply for all the cities bordering the lake, and they say, "Residents are advised that their water is safe to drink," of course, they have to say that, what else could they say? but it is an outright lie, but who cares?

nobody cares, not really, here we have the illustrious City of Toronto failing to even enforce basic public health rules about vermin, mice and rats, around food: mouse found, bakery continued to serve customers, and pizza place closed after dead rats found, nobody, as my lawyer friends like to say, gives a rat's ass

the odd reasonable voices to be heard, for example an editorial in the NYT, are drowned out by the pestilent stupidity of the majority and their rogue leaders like this Jim Inhofe and Sarah Palin, and the half-dozen Republicans who held a press-conference in Copenhagen, Jim Sensenbrenner, Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Shelley Moore Capito, John Sullivan, & Marsha Blackburn, and then at least one Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, and not forgetting our very own Wild Rose Alliance deniers led by (fanfare) Danielle Smith, and she is no shrinking violet and she even has the Edmonton Journal wondering (these are the wizards who will maybe go so far as to say that climate change is happening but don't admit that it is man-made)

harsh? I don't think so ... here's a story for you ... I didn't know what to do with Copenhagen coming up so I went out and had 5,000 buttons made up with "350" on them, and I just started handing them out on the streets of Toronto, and I discovered that not 1 in 100 people know a single thing about it, not root 1, I say, "do you know what 350 means?" and they say, "350 euros?" or just "no," I will give the people of this city full points for being open and willing, very few people did not want to have it explained, they had a minute to listen, and I told them, and they took the button and maybe a few extras for their kids and their grand kids, several school teachers took a pocketful to give to their classes, including a beautiful woman from Jane/Finch with her daughter who took three big handfuls

but I was turned away by a church and by politicians: Church of the Holy Trinity (In The Heart of The City) right next to the Eaton Centre turned me away, the Green Party candidate Zoran Markovski turned me away, the City of Toronto turned me away, Jack Layton took one but scowled and turned his back on me when I gave Jim Prentice a slightly rude name ('that asshole' I said, and I meant it, and still do),

having watched closely, day after day, the intimidating diplomatic courtesy on the floor of the UN Plenary I have to wonder what it might be good for? not that I endorse gratuitous insults either, but even Lumumba Di-aping's remark, “L9 asks Africa to sign a suicide pact. It is a solution based on the values which, in our opinion, channelled six million people in Europe to the furnaces,” linking the Copenhagen Accord with the Holocaust was not out of line, to me at least, nor Ian Fry's “Can I suggest that, in biblical terms, it looks like we are being offered thiry pieces of silver to betray our people and our future. Mr President our future is not for sale,” nor Marina Silva also comparing it to slavery and the Holocaust

I did so have to laugh, that was the only time I actually saw our Canadian fellow Michael Martin say anything, and it was to see if he could pour a bit of gas on Lumumba and light him up, what do you call such behaviour? I call it shitty, I call Michael Martin a shit-head for doing it, or maybe a dipshit? petty? whatever ...

for the record Beaches United Church did not turn me away - they took three handfuls in a bowl for their congregation

I had no idea that 5,000 buttons were so many, I managed to distribute almost 2,000, mostly one at a time, I wish someone would tell me it was worth it

I will tell you the truth - being turned away by those I thought might help hurt like hell, hurt, hurt too much, and finally I stopped (I have not given up I have just stopped) because I could not face any more of it alone, I mean to say that those who did give me a boost, my son, a woman at the Toronto Climate Campaign, the teacher from Jane/Finch I mentioned, were just not enough ...

there are two souls particularly worthy of mention here, they are the two organizers of the candle light vigil at Queen's Park on Saturday the 12th

I got there quite early and thought there was no one at all, but I decided to walk up to the sort of 'geometric' centre of the space anyway, and there, in the darkness, down on their knees on the asphalt, in the bitter cold wind were two young people, a boy and a girl trying to get candles lit, and they could not get them lit, so I helped them, and eventually we got one going, working together, and then two and then three, and someone else came along, and we got one going for him, and a few more, and a gust would come along and blow most of them out and we would light them all up again, a couple from Kingston came along, and after a while there were quite a few people there, maybe 150 or even 200, cold night, I was shivering by then, in the end I forgot to get their names and I forgot to give them buttons

at one point there was that obvious smell of burning hair, and it was the girl's, she had beautiful long hair and the wind blew a bit of it into a candle, and she just didn't care, I was so impressed by that, just didn't care, vanity be damned, at the end as I was leaving the boy came along and he thanked me and I thanked him and I went away hoping that they will grow up and be leaders of this country, I was proud to help them, God bless them both

and that (o my best beloved children and grand daughters) was the best thing that happened during the Great Button Fiasco, and it was very good, and it kept me going for another week and a bit more until I crashed like an amphetamine junkie, into the arms of Judas Priest which is where I died of thirst

I know I know I know I know, you are supposed to have faith and take enough energy from what happens that is positive ... but if it is not enough then what do you say? I don't know?



