Changing the Menu

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fedele-bauccio/combating-climate-change_b_546373.html

There are many habits that we can change to make a positive impact on the environment including changes to our diet:

•“Minimize food waste and take only what you will eat (food sitting in landfills emits harmful methane gas).

•Eat more seasonal and regional foods since they are less likely to have been air-freighted to you. It can be as simple as topping a sandwich with grilled onions rather than out-of-season tomatoes.

•Limit beef and cheese consumption (since the ruminant animals these foods come from emit methane gas).

•If it's processed or packaged, try to skip it. This kind of food takes a lot of energy to produce, and often, the packaging is wasteful.”

Honestly, I have yet to adjust my own habits to these recommendations. Nonetheless, it is something to strive for.

Canada: Government Inaction

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Where+climate+change+leaders/2917736/story.html

On Canada’s political leaders’ inaction on climate change:

“Andrew Weaver first has to stifle a laugh when he's asked about the state of political leadership in this country on confronting climate change.

Weaver is a doctor of climatology and heads the climate modelling group at the University of Victoria. "There is a void federally in terms of any significant leadership, that's pretty clear," he says when he regains composure.

The laugh as much as the statement sums up the general view in environmental circles. Environmentalists say there is political leadership in some quarters on the climate-change issue, albeit tentative and insufficient to meet the looming challenge, however it tends to fade the higher you get on the political ladder until at the top, occupied by Stephen Harper's Conservative government, it practically disappears altogether.

"From a climate-change perspective, Canada is now pretty much the worst country in the industrialized world," said Graham Saul, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, the local branch of the global network of 500 environmental activist organizations.

"What we see in Canada is a leadership in government that is actually going backwards on the issue."

Climate Action ranks Canada second to last among countries surveyed on its global climate performance index, just ahead of Saudi Arabia and last among the world's 10 top greenhouse-gas emitters. But then Canada is only among the worst of a deplorable lot; the organization left the top three spots on its ranking vacant because "none of the countries analyzed is contributing sufficiently on a practical level to the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change."

The general dearth of global leadership was epitomized by the failure of last year's United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen to agree on concerted, meaningful greenhouse- gas curbs.

The Harper government's first action on climate change after it was elected four years ago was to flatly renounce Canada's commitment to meet the Kyoto Protocol for emissions reduction. That move reflected the prevailing Conservative ideological view that the climate-change threat is overblown, but was at least more up-front than the Liberals were while in government, when they did little until too late as Canadian emissions steadily increased until it was gobsmacking obvious that there was no hope of meeting the Kyoto target.

After fudging around on the issue for some years, the government has most recently set a target of a 20-per- cent greenhouse-gas reduction by 2020. Environmentalists maintain that this is gravely insufficient, that it should be at the very least 25 per cent and more properly 40 per cent to adequately counter the climate-change threat. "It appears that the government's strategy is to do as little as possible," said Saul.

The government counters that it is doing as much as is reasonably possible in the country's best interest.

"The primary consideration in framing our strategy for climate change and the environment has been economic reality," said federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice recently. "It's all very easy to toss around targets, but we've done the analysis. Some of the targets that people are pushing cannot be achieved without inordinate economic costs and our government is not prepared to take those costs on."
The stirrings of climate-change leadership among the federal opposition are noted, but these, too, are generally judged too feeble by environmentalists. This week, an NDP sponsored Climate Change Accountability Act was passed by the House of Commons with the minority-government members voting solidly against and the three opposition parties unanimously in favour. It sets a reduction target of 80 per cent by 2050 and calls on the government for a regular accounting of its climate-change action.

The same day, a Liberal-sponsored motion was passed, again by combined opposition vote, calling for a national action plan on climate change and a first ministers conference devoted to the issue within 90 days. "The country has to move forward on climate change and at the moment we're not. We need action now," said Liberal environment critic David McGuinty in putting the motion.

