The phrase has been bandied about enough in the media recently regarding the Truscott fiasco, but I’ll admit that it doesn’t really apply to the stories I’m bringing up. These aren’t miscarriages of justice, they are full-on abortions - completely intentional, borne on the wings of spooky authoritarianism.

First up, are the agents provocateurs in Quebec. At a protest of the leaders summit in Montebello, Quebec, the police used two undercover police officers dressed as the perfect cliché of Black Bloc anarchists. Sticking out like sore thumbs in their ridiculous outfits, they proceeded to heft rocks and attempted to incite violence amongst the protesters so that the police could sweep out the lot of them.

Why isn’t this an enormous scandal? This calls for a national inquiry, and the fascists that perpetrated it need to be sacked. So much for democracy.

The next story isn’t quite so sensational, just offensive in a fundamental civil rights sort of way.

The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled it is lawful to seize property obtained through illegal activity even if the owner has not been convicted of a crime.Ontario’s Criminal Lawyers’ Association and Robin Chatterjee – a man on bail who had $29,000 in cash and some grow-op-style gear confiscated after he was stopped by York Region police in 2003 while driving without a front licence plate – argued the seizure was unconstitutional.

While the money, lights, and exhaust fan smelled of marijuana, no drugs were found and Chatterjee was never charged with any narcotics offence.

Still, police and the province were successful in taking away his property.

No crime, no warrant, nor even any probable cause apparently means ‘no problem’ when it comes to the seizure of private property. My friend Pavel will have a field day with this one, I’m sure.

I briefly caught some of a documentary on TV that was describing some of the sources of groundwater contamination, including some that you probably wouldn’t think of. Cemetaries, apparently, are a major source of long-term pollution, as all kinds of tasty embalming agents and other nasty chemicals leech out into the soil for years after people are buried. I’ve always marvelled at the tremendous amount of land wasted for cemetaries, to say nothing of the immense amount of groundskeeping necessary to keep them looking pretty. Groundwater contamination seems to be another nail in the coffin (har har).

So when I die, burn me for fuel, compost me, or grind me up and leave me at the curb in the green bin - just don’t inhume me.

If you hadn’t realized it, the commercial production of meat is one of the most wasteful systems in our society. How wasteful? It turns out that if you’re eating the typical American diet, the food you’re consuming has twice as many embodied fossil fuels as a vegetarian diet, roughly the equivalent of driving an extra 11 miles every day.

Doesn’t sound like that much? Put another way, it is actually more energy efficient to drive than it is to walk if the calories you burn are coming from that meat-rich diet. How’s that for a mindfuck?

(some more detailed information and sources, here)

So I’m writing from Chicago (an amazing city with a lot to teach Toronto - more about this to come) and I just found it mindblowing how xenophobic the American border guard was on my way here. I wasn’t sure which American city I would be departing from, so I only bought a one way from Toronto to Detroit to start my trip. Anyway, this raised a lot of interest at the border, and I proceeded to listen to a ten minute lecture about the “fucking illegals taking over this country”, about all the crime, the poverty, the terrorism, that has resulted since “we started letting those fucking immigrants into our country”. It was quite the experience. At risk of sounding too repetitive (the whole lecture was the same three points repeated over and over), I’ll end by saying I got a great reaction when I told the guard I was an American citizen as well.

One of the few pictures that I took in Cuba that I like. I may post a few others, eventually.

Rich ‘can pay poor to cut carbon,’ says Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The jist of the article is that instead of making up our share of emissions reductions to meet international guidelines on time, wealthy nations could buy carbon offsets from developing nations instead.

Yvo’s blurb has a lot of environmentalists up in arms, calling it yet another way for us Westerners to pass the buck on sustainable development. There’s a lot of controversy about carbon offsetting, and while I agree that for the most part it’s a dangerously shortsighted policy that perpetuates the status quo (and often is improperly counted in the first place), I think that in this case there may be legitimate potential for good.

De Boer’s suggestion may initially sound offensive, but he does have a valid point when he says “The atmosphere does not care where emissions are reduced as long as they are reduced.” While in the long term it is of paramount importance that Western nations significantly cut their emissions, a dollar spent now in China, India, or Nigeria to improve efficiency and clean up infrastructure will buy more carbon than that same dollar spent in the US. In this case, it’s a win/win situation - Western nations can still reduce the net emission of carbon, while developing nations get subsidies for developing modern, sustainable infrastructure that could also improve quality of life.