but I do know what the matter is, it's me ... old and burnt-out and no damned good, whatever ... like Bob says, it's kinda funny, and as a matter of fact it is as funny as ever-can-be ... you might even say it's mighty funny

I grew up with the threat of nuclear armageddon, JFK playing hardball with Russia over missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev banging his shoe on the UN desk,

but here are my children and their children imagining the literal end of human civilization, even imagining human extinction ... you would have to call this a 'paradigm shift'

I truely do not know, I cannot even guess at how they deal with it, beyond the obvious built-in endocrine mechanisms that send us out each day looking for food & fucking, even those subtler urges to experience the sublime, to transcend through beauty into timelessness

I'm sorry kids, beyond staring open-eyed down the muzzle of this awful thing and not abandoning all hope I have nothing to offer ... a shrug, a grin, a laugh


well, I was going to post some pictures of the delightful Makosi Musambasi from Zimbabwe and her voluminous boobage as she struggles to make it big in London, just to cheer you up y'unnerstan, (and me too :-) AND she does have some opinions on global warming and the Copenhagen conference reported in the Zimbabwe press ... BUT I will save it, instead here is a list of YouTube videos, Climate Denier Crock of the Week by Peter Sinclair, being concise rebuttals of some of the arguments used most often by climate change deniers:

1. Climate Deniers Love the 70s!, the Remix.
2. Climate Crock Sacks Hack Attack Part 1.
3. Climate Crock Sacks Hack Attack Part 2.
4. The 'Urban Heat Island' Crock.
5. The 'Temp leads Carbon' Crock.
6. The 'Medieval Warming' Crock".
7. Creepy at the EPA.
8. Party like it's 1998.
9. Party like it's 1998 Revisited.
10. That 1500 Year Thing.
11. Ice Area vs Volume.
12. It's cold. So there's no Climate Change?.
13. Denial was a River in Africa.
14. Birth of a Climate Crock.
15. All Wet on Sea Level.
16. Mars Attacks!!!
17. Watts Up With Watts?
18. This Year's Model.
19. Solar Schmolar.
20. Sense from Deniers on CO2? Don't hold your breath ...
21. The Big Swindle Movie.
22. 2009 Sea Ice Update.
23. Don't it make my Green World Brown.
24. The Big Mist Take, original.
25. The Big Mist Take Remix.

unfortunately they are in no particular order, he does not date them, and the sound and general quality is sometimes spotty, but they comprise an excellent primer for anyone who gets involved in discussions around climate change - especially if you happen to be discussing with a denier

here's a thought - there have been people around since the early 50's who knew just about what I know now, quite possibly knew it much better than I do now, and giving up would dishonour those people - sketchy maybe but a reason to carry on :-)



Appendices:
1. Climate change protests ahead of Copenhagen summit, BBC, Dec. 5 2009.
2. Loneliness is a social disease, study finds, Zosia Bielski, Dec. 1 2009.
3. Barrett's Privateers - Stan Rogers.
4. Leak from Darlington station poses no danger: OPG, Tyler Hamilton, Dec 22 2009.
5. Mouse found, bakery continued to serve customers, Jennifer Yang, Dec 22 2009.
6. Pizza place closed after dead rats found, Toronto Star, Dec 23 2009.
7. Editorial - That Climate Change E-Mail, NYT, Dec 5 2009.
8. Desert Vistas vs. Solar Power, Todd Woody, Dec 21 2009.
9. Canada won't be swayed by Copenhagen 'hype': Prentice, Mike De Souza, Dec 4 2009.
10. Alberta's Wildrose leader is no shrinking violet, Gary Mason, Dec 16 2009.
11. Climate-change denial is dangerous, Graham Thomson, Dec 10 2009.
12. Marina Silva: fracasso em Copenhague é tão grave quanto o Holocausto, Veja, 17 de Dezembro de 2009.


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Climate change protests ahead of Copenhagen summit, BBC, Dec. 5 2009.

Demonstrations have taken place around the UK to urge action on climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

Organisers Stop Climate Chaos want world leaders to reach a tough new deal on cutting emissions.

In London, police originally said about 20,000 people had taken part - but did not contradict claims by the organisers that the actual figure was over 40,000.

Gordon Brown praised the protesters for "propelling" leaders to reach the "first world climate change agreement".

About 7,000 turned out for a demonstration in Glasgow. A protest also took place in Belfast.

As the main protest drew to a close on Saturday evening , some 150 protesters from a different action group - Camp for Climate Action - set up camp in Trafalgar Square, central London.

Organisers of the camp told the BBC News website they wished to draw attention to the role of the "political and economic system" in causing climate change.

The Metropolitan Police said they had been told the camp would remain in place for 48 hours.

"A small neighbourhood style police team will be in place to provide a police presence around Trafalgar Square," said a Met spokesman.

'Flat earth group'

The prime minister, who met some of the demonstrators in Downing Street, said it was essential that a deal be reached in Copenhagen and leaders had to be "ambitious".