But while it's encouraging to see the Liberals, the only viable national governing alternative, gathering their hind legs on the issue, it is noted that the Liberal position today is far less progressive and courageous that the party's Green Shift policy, under previous leader Stéphane Dion, which boldly proposed an escalating carbon tax. The policy was scrapped by current leader Michael Ignatieff when he took over after the Liberals' disastrous finish in the 2008 election when they suffered their lowest vote share in more than a century.

"The Liberals under Michael Ignatieff have really refused to get their teeth into the climate-change question. They've refused to take a position on any target up to now, literally this week," said David Martin, climate and energy co-ordinator for Greenpeace Canada. The 80-per-cent target looks ambitious, he said, but 2050 is a long way off. "What's missing is a medium-term target, which is really where the rubber hits the road."

The Liberals were understandably spooked by the pasting they took running on a carbon tax in the last election, but the environmental view is not that the policy was bad, but rather that it was defeated by poor salesmanship and the extenuating circumstance of the concurrent global financial meltdown that posed a more immediate and palpable threat to Canadians than Arctic ice melt.

"It was a combination of the effectiveness of the Conservative campaign and Mr. Dion's ineffectiveness in communicating his plan," said Sierra Club Canada director John Bennett. "He's a great guy and he was an effective environment minister in his time, but he just couldn't articulate the position clearly enough."

Some provincial governments have led where federal governments have feared to tread since the climate-change issue arose. Both Quebec and British Columbia have grasped the political nettle of carbon taxing and won subsequent elections.

In 2006, the Quebec Liberal government imposed a tax of just under one cent a litre on petroleum companies, too little, it is estimated, to make much discernible impact on consumption, but nevertheless groundbreaking in North America. Gordon Campbell's B.C. Liberal government, which tends to be of more conservative bent than the federal Liberal Party, followed two years later with a significantly bolder policy that put an escalating tax on greenhouse-gas emissions and imposed a 2.4-cent tax - now raised to 3.6 cents - on gasoline at the pump.

The carbon tax was a major issue in last year's B.C. election in which the Liberals were elected in majority for a third term, in large thanks to environmentalist support that swung over from the provincial NDP, which uncharacteristically opposed the tax. "You could argue that the reason the B.C. government is in place is precisely because they gained the environmental vote," said Weaver.

A number of factors are cited that discourage high-level political leadership on climate change, or enable its abdication: insufficient public pressure on politicians, the complexity of the issue and the seeming remoteness of the climate threat, the prevalence of economic considerations at election time, the fragmentation of the environmental vote among four opposition parties and North American political culture in general.

Environmentalists note that the Harper government was elected with a mere 36 per cent of the popular vote, which means nearly two thirds of Canadians voted for parties - the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Greens - with more progressive climate change policies than the Tories. "Part of the problem is that we get governments supported by not much more than a third of the population," said Weaver. "Clearly some sort of electoral reform is called for."

Another problem, he suggests, is that the full benefits of climate change action in the present day lie in a distant future on a political time scale. "It's fundamentally about generational equity, doing something for future generations. It's not something they'd be doing for themselves in their political lifetime. It's about the effects down the road."

North Americans, including Canadians, are generally more resistant to big-government intervention, said Matthew Branley, the Pembina Institute's climate change director. "There tends to be more cultural acceptance of that in some European countries and this explains to some extent why we've done so much less."

Polls persistently show that a strong majority of Canadians are environmentally disposed and conscious of the global warming threat. A recent Harris-Decima survey for Toronto's Munk Centre found two-thirds of Canadians agree that climate change is the planet's defining challenge. "But there hasn't really been enough of a public outcry," said Earth Day Canada president Jed Goldberg. "It's one thing to say that you have a concern about something, and another to scream and yell about it. In the absence of some kind of real public pressure on the government, I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of response."

He acknowledged that it is to be fully expected that economic worries will trump environmental concerns as tends to be the case at election times. "It's human nature that you react to the issue that has the most direct impact on you. If people are losing jobs, if they're squeezed financially and don't how they're going to make their rent or mortgage payments, then that becomes their primary concern and everything else becomes secondary."

While he is brutal in his take on today's Conservative administration, Saul praises former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney for pushing the Americans to deal with acid rain two decades ago, unlike the Harper government which maintains Canada must realistically be in lockstep with the U.S. on climate policy.