While it all sound very good on paper, the perilous part of the arrangement is that it may ultimately push us past the threshold of no return if improvements aren’t made to Western infrastructure in the meantime. Should this scheme go forward, I’m not sure if there will ever be the political will here to force the inevitable ‘big squeeze’ in per capita emissions needed in order to achieve carbon parity with the rest of the world.

Thoughts?

Besides the occasional random stuff, the themes I post about inevitably end up being either sustainability or social justice. At the moment, I’m profoundly optomistic about the former, and seriously doubtful about the latter. Here’s why:

A great deal of sustainable development has to do with improving efficiency. While conservation is important - and by far the easiest path to sustainability - efficiency is, at its basis, about getting more ‘out’ from less ‘in.’ Not only does it reduce the load on the environment, efficiency improvements almost always end up paying dividends economically in the long term. Sustainable policies makes eminent business sense, which is why I suspect that more and more will be adopted; and sooner rather than later.

The same cannot be said about social justice. With the exception of the bottom-of-the-pyramid theory that sees the billions of poor people in the world as the biggest market niche ever ignored, it takes a lot more creativity to find ways to make money by helping people. While some new business models are embracing emerging technologies to do just that, the economic incentive is much harder to see, and without that, nothing is going to happen on any significant scale.

It may just be the cynicism of our generation, but I find that altruism (be it social, environmental, or whatever) too often gets pegged as stemming from guilt. “I have so much, and that homeless guy has so little, so [even if he doesn't deserve it] I should give him something,” is the typical line of thought. The same mentality might be applied to the Prius driver, obviously abashed by his country’s obsession with gas-guzzlers.

While I won’t deny that this is probably the motivation for some, on a fundamental level I’d like to think it’s rooted in something much more hopeful. In all my naive optomism, I can’t help but feel that a world that is better for everyone is…well, better for everyone. Including (maybe even especially) the wealthiest. If those that are poorest gain the ability to grow beyond mere subsistence, while on an individual relative level they may still be desperately poor, in aggregate they represent a staggering potential market. While it feels terrifically crass to position the argument that way, I’m mostly just trying to say that life is not a zero sum game. Clichéd though it may be, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Besides all that, I would be lying if I said that my beliefs weren’t a little bit selfish - if we ever do reach a point where we no longer need to worry about satisfying the basic needs of life (not just human life, at that) who knows what we’ll be able to achieve. When it comes time that we can strive together towards something (anything!) with some real meaning, I fully intend to be there, and any petty luxuries I might sacrifice in the meantime start to pale in comparison pretty quickly.

Another article, called The Truth About Denial, this time regarding global warming.

Current pollsters indicate that the average person still thinks that there’s significant scientific controversy over global warming. While Mr. Gore tried to rebuke that in An Inconvenient Truth by pointing to actual scientific papers, of course he’d say that, what with his agenda* and all, right?

The article’s a bit of a long one, but it’s an interesting trip through the politicization of the global warming debate. Just goes to show what a few (hundred million) well-placed lobby dollars can do to essentially create an entirely independant reality with little bearing to our own.

Little dose of reality, just to help you sleep at night:

This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It’s enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.

* Such a dirty word, isn’t it?

It’s a question I’m sure plenty of people are asking, in both high (i.e. business interests) and low (i.e. hippies like me) places, so I figured I’d weigh in with my opinion on it. At the moment, I’d like to make the tentative judgement that sustainability is in for the long haul - at least, longer than it ever has in the past. Modern environmentalism in various forms has, after all, been around since backlash to the Industrial Revolution, sporadically re-igniting every few decades with the advent of a new crisis to fight (e.g. pesticides in the 60s, endangered species in the 70s, the ozone hole in the 80s) so it may be risky to suggest that this time around it’s something special.

But that’s exactly what I think. While the driving point for the latest environmental crisis is ostensibly still in contention (at least among non-scientists, right?), the fact of the matter is, it is a bigger issue than has ever been brought up before. Climate change may not turn out to be as bad as feared, but it could also be far worse than simulated - that unpredictability combined with the incomprehensibly massive scope of the problem makes for a looming phantom considerably more terrifying than the relatively certain misery caused by pesticides.

On top of, and thoroughly intertwined with, global warming is the matter of peak oil. While that issue merits a whole other post (or ten), it can’t be denied that the mindblowing growth of China and India is going to put immense strain on all our natural resources, and if coal turns out to be the last resort, we’re definitely doomed - we need alternatives if we plan on any sort of future.

(This one’s going to go long, so follow the link for more of my rant-y goodness.)

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