Mr Brown said he and the "vast majority of people" were convinced by the scientific evidence for man-made global warming.

He said Copenhagen had to convince everyone of the risks, including the sceptics.

"There's a flat earth group over the evidence, if I may say so, that exists about climate change, and we've got to show them that the scientific evidence is strong," he said.

"The public need to be angry about the extent to which we have not taken action sufficiently as a world until now, and they've got to then see that the first climate change agreement is not only necessary, it's absolutely essential."

Cut emissions

The demonstrators on Saturday made several demands, such as calling on Western nations to commit to an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050.

A series of events known collectively as The Wave took place in London.

They began with an ecumenical service at Westminster Central Hall, which involved both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Archbishop Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Religious leaders said they were taking part in The Wave because they "recognise unequivocally that there is a moral imperative to tackle the causes of global warming".

At about 1200 GMT, they joined environmental campaigners, aid agencies, trade unions and organisations including the Women's Institute for a rally close to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, before beginning their march to the Houses of Parliament.

In Glasgow, demonstrators marched from Bellahouston Park in the south of the city to Kelvingrove Park for a rally.

Strathclyde Police said about 7,000 had turned out, which is believed to be Scotland's largest protest in support of action on climate change.

Ashok Sinha, from the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, said: "We will call on Gordon Brown to make Copenhagen count by committing rich countries to reduce their emissions by at least 40% in the next 10 years, finally putting the right sort of money on the table to help poor countries, and urgently start the process of decarbonising our energy supply.

"With bold leadership at home, Mr Brown can help inspire a fair, effective and binding international deal at Copenhagen."

Mr Brown will join Barack Obama in Copenhagen next week, after the US president announced that he had changed his plans and would now attend the end of the conference.

Ahead of the summit, Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband took part in "the first ever ministerial mass phone call" on Saturday, after inviting questions from members of action group 38 Degrees via his website, Ed's Pledge.

He told the BBC: "We're going to go all out, the whole of the British government, over the next two weeks to make sure we get the most ambitious agreement we can."

Any agreement made at Copenhagen must become a legally-binding treaty "within months", he added.

Barbara Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam, said world leaders must do more to help those in developing countries cope with the effects of global warming.

"For poor people, climate change is not something in the future. Climate change is hitting them now," she told the BBC.



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Loneliness is a social disease, study finds, Zosia Bielski, Dec. 1 2009.

Researchers find that lonely people that were surveyed ‘infected' remaining friends with the emotion before those relationships faltered

Loneliness is contagious and expressing it can make us even more isolated, according to new research from Harvard, the University of Chicago and the University of California-San Diego.

Looking at a longitudinal study of more than 12,000 people, the researchers found that lonely respondents “infected” remaining friends with their loneliness before the relationships crumbled, perpetuating a cycle of isolation.

Loneliness spreads because even as lonely people seek social connection, their “caustic” behaviour often frays relations down the line, says John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago psychologist and one of the study authors.

Loneliness, he says, is a “sensitivity to social rejection” that makes our brains more alert to social threats – and subsequently makes us harder to be around.

Lonely people tend to be shyer, less trusting and more socially awkward, anxious and hostile, wrote the authors, whose findings were published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers found that next-door neighbours and friends were more likely to make each other lonely than siblings or spouses, and that women were more likely to “catch” and spread loneliness than men.

They say their findings have particular implications for older people. Previous research has shown that loneliness can play a serious role in their health, including cardiovascular risks, the progression of Alzheimer's, obesity, alcoholism and depression.

“Social species do not fare well when forced to live solitary lives,” the authors write, comparing loneliness to hunger, thirst and pain.

The researchers tracked the “topography” of loneliness in Framingham, a town in Massachusetts whose residents had been tested extensively since 1948 for a study of cardiovascular risk factors.

The townspeople filled out a battery of surveys on depression and loneliness and also listed the names of all their family members and friends on tracking forms. Many of these acquaintances lived in Framingham and underwent the same study, giving the authors of the loneliness research a unique glimpse into the town's social networks.

The researchers had already used the Framingham sample as the basis for a number of inquiries into the process of “contagion,” tracing how obesity, smoking and happiness can spread through social networks and communities.

As with the other studies, the researchers found that loneliness spreads through three degrees of separation.

“Participants are 52 per cent more likely to be lonely if a person to whom they are directly connected (at one degree of separation) is lonely,” the authors write.

At two degrees of separation, they were 25 per cent more likely to feel lonely. At three degrees it was 15 per cent and at four degrees the effect disappeared. This pattern – what the authors term the “three degrees of influence rule of social contagion” – also appeared in the obesity, smoking and happiness studies.

Lonely people in Framingham often cut the few ties they had left, having transmitted “the same feeling of loneliness to their remaining friends, starting the cycle anew.”

The researchers found that lonely spouses rubbed off much less than lonely friends. Lonely siblings appeared to have no effect on each other, suggesting that “loneliness in older adults is about the relationships people choose, rather than the relationships they inherit,” the authors wrote.