"Mulroney actually started doing things. He went to Washington and said that we have a problem and in Canada we're doing x, y and z and we need you to do a, b and c. He didn't just sit on his hands and wait for the U.S. to show leadership. He started action at home then went down there and said, 'You need to come with me.' That's what leadership looks like."

Good policy should make for good politics, though that's not necessarily the case as the Liberal experience in the last election showed, said Désirée McGraw, co-founder of the Al Gore Climate Project in Canada who lectures on climate diplomacy at McGill University.

"When you have the right policy, you need to get the politics and the communications around it. That's where leadership comes in. It's not just about polls or reacting to where people want you to go. It's about leading people to where we need to go. Right now I see some at the sub-national level, some in the private sector, but it's disjointed and uneven. I certainly don't see it in government, which is where it counts."”

I don’t agree that action in the government is where it counts. They have proven themselves to be unreliable and there’s nothing to say that revolutionary action in the business world could lead to improvements in Canada’s climate position. What needs to be done is to unite the major businesses in their efforts to combat climate change so that it is no longer ‘disjointed and uneven’. Business can send a message to government that something must be done on climate change. Not the other way around.

Many Canadians Sceptical on Climate Change

http://www.straight.com/article-317681/vancouver/its-time-clear-your-climate-change-confusion

Rebeka Ryvola writes on the troubling fact that many Canadians remain sceptical towards man-made climate change and the campaign of misinformation that has led to this perception:

“Our climate is warming at unprecedented rates, but Canadians are not moved to take action. Climate change is causing everything from species extinctions and rising sea levels to ocean acidification and water and food shortages. Yet, we continue to live our lives like nothing is wrong. We are not acknowledging the role we are playing in creating these threats to humankind and the Earth.

The reason for this inaction is a scary one: many Canadians do not believe that current climate change is human-caused. Even the most apparent climate-change impacts are being brushed aside, chalked up to mere natural processes. This way of thinking exists because the fossil-fuel industry has expended huge amounts of money and effort to fabricate the “other side” of the climate-change controversy.

The scientific research behind the climate change is real and indisputable among the world’s experts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leads the way in amassing research done by scientists all around the globe. The reputable IPCC prides itself on processing research and providing an understanding of climate change and how it is altering our Earth. The IPCC is open to all contributions of valid research and yet no research has been presented which refutes that we are rapidly altering our atmosphere.

On the one side of the debate is the IPCC and many other well-intentioned organizations standing for fast action against human-induced climate change. On the flip side, we have various scientists and organizations operating out of fossil-fuel industry pockets. These “climate skeptics” are able to paint a very convincing picture of a scientific disagreement on the causes of climate change. The oil and gas giants have good reasons to be funding massively misleading campaigns of trickery: their money is made extracting and selling harmful fossil fuels. They depend on public consumption of their product. In one case, a fossil fuel-funded “scientific” organization, the Information Council on the Environment, spent $500,000 on a campaign to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”. Climate misinformation campaigns permeate media all around us; newspapers, television, and the Internet all present us with a false two-sided climate debate.

Since most of us are not scientists ourselves, it is difficult to know what exactly we should be asking of the information that comes our way. The idea that the climate skeptics are on a level playing field with peer-reviewed scientific research is ludicrous. The IPCC and the majority of the globe’s scientists devote their life to tireless work that broadens our understanding of the world we live in. The skeptics, deniers, and oil-funded scientists have a shady agenda of deception. When we see how wildly unbalanced the two “sides” are, it becomes obvious that a valid scientific disagreement does not exist.

Now is the first time in history that we can use our technology and intelligence to predict what the future of our Earth will look like—and, without serious change, this future does not look good. The scientific consensus is that we are rapidly sliding down a slippery slope. We have evidence that shows us we need change and we have the technology required to make it. It is time to make critical decisions that will impact all future generations.

