Who do we talk to about getting Lake Superior back?

So apparently Lake Superior is a meter below it's annual average this year, according to this CBC Radio piece. (WMV link. Start listening about 15:30.) Given that we're talking about the largest source of freshwater in the world, that's enough water, the piece says, to keep Canada slaked for a decade. And it's going away.

Have I mentioned there's a really dumb idea out there to send water from the Great Lakes to the American Southwest? Any chance I'll be able to win my ecology back at the blackjack tables in Vegas?

The suspects for this recent drop in water levels are more diverse than usual -- global warming for sure, but it's also being blamed on overzealous dredging in the St. Clair River, apparently. Basically, somebody deepened a channel between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, and now apparently all the lakes from Detroit on up are draining much faster than previous.

Which wouldn't be a good thing at the best of times, but when you combine drier summers and warmer winters it means the rivers which feed Lake Superior have dwindled, too. So water's rushing out and not being replaced quickly enough.

All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that Bill Richardson may be right on the war, but sending water from the Great Lakes south so that people in Las Vegas can have larger pools is insanity. And my other favourite Democratic governor of a border state agrees.

We need to start thinking about different ways of doing things with water, just like we need to start thinking about different ways of using energy. And a big one is going to be "stop creating permanent settlements in a desert, people!" Barring that, if America isn't smart enough to put together solar-thermal power and seawater desalination, I don't see why the Northeast should be dried out for a Southwest that's already a desert.

Fred Pearce did a really, really good book about the global water problems we're facing, but one of the most interesting bits in it was the (apparently not new) concept of "virtual water", where economists talk about the amount of water embodied in, say, a T-shirt made from cotton in Egypt or Russia or whatever. Basically, some countries are massive water exporters depending on the products they sell, while others are massive water importers. The "water" can be bound up in finished products, or simple crops like tomatoes or alfalfa.

It would be interesting to look at something like ethanol or tar sands oil and see the amount of virtual water Canada exports to the US as oil.

Terrifying Bedtime Reading

Carbon Equity has a report out that summarizes the summer's horrifying news from the Arctic, and makes some conclusions. First, a picture:



That thick black line is the observed reality, plumetting below all the predictions. I've copy-pasted their executive summary below, but you should really just spare a few minutes and read the whole PDF here.

• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than projected.

• The Arctic's floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.

• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise in sea levels by even as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.

• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously believed.

• Long-term climate sensitivity (including "slow" feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.

• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of "dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.

• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than "business-as-usual", the most pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.

• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.

• We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner.

• The object of policy-relevant advice must be to avoid unacceptable outcomes and seemingly extreme or alarming possibilities, not to determine just the apparently most likely outcome.

• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of species as a death sentence.

• To allow the reestablishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice it is likely to be necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5°C (a long-term precautionary warming cap) and for the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium to be brought down to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 ppm CO2e.

• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.

Fox News = MiniTru

In the segment, Neil Cavuto hosted New York Sun editor Seth Lipsky, whose paper ran an editorial this week saying that Petraeus deserved the [NOBEL FUCKING PEACE] prize for his attempts to “save the nation of Iraq.” Lipsky said that Petraeus “deserves” the award “as a representative of G.I. Joe” because American troops “go overseas to liberate, they go overseas to make peace.” He then added that the use of “fighting” in a war doesn’t undermine the “idealism” of the Nobel Prize...

Oh good God my eyes are bleeding. Make it stop.

Let's wander a bit...

Jerome a Paris has an interesting piece on energy deregulation. Basically, the CATO institute (!) has come out against energy deregulation. Jerome comes to the conclusion:

Which means, as the CATO writers conclude, that in a really, really free market, players would end up with something that would look amazingly similar to a fully regulated market, based on long term contracts and smoothed out price formulas.

So why bother with deregulation? To be sure that the choice they make is actually that one? As they point out, deregulation has been botched, incoherent and/or inconsistent every single time it has been tried, for various reasons. The time spent to get to a perfect "free market" has actual costs in real life, and it is worth asking if they are worth paying.

Re-regulate. Even CATO points that way.

Sean Casten, at Gristmill, disagrees. But it's a mark of how bad the history of energy deregulation is that I think Casten makes a weak case -- and he's making one of the strongest cases for deregulation that I've seen since Enron. It's an odd day for me -- choosing the nutbars at CATO over a co-blogger at Grist! Shocking!

What's more important than a relatively narrow regulate-or-don't debate is something else at Grist: David Roberts brings us this little gem: an experienced energy analyst arguing that the primary choice for energy is fundamentally political, not economic or technological. I'd like to highlight this part in particular:

All in all, what with assorted, perverse and often enormous subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear power, and more modest but more visible subsidies for renewables; with inadequate accounting for risks; and with arbitrary and distorted provisions for externalities, only one conclusion can be drawn. As far as comparative costs are concerned, the choice of generation is political, not economic. Electricity costs stated as so many cents or pence per kilowatt-hour are just window-dressing after the fact, an artefact of prior decisions otherwise concealed.