The study suggests loneliness is not a “quintessential individualistic experience,” but a complex group dynamic, one that remains stigmatized.

“We have this notion that it's personal weakness,” Dr. Cacioppo says.

He argues that today's culture is particularly vulnerable to loneliness because we are postponing family, divorcing more often and living longer.

The average person spends 80 per cent of their waking hours in the company of others, and prefers that to time alone, the authors write, citing earlier studies.

The researchers are now looking for predictors of social isolation in south Chicago neighbourhoods, and hope their work will eventually trickle down to city policy.

“[The research] implies cities, communities, neighbourhoods, buildings and roads can be constructed in a way that either promotes social cohesion and a feeling of connection or places that at high risk,” Dr. Cacioppo said.

Other members of the study team were James Fowler, associate professor of political science at the University of California-San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School.



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Barrett's Privateers - Stan Rogers

Oh the year was seventeen seventy eight
I wish I were in Sherbrooke now!
A letter of marque came from the King
To the scummiest vessel I've ever seen
God Damn them all! I was told
We'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's privateers.

Oh Elcid Barrett cried the town,
For twenty brave men, all fishermen, who
Would make for him the Antelope's crew.

The Antelope sloop was a sickening sight.
She'd a list to port and her sails in rags,
And a cook in the scuppers with staggers and jags.

On the King's birthday we put to sea.
We were ninety-one days to Montego bay,
Pumping like madmen all the way.

On the ninety-sixth day we sailed again.
When a bloody great Yankee hove in sight
With our cracked four-pounders we made to fight

The Yankee lay low down with gold.
She was broad and fat and loose in stays,
But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days

Then at length we stood two cables away.
Our cracked four-pounders made an awful din,
But with one fat ball the Yank stove us in.

The Antelope shook and pitched on her side.
Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs,
And the maintruck carried off both me legs.

So here I lay in my twenty-third year.
It's been six years since we sailed away,
And I just made Halifax yesterday.



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Leak from Darlington station poses no danger: OPG, Tyler Hamilton, Dec 22 2009.

Radioactive tritium accidentally released Monday into Lake Ontario from Darlington nuclear generating station poses no harm to local residents, according to Ontario Power Generation, which has launched an investigation and continues to test lake water hourly.

OPG spokesman Ted Gruetzner said the tritium - a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - was in water that spilled from an underground tank, which is used for backup cooling in the event of an emergency. About 300,000 litres escaped, roughly enough to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Gruetzner said little is known at this point about how much tritium was in the water, though concentration is expected to be low. The water also contained a toxic inorganic chemical compound called hydrazine. "Water sampling at local water treatment facilities indicates that levels of tritium continue to be at normal background (safe) levels," OPG said in a statement. "Further samples will continue to be taken regularly."

The accident happened at around 3 p.m. on Monday, after which the Ministry of Environment, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the Durham Medical Officer of Health, and water treatment authorities in the area were notified.

"We know what happened, we just don't know why it happened," said Gruetzner, explaining that staff charged with filling up the underground tanks inadvertently filled one that was already full. The tank overflowed and water ran onto the ground, much of it flowing into the lake.

OPG said it is working closely with relevant agencies and taking "all conservative, precautionary measures to ensure the public and the environment continue to be protected."

Tritium can be harmful when ingested in enough quantity. It immediately travels to the gastrointestinal tract and is absorbed uniformly in the bloodstream within two hours. "The health hazard of tritium is associated with cell damage caused by the ionizing radiation that results from radioactive decay," according to the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory.

Durham Region said in a statement that water sampling and testing is taking place at water supply plants in Oshawa, Bowmanville and Newcastle. "Residents are advised that their water is safe to drink," according to the statement.

The spill comes a month after the Sierra Club of Canada released a report warning that "routine and accidental releases of tritium" are rising and that accumulation in the environment is a growing health concern. It criticized Canada for allowing tritium levels in drinking water that are 70 times higher than in the European Union and 473 times higher than in California.

Canada's nuclear safety commission dismissed the Sierra Club report as "junk science," but Linda Keen, former head of the agency, told the Star that community concerns should be taken seriously. She said tritium is an operational byproduct of Candu nuclear reactors, making Canada the world's largest producer of the otherwise rare radioactive isotope.

"Accumulative effects of tritium are what really worried me (when I was head of the agency), not just the dose at a certain date," she said.



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Mouse found, bakery continued to serve customers, Jennifer Yang, Dec 22 2009.

The campaign began as a twitch of brown fur spotted from the corner of Borys Machnikowski's eye – a tiny mouse, munching on a mini cheese roll inside an eatery located in a TTC station.

Borys Machnikowski snapped a cellphone picture of a mouse eating a mini cheese roll at Bakery on the Go in the Warden subway station.

Machnikowski, a 20-year-old Centennial College student, snapped a photo and showed it to employees at Bakery on the Go in the Warden subway station. But when workers failed to remove surrounding food and kept serving customers, he had to act.