You are now aware that climate misinformation campaigns exist. Take it upon yourself to question your sources. Challenge, research, and think critically about all that is presented to you. Once we see past the phony skeptics, we can begin to make lifestyle adjustments. We can start to vote with our dollar, and demand our politicians lead the way. We need to see clearly for each other, for the future, and for all the other living things on Earth that are waiting anxiously for us to determine their fates.”

Canadians need to take the time to research climate change, to see the evidence themselves. Otherwise, many will continue to buy into the testimony of one scientist motivated by contributions from organizations who have an interest in perpetuating the climate sceptic movement.

Misleading Polls and the Result of Balance in the Media

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/18/opinion/main6409392.shtml

Mark Hertsgaard writes on how a misreading on polling data and media misinformation is affecting the American government’s reaction to climate change:
“Mark Twain famously said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. He could just as easily have included polls.

Advocates across the political spectrum habitually cite polls to "prove" that the public holds a certain view of a given issue, even when the truth is more complicated or even contradictory. This appears to be happening with the climate issue. As the Obama administration and Congressional leaders prepare to introduce new climate legislation, mainstream media have given fresh prominence to deniers' claims of fraud and rampant error on the part of climate scientists. Meanwhile, surveys by Gallup and other leading pollsters are being spun as evidence that the deniers are gaining ground among the public, which is supposedly divided over whether to take action against rising temperatures and the droughts, storms and sea-level rise they trigger.

A closer look, however, suggests that public opinion has changed very little. What has changed is the message coming from the media, key parts of which have reverted to their longstanding posture of scientific illiteracy and de facto complicity with the deniers' disinformation campaign.

This abuse of polling data has a long pedigree. As a young reporter in the 1980s researching the book On Bended Knee, I watched the Reagan White House use polls to make fools of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. Reagan's advisers were forever citing polls supposedly demonstrating that the Gipper was wildly popular and thus that anyone who criticized him was taking a political risk. The truth was rather less flattering. Yes, Reagan was personally popular--most Americans thought he was a nice guy--but that had been true of almost all presidents.

Ask Americans about Reagan's policies, however, and many were indeed unhappy with his trickle-down economics and bellicose foreign policy. Nevertheless, most news organizations and Congressional Democrats swallowed the White House spin and pulled their punches. As a result, Reagan escaped sharp and sustained criticism from the opposition party and the press for most of his presidency.

Today, a similar gullibility and misreading of polls is playing into the hands of climate change deniers.

The campaign to deny the science behind man-made climate change, which seemed to be losing steam a year ago, has resurged in recent months, thanks to high-profile media coverage of stolen e-mails from a British climate unit and of trivial errors in the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are no longer the only major outlets trumpeting such charges. The New York Times, whose veteran climate reporter, Andrew Revkin, retired in December, has subsequently run two front-page stories suggesting that the science behind climate change may not be settled after all.

The Times's February 9 article "U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility" quoted not a single mainstream climate scientist in support of its headline, noted Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress, whose new book, Straight Up, blasts the media and deniers alike for misrepresenting climate science. Robert Brulle, a communications expert at Drexel University, accused the Times of becoming "an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement." The deniers' agenda has been further advanced by unquestioning coverage of polls by Gallup, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and other survey groups that claim to demonstrate growing public skepticism about climate change. Gallup's poll, released on March 11 and publicized internationally by Reuters, said that 48 percent of Americans now regard fears of climate change as "generally exaggerated."

All this has led environmentalists and climate deniers to assume that getting strong climate legislation through Congress will be even harder this year than last, when the weak Waxman-Markey bill barely passed the House before languishing in the Senate. Dig deeper, though, and this assumption crumbles like day-old coffee cake.

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who has been surveying Americans' views on climate change since 1995, says that, in fact, Americans remain overwhelmingly convinced that man-made climate change is happening and must be confronted. "The media is sensationalizing these polls to make it sound like the public is backing off its belief in climate change, but it's not so," argues Krosnick, who delivered a paper on the subject at an American Meteorological Association briefing in Washington a day after the Gallup poll was released. Krosnick says that Americans' views have remained quite stable over the past ten years and that in November 2009--the very time the media were full of stories about the stolen British e-mails--a whopping 75 percent of Americans said they believed that global temperatures are going up.