Anybody, in any debate, will eventually try to tell you they've demonstrated an objective conclusion. This is possible, in some cases, but you've frequently got to call people on their bullshit. Energy is a perfect example. Any statement has to be prefaced with the assumptions. For example, any statement like "renewables are too expensive" or "coal is cheap" needs to be prefaced with the assumptions that coal will continue to be given subsidies by the bucketful, and that not only do we not put a price on pollution, but we'll continue to let polluters pollute for free forever.

There's a similar dynamic in politcal science, where International Relations scholars frequently bring up the idea of "national interest" without contextualizing it. For example, "it's in the US' national interest to keep forces in the Persian Gulf" that makes absolutely no sense unless you assume that the US has an interest in keeping oil flowing, and you believe that the US plays that role. If you disagree with either of those statements, then clearly the US doesn't need to be in the Gulf.

For example, there's good reason to believe that the Gulf oil producers would sell to whoever wanted their oil, regardless of US presence. Their populations are too large now, and their economies too dependent on oil exports, to cut off their noses for very long. Ergo, any military act to re-open the oil supplies would almost certainly be more expensive than the disruption caused by a cutoff. Doubly so, when you consider that strategic oil reserves are ubiquitous in the world today. Therefore, there's no US interest in keeping forces in the Persian Gulf.

And that's before we even get in to the question of whether the US "needs" oil in the first place!

So theorists -- political or economic -- who talk like this are doing a disservice to their fields. They're using the language of their fields to conceal reality, not illuminate it.

But back to energy: one of the things that intrigues me is how policy proposals in the US are rapidly catching up to the Kyoto-loving Liberal Party in Canada. You've got both Obama and Edwards putting forward very, very good proposals as far as cap-and-trade systems go, and some measures that in fact go further -- Edwards sorta-moratorium on coal plants is something that I think Dion would have a really, really hard time with.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, I watched during the election as the owner of Bruce Power claimed to be a "private businessman", and nobody called him a liar. His "assets" were built with public money, his access to the market (transmission lines) were built with public money and the use of state power in the form of eminent domain, he's got guaranteed insurance from the Province in case of an accident (something Ontario drivers can't get!) and his contracts with the government stipulate a guaranteed demand, regardless of market conditions. This, the fruits of Ontario's so-called privatization. (And yes, Bruce Power's been given a pretty shady handout from the Province. Journalism, anyone?)

Not to get back on an old argument, but this is where economics fails us. Economic arguments about whether nuclear will be more or less expensive than solar or wind are frankly meaningless. The first questions are political, not economic or technological: what forms of energy do we want for the future? Economics and technology are really secondary in this debate -- if we want solar and wind, there's really no question that we can make it affordable, especially once you start analyzing the assumptions behind our current system.

Jeebus

Scott Tribe, in comments:

Ian [Urquhart] in his email states that he believes that any form of PR is a cure worse then then disease.

Bad, bad people. I simply don't understand how a person could hold that belief.

Apparently, the rest of the industrialized world doesn't count, or has it plain wrong.

Congratulations

...to Al Gore, for driving the right-wing of US politics right off the deep end. Yes, they're comparing him to Yasir Arafat now.

Oh, also, way to go on that whole "winning the Nobel prize" thing.

Told Ya so

Ian Urquhart: "Let's hope this is last we hear of MMP".

Toronto Star editorial: "Ontario has now joined British Columbia and Prince Edward Island in rejecting proportional representation and choosing the status quo. That should be all the answer the advocates of electoral reform need."

You've got to love that -- BC voted more than 55% in favour of STV, but because it didn't meet the arbitrary level of support the government said was required, the Star describes it as "rejected". I'm beginning to wonder if the Star is even capable of not lying to it's readers on this issue.

And it's time to go back to bashing Ian Urquart:

This is a valid argument only if the principle of "proportionality" – that each party's seat count should be directly proportional to its popular vote – is seen as trumping all other concerns, including accountability, tradition, simplicity and stability.

Funny. Three of Urquhart's four concerns would be satisfied by a one-party state in some countries. In China, there's a long history of undemocratic rule, which is awfully simple and stable (6,000 years!) So: is Ian Urquhart three-quarters of a Communist?

And just to be clear, yes, Ian is opposed to any proportionality: "But, please, no more talk of MMP or its ilk." These are bad, bad people. They don't want any talk of silly concerns like voters getting the outcomes they vote for. Blech.

The end of reform

Scott and