"It's a public health issue," he said. "There's bound to be mice but they (kept selling) baked goods to people knowingly and willingly."

Since their Saturday night rodent encounter, Machnikowski and his friends have done everything they can to "get the word out," including contacting public health officials, alerting media outlets and posting flyers to warn would-be customers.

While they aren't surprised a food establishment could have mice – especially one inside a TTC station – they're shocked at how employees handled the complaint. Machnikowski said an employee "gave him a blank stare," removed the tray of cheese rolls and continued selling bread from the same display case without cleaning the area.

The students began warning customers, showing them the photo of the rodent. A manager asked them to leave. "He was just saying, `It's a subway system, there are mice. So what?'" Machnikowski said.

Store officials could not be reached for comment, and employees refused to speak with reporters.

According to the bakery's DineSafe history, the establishment received a conditional pass in August 2008 for two infractions and was given a full pass two days later.

The complaint prompted a new investigation and on Monday, the bakery was given a conditional pass for five infractions, including failure to protect food from contamination and failure to provide adequate pest control, the latter given a severity rating of "significant."

Jim Chan, the city's public food safety manager, said investigators found no indication of an "active infestation," but old droppings were found on the floor. He said the bakery operator was "lectured" and it will be reinspected within 48 hours.

But Machnikowski feels the TTC should be more active in ensuring its food establishments are safe.



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Pizza place closed after dead rats found, Toronto Star, Dec 23 2009.

A popular downtown Toronto pizza place has been closed for a rat infestation and dirty conditions after twice being hit with warnings earlier this year.

Cora Pizza, located on Spadina Ave. at Harbord St., is a late-night favourite among University of Toronto students. It was closed Monday by health inspectors for a litany of problems, including a "crucial" failure to protect food from contamination.

Toronto Public Health described a "number of dead rats and fresh droppings" at Cora, which has been in business since 1984.

Its run-ins with health inspectors date to March 20, when Cora was cited for rodents, dirty food surfaces, unsanitary conditions and staff who didn't wash their hands.

It passed a reinspection three days later, then fell back to a conditional pass on June 9 for the same reasons. Cora got its green pass back on June 12, then failed with 16 infractions on Dec. 21. The closure order included a summons and declaration of a health hazard because of "gross unsanitary conditions."

A new inspection is scheduled for Wednesday and the owner has promised Cora will reopen.



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Editorial - That Climate Change E-Mail, NYT, Dec 5 2009.

The theft of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.

They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration’s climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.

No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years’ worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don’t change the underlying scientific facts about climate change.

One describes climate skeptics as “idiots,” another describes papers written by climate contrarians as “garbage” and “fraud.” Still another suggests that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose 2007 report concluded that humans were the dominant force behind global warming, should pay no attention to contrarian opinions.

Another quotes an exasperated Phil Jones — director of the climate center at the University of East Anglia, from which the e-mail was stolen — as expressing the hope that climate change would occur “regardless of the consequences” so “the science could be proved right.”

However, most of the e-mail messages — judging by those that have seen the light of day — appear to deal with the painstaking and difficult task of reconstructing historical temperatures, and the problems scientists encounter along the way. Despite what the skeptics say, they demonstrate just how rigorously scientists have worked to figure out whether global warming is real and the true role that human activities play.

The controversy isn’t over. James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading skeptic, has asked for an inquiry into what some are calling “Climategate.” And on Friday, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel, announced that he would conduct his own investigation.

It is important that scientists behave professionally and openly. It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen.



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Desert Vistas vs. Solar Power, Todd Woody, Dec 21 2009.

AMBOY, Calif. — Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

For Mrs. Feinstein, creation of the Mojave national monuments would make good on a promise by the government a decade ago to protect desert land donated by an environmental group that had acquired the property from the Catellus Development Corporation.

“The Catellus lands were purchased with nearly $45 million in private funds and $18 million in federal funds and donated to the federal government for the purpose of conservation, and that commitment must be upheld. Period,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement.

The federal government made a competing commitment in 2005, though, when President George W. Bush ordered that renewable energy production be accelerated on public lands, including the Catellus holdings. The Obama administration is trying to balance conservation demands with its goal of radically increasing solar and wind generation by identifying areas suitable for large-scale projects across the West.

Mrs. Feinstein heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the budget of the Interior Department, giving her substantial clout over that agency, which manages the government’s landholdings. Her intervention in the Mojave means it will be more difficult for California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.

“This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area.

Union officials, power industry executives, regulators and some environmentalists have also expressed concern about the impact of the monument legislation, but few would speak publicly for fear of antagonizing one of California’s most powerful politicians.

The debate over the monument encapsulates a rising tension between two goals held by environmental groups: preservation of wild lands and ambitious efforts to combat global warming.

Not only is the desert land some of the sunniest in the country, and thus suitable for large-scale power production, it is also some of the most scenic territory in the West. The Mojave lands have sweeping vistas of an ancient landscape that is home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, fringe-toed lizards and other rare animals and plants.