Krosnick, whose academic specialty is the wording of survey questions, suspects his colleagues at Gallup and elsewhere have gotten misleading results because of the way they worded their questions: their phrasing ended up testing whether Americans believed in the science of climate change rather than the phenomenon of climate change. "Most people's opinions are based not on science but on what they experience in their daily lives," Krosnick told me. "So our surveys ask people if they have heard about the idea that temperatures have been going up over the past 100 years and if they agree with this idea."

The 75 percent of Americans who answered yes to that question amounts to "a huge number," says Krosnick--a far higher level of agreement than pertains on most political issues. Where climate change deniers have had an effect, he adds, is in reducing, to 31 percent, the number of Americans who think all scientists agree about climate change. "But most Americans have thought that [scientists don't all agree on climate change] for the entire fifteen years I've been polling on this issue," adds Krosnick--further tribute, it seems, to the media's longstanding habit of giving a handful of deniers prominence equal to the vast majority of scientists who affirm climate change.

Even if Krosnick is right that ordinary Americans' opinions have not changed much, it would be a mistake to conclude that the recent polls and media coverage have had no political effect. As the Reagan example illustrates, the public can hold one opinion--that Reagan's policies were unwelcome--but that opinion may have little practical effect if the governing elite in Washington believes something different. "It's not just a question of the media mischaracterizing the public's views about climate change," says Krosnick. "It is also that, because of this perception, legislators may turn against voting for climate bills they believe would be good for the country."

An assumption of lackluster public support for strong climate action may explain recent Obama administration retreats on the forthcoming climate bill. In an apparent effort to entice a few Rust Belt Democrats and less doctrinaire Republicans to back the Senate bill being co-sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, Connecticut independent Joseph Lieberman and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, the White House has endorsed an Energy Department request for an estimated $36 billion in new loan guarantees for nuclear power plants as well as a resumption of offshore oil drilling along the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts.

More nuclear plants would do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while resumed drilling would actually increase them, but the administration evidently believes that such is the price of attracting the sixty Senate votes needed to overcome the predictable Republican filibuster.

"I've worked on energy issues in Washington for seventeen years, and I've never seen such strong opposition from the polluters as we face now," says Anna Aurillio, director of Environment America's Washington office. "They're putting unprecedented amounts of money and effort into this fight because they know that if we get a bill through Congress, this president will sign it." At press time, the specifics of the Senate bill had not yet been released, but the battle to make the bill match rather than dodge the science of climate change will clearly be titanic.

It will not be won if the deniers' narrative--that climate science is dubious and Americans don't really want action--is allowed to stand. Now is the time for journalists to get the story right and for ordinary citizens to speak out, loudly, to stiffen lawmakers' spines. Says Aurillio, "We need sixty senators to be convinced by the public, not the polluters, to do what's necessary to solve this problem.””
The problem with relying on members of the media for coverage of scientific issues is that they strive to take a non-bias approach. In non-scientific cases this is perfectly acceptable. The problem though is that science is not concerned with bias. The sceptics do have a right to free speech, of course. It is then the duty of the members of the media to inform the people that the arguments of the sceptics are not supported by science. It is not being biased. It is telling the truth based on evidence.

Poor Outlook for Climate Change Legislation Under Obama

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0419/1224268630412.html

Don’t count on the U.S. making progress on a climate change bill anytime soon:
“The author of a book on climate change says the US is unlikely to pass legislation this year, writes Frank McDonald , Environment Editor

NOT EVEN a “watered down” version of the climate change and energy Bill before the US Senate is likely to be passed this year because of “entrenched opposition from deniers and sceptics”, according to American author Howard Friel.

Friel, who spoke at a Trinity Week event in Trinity College Dublin on the theme What will the world be like in 10 years’ time? said in an interview with The Irish Times that he had also lost faith in President Barack Obama’s ability to set the climate agenda in the US.”