As conflicts over building solar farms in the Mojave escalated earlier this year, Mrs. Feinstein trekked to the desert in April. The senator’s caravan, including the heads of two of the nation’s largest utilities, top energy regulators and a group of environmentalists, bumped along a dirt track and pulled up to a wind-whipped tent. Inside, executives with a Goldman Sachs-owned developer waited to make their case for building two multibillion-dollar solar power plants.

The presentation over, the entourage rolled on to the next solar project site to hear the developer’s pitch. Mrs. Feinstein gave the developers a hearing but was not moved by their arguments, according to five people present on the tour. The senator seemed concerned about the visual effect of huge solar farms on Route 66, the highway that runs through the Mojave, they said.

“When we attended the onsite desert meeting with Senator Feinstein, it was clear she was very serious about this,” said Gary Palo, vice president for development with Cogentrix Energy, a solar developer owned by Goldman Sachs. “It would make no sense for us politically or practically to go forward with those projects.”

Another project, a huge 12,000-acre solar farm by Tessera Solar, was canceled last week, and the company cited Mrs. Feinstein’s opposition.

Steven L. Kline, chief sustainability officer for Pacific Gas and Electric, called the proposed monument “prime territory” for solar development and noted that the loss of the planned solar projects would hurt his company’s efforts to comply with state renewable energy mandates. The utility was planning a solar farm in the monument area.

“In the near term, it would have a very substantial impact,” he said, emphasizing that in principle, P.G.& E. supports Mrs. Feinstein’s efforts to preserve sensitive desert lands. “Over time those projects will be built somewhere else and we’ll have benefits of the power.”

Mrs. Feinstein has long championed desert preservation, sponsoring legislation in 1994 that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve. Five years later, she pushed for federal money to help acquire nearly 500,000 acres owned by Catellus.

A small Southern California environmental group, the Wildlands Conservancy, had negotiated the acquisition of the Catellus property and raised tens of millions of dollars for its purchase from a major benefactor, the financier David Gelbaum, a former hedge fund manager turned philanthropist.

The Catellus holdings consist of hundreds of small parcels that form a checkerboard across the Mojave.

“The whole objective was to preserve the core of the Mojave Desert,” said David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy. “To a large extent this land is the connective tissue that holds the desert together.”

When Mr. Myers became aware that solar and wind developers had applied to lease federal land that included the former Catellus holdings, he contacted the senator.

The legislation to protect a million acres of desert land would include 266,000 acres of the former Catellus lands. (The balance of the half-million acres of Catellus property is already protected, in various ways.) The proposed renewable energy projects would have occupied about 30,000 acres of Catellus land, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

“If all this solar development took place in the Mojave, the higher you climb the more industrialized the vistas would look,” Mr. Myers said recently as he walked past bighorn sheep tracks and scrambled up a peak overlooking the Trilobite Wilderness Area.

Mr. Myers stresses that he is not against large-scale solar power plants but prefers that they be concentrated on already disturbed farmlands. In recent months, he said, he has worked with solar developers to find alternative sites.

On Thursday, Mrs. Feinstein introduced legislation to provide a 30 percent tax credit to developers that consolidate degraded private land for solar projects. She followed that on Monday with the legislation to create the 941,00-acre Mojave Trails National Monument and the 134,00-acre Sand to Snow National Monument.

“I strongly believe that conservation, renewable energy development and recreation can and must co-exist in the California desert,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement. “This legislation strikes a careful balance between these sometimes competing concerns.”

Developers and environmentalists say Mrs. Feinstein has modified the monument legislation to address some of their issues. The 2.5 million acres set aside in a draft version of the monument act has been shrunk to around one million acres, allowing at least two projects to proceed. The bill also includes provisions designed to accelerate approval of renewable energy projects on federal land.

That is not likely to mollify monument opponents, including unions that were anticipating the creation of thousands of construction jobs.

“Unfortunately, Senator Feinstein wants to wall off a large part of the desert based on historical land ownership rather than science,” said Marc D. Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy. “It seems the wrong approach to where solar should go and where it shouldn’t go.”

But John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies in Sacramento, said the monument legislation would put so much land off limits for development that it might actually spur a more vigorous state and federal effort to compensate by creating renewable energy zones. “The problem is,” he said, “if you take a million acres off the table, what are you going to replace it with?”



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Canada won't be swayed by Copenhagen 'hype': Prentice, Mike De Souza, Dec 4 2009.

The Harper government won't buy into the "hype" surrounding the Copenhagen climate summit to rush into a new deal, said Environment Minister Jim Prentice on Friday.

In a lunchtime speech delivered to Montreal business leaders, Mr. Prentice said Canada won't agree to anything at this month's international conference just for the sake of saying it is taking action.

"There's always a lot of hype and drama that gets built into this sort of international event, much of it intended to force the hand of participants," Mr. Prentice said in the prepared speech. "We aren't going to buy into that. We are not going to panic. We are confident about the actions we are taking on the domestic and the continental fronts."

Although opposition parties, environmental groups and scientists have suggested that Prentice's goal of reducing Canada's emissions roughly to 1990 levels by 2020 is too weak, he said that any drastic changes to that plan could damage the economy since the United States has adopted a similar target.

"If we do more than the U.S., we will suffer economic pain for no real environmental gain -- economic pain that could impede our ability to invest in new, clean technologies and other innovative solutions to climate change," Prentice said. "But if we do less, we will risk facing new border barriers into the American market."

Several Canadian provinces, have announced their own targets that go beyond the U.S. target. Quebec, which pledged to reduce emissions by 20%, was even praised by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for showing leadership in its own climate change plan.

Mr. Prentice indicated that a political agreement could be achieved at the Copenhagen conference, which begins next week, that would eventually lead to a new treaty to take effect after the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

"Make no mistake," Mr. Prentice said. "We absolutely understand the urgency around environmental issues - and I make a practice of meeting regularly with Canadian companies, associations and ENGOs [environmental groups] who share that desire to move forward boldly."

The Kyoto agreement was the first legally binding treaty that forced industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels through domestic measures or investments in projects abroad that reduce pollution.

Under the Harper government, Canada announced that it would not try to meet its commitment to reduce emissions by six per cent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. Instead, its emissions are about 30% above that target.

Prentice has not yet introduced a framework or regulations to cap pollution from industrial facilities, but indicated earlier this week that they would be expected to make absolute reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.



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Alberta's Wildrose leader is no shrinking violet, Gary Mason, Dec 16 2009.

Danielle Smith is not entirely convinced there's a climate-change problem. And that will make the many skeptics in her province happy.

If recent polls are to be believed, Alberta's four-decade-old Conservative government could be toppled in the next election – by an even more right-wing alternative.

Only in Alberta.

The Wildrose Alliance Party seems for real, however, even though it has only one MLA. Party leader Danielle Smith possesses an intelligence, charm and charisma that belies her days as a newspaper columnist. Her speeches and public writings are receiving more attention – and scrutiny. As such, remarks she made this week concerning the United Nations climate-change summit in Copenhagen caught many people's attention.

In an address to the Canadian Club of Calgary, Ms. Smith urged Ottawa not to sign on to any accord in Copenhagen. Instead, she said, Canada and the provinces should find their own homegrown measures to slay the problem of rising greenhouse-gas emissions.

That is, if there's a problem at all.

Ms. Smith, it appears, is not entirely convinced. And that will make the many climate skeptics in her province – and across the country, for that matter – deliriously happy. “The science isn't settled,” Ms. Smith told her Canadian Club audience. “If we're going to embark on this path, we've got to be darn sure that the science makes sense.” She quoted from Lawrence Soloman's book The Deniers , which details studies that contradict the science supporting claims of man-made global warming.

The crowd lapped it up.

But Ms. Smith wasn't done.

In an opinion piece that appeared in the Calgary Herald this week, Ms. Smith questioned spending billions of dollars on carbon-capture technology that “won't yield results for decades,” denounced cap-and-trade schemes and carbon taxes and pretty much gave the thumbs down to UN plans to send billions to help developing countries cope with the impact of climate change.

As top-to-bottom denunciations of climate-change strategies go, it was quite impressive.

Not even Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner denies the existence of global warming. Or that the art of extracting oil from Alberta's oil sands contributes to it. And he'd like to do something about it, honestly. As long as it doesn't hurt the economy. Not the most progressive outlook on climate change, admittedly. Yet, it seems almost Suzukian compared with the view taken by Ms. Smith.

For someone emerging as a major player on the Canadian political scene to come out and effectively question the existence of global warming, well, that takes more than a little chutzpah.

Or maybe just naiveté, of which I think Ms. Smith can certainly be accused.

Whether or not she accepts it, the world is moving on climate change. Achieving consensus will be difficult, but even reluctant joiners such as China and India now understand that the world's economy will be powered, in part, by the changeover from fossil-based fuels to clean technologies.

They accept, too, that their countries are contributing to a carbon dioxide problem and that they're going to need to address it sooner than later or risk facing the wrath of a world with which it hopes to trade.

If nothing else, U.S. President Barack Obama is driving a green agenda and is going to force trading partners such as Canada – and provinces such as Alberta – to play the game according to new, environmentally friendly American rules or risk losing billions in investment opportunities. Polluters need not apply.

So Ms. Smith can score easy points with like-minded and self-interested supporters if she wishes, getting rousing ovations with each skeptical utterance she makes. That's fine, if not a little transparent. But, ultimately, it will be a position that hurts her province far more than it helps it.

To be fair, Ms. Smith isn't saying there isn't something Alberta could be doing to becoming greener – in the event this whole global warming thing turns out to be real. There are practical ways Albertans can reduce energy use and improve energy efficiency, she said this week. Tax incentives could be used to help individuals and businesses improve energy efficiency in their homes.

An idea, perhaps, borrowed from one of the many governments around the world that have been giving green tax breaks for years.

But most of these same governments recognize that sealing windows and doors isn't going to get it done when it comes to reversing the impact of rising greenhouse gases. Then again, if you're not sure there's a problem to begin with, what's the big deal?



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Climate-change denial is dangerous, Graham Thomson, Dec 10 2009.

Mankind-caused or not, it is a reality that must be faced

The danger for politicians trying to be all things to all people is they risk end up being nothing to anybody.

Take, for example, the recent policy announcement on climate change by Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith. It is a statement that dances around every conceivable angle on climate change so that Smith doesn't have to take a position on the issue herself.

You think global warming is real? You may be right, according to Smith.

You think it's man-made? Hmm. You may be right, too.

You think it's not real and the climate is actually cooling? Well, you may be right on that, too.

"There are at least eight positions I have read," says Smith. "Some scientists say that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are causing global warming and the effects will be catastrophic (1), some say the effects will be moderate (2), some say they will be mild (3), some say it will be beneficial (4).Some say there is nothing we can do about it so we should adapt (5).Some say the cost of trying to do something is too high and we would be better off dealing with pressing environmental issues (6).Some say it is natural, and being caused by solar flaring (7).Some say we have actually entered a period of global cooling that began in 1998 (8). It is quite clear to me the science on this issue is not settled."

Actually, the preponderance of science from credible experts is that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans and it poses a serious threat to millions if not billions of people. That is why 192 countries have sent delegations to the Copenhagen conference to figure out how to deal with the problem, not because they want a two-week vacation in Denmark in December, and not because they are part of a global conspiracy to siphon money from the Alberta oilsands.

For Smith to say there are eight positions on climate change is not just misleading but disingenuous. She is hiding behind a smokescreen that is raised by those who want to delay or avoid taking significant action. Her statement misrepresents the scientific consensus surrounding man-made climate change and elevates discredited arguments about climate cooling to the same level as respected science. Even skeptics who question whether humans are behind global warming at least acknowledge the climate is getting warmer, a fact underlined this week by 160 years worth of temperature records from the U.K.'s Meteorological Office supported by the U.S. National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA is hardly a bastion of climate conspiracists).

"These figures highlight that the world continues to see global temperature rise, most of which is due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and clearly shows that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed," said the Met Office.

These days Smith is trying to position herself and her party as moderate conservatives. However, by disregarding the science of climate change and lumping the global cooling myth into her argument Smith risks painting herself as the most extreme of climate-change deniers.

By comparison, the Alberta government begins to look like Greenpeace. If Smith keeps this up we'll have Environment Minister Rob Renner unfurling banners from the High Level Bridge and hanging from the rafters at Wildrose Alliance conferences.

Smith would do better to follow the lead of Alberta's own climate change experts, such as the University of Calgary's David Keith -- a hard-nosed scientific pragmatist who is as crusty with Greenpeace as he is with climate-change deniers. This week, he wrote an opinion piece for Alberta newspapers on the dangers of climate-change denial to Alberta's economy.

"The culture of climate science denial runs deep in Alberta," writes Keith. "In part, denial arises from a healthy dose of skepticism for multinational entities such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); for overhyped nonsense from the some in the environmental community suggesting that global warming poses an existential threat to humanity; and for overreaching environmental bureaucrats in Europe who imagine that they can impose their solution on the world. But most denial is, I suspect, rooted in the perceived self-interest of a province dominated by oil and gas.

"I share the skepticism of bureaucracy. And I share the self-interest: oil and gas revenues drive this city (Calgary) and, through taxes, pay my salary as a professor.

"If Alberta digs in to defend our oil and gas industry against change to the bitter end, then the landing will be a hard crash. We have a better chance of leaving a healthy economy to our kids if we take the facts as they are and shape our strategy around them, a strategy that gives Alberta the best chance in a carbon-constrained future."

Keith's editorial was not aimed at Danielle Smith specifically, but it nonetheless contains sage advice.

"Leaders do not win battles in business or war by fooling themselves about reality. Ignorance is dangerous, wilful ignorance doubly so."



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Marina Silva: fracasso em Copenhague é tão grave quanto o Holocausto, Veja, 17 de Dezembro de 2009.

COPENHAGUE (AFP) - A ex-ministra do Meio Ambiente Marina Silva pediu nesta quinta-feira que os líderes mundiais não saiam de Copenhague sem um compromisso porque um fracasso da reunião será tão grave quanto a escravidão e o Holocausto, segundo declarações feitas à margem da cúpula.

"É preciso impedir que os líderes deixem Copenhague sem o compromisso necessário para salvar nosso planeta", afirmou a ex-ministra.

"Um fracasso ao final da rodada de negociações será tão grave quanto a escravidão ou Holocausto", acrescentou a ecologista e possível candidata à presidência brasileira.

Como a escravidão e o Holocausto, "os perigos da mudança climática são fatos tão graves que não podem ser castigados ou perdoados", insistiu.

"Se formos embora de Copenhague sem acordo, será algo da mesma ordem que esses males, o mal absoluto", concluiu.