Anyone who actually expects Obama to make effective progress on climate change is overly optimistic. The healthcare debate showed just how easy it is to work up the oppositions and fill their minds with imaginary fears. Both sides of the aisle agreed there were problems with the healthcare system but the division was so deep that it led to fierce debate. Imagine then, the opposition that will be born as a result of a government proposal to combat a threat many believe to be a hoax. I haven’t lost faith in Obama on climate change, I’m not sure I had it in the first place.

Christian Attacks Environmentalism: Destroys Irony Metre

http://www.rightsidenews.com/201004199638/editorial/the-high-holy-day-of-the-environmental-religion.html

I have argued that at times environmentalism feels like the new religion though I try to base that on the fanaticism apparent in some of the more extreme factions of the environmental movement, unlike the following article:

“Though touted as, somehow, NEW, worship of the earth is likely the oldest religion on earth. Born of child-like ignorance, it has survived centuries and is, once again, robust and thriving among those people of earth who have lost their way and have reclaimed this form of paganism at the risk of their eternal souls.

I must tell you, I question whether one who subscribes to the Christian faith can take part in a pagan rite without committing sin. The Earth Day celebration is, in my opinion, a pagan rite. Celebrants of paganism can only be in league with the forces of evil.

But here we are, this week, celebrating the annual, global, orgasmic, daisy chain of paganism -- Earth Day.

Paganism will be on display over the next several days. It is reminiscent of the days before civilization took root and the human animal began its assent from the caves and mud huts.”

Note the mention of “Christian faith”. I’ll wait for you to repair your irony metre. Have you fixed it? Ok, now read this:

“Our forsaking the worship of "the creator" in favor of the worship of "the created" is a cycle as old as man himself. And once again, we have circled back to the religion of our caveman ancestors.”

I apologize for causing the destruction of the irony metre once again.

Stop Waiting for the Government

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9F456EO0.htm

“Canada will not act this year on a cap-and-trade system to control climate change because the government does not expect the U.S. to pass emissions-control legislation this year, Canada's environment minister said Thursday.

Jim Prentice said Canada is committed to harmonizing its climate change initiatives with the United States so that it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions without damaging its trade relations with its southern neighbor.

"We have said that if the United States is prepared to go down the road of a cap-and-trade system, we are as well. We've done the analytics. We're set to go," he said.
"But at this point, my assessment is that it's unlikely that the U.S. Senate will introduce or pass cap-and-trade legislation this year, possibly, even unlikely, next year," said Prentice.

Under a cap-and-trade system, emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants, refineries and factories would face increasingly more stringent limits, or caps. Companies could then invest in pollution-reducing technologies, or buy and sell permits to meet the cap -- the trade portion.

The emissions-reduction plan is the cornerstone of the U.S. Democrats' climate-control policy, but is stalled in the U.S. Senate after it was passed in the House. Republican critics say it would lead to soaring energy prices, suppress economic recovery, cost jobs and result in higher prices on goods and services. Democratic argue that the bill contains measures to mitigate the cost to consumers by promoting energy efficiency and to develop alternative energy sources and "green" jobs.
Prentice said while Canada is committed to reducing its emissions, it will not introduce cap-and-trade legislation that is divorced from the country's principal environmental and economic partner.

He says Canada will instead focus on other measures that are not trade-sensitive, such as thermal electricity or improving treatment of waste water in cities.
At the same time, Canada will work together with the United States on regulatory measures, such as the recent agreement to cut auto emissions, Prentice said. He added that the two countries will soon introduce tougher standards for ships and aircraft as well.”

I wouldn’t hold out for the American government to get their act together on the cap-and-trade bill any time soon. While it’s encouraging to see that Canada will work with the U.S. to begin introducing other regulatory measures, the fact that we are forced to wait for the U.S. to make a decision regarding cap-and-trade is a sign of our over reliance on the Americans.

Business leaders on both sides of the border shouldn’t wait for governments to take action. A market implemented system between business partners could prove even more effective than any plan the government puts forth. Doing so could even allow businesses that get involved in a volunteer cap-and-trade system to be ahead of the competition if and when new rules are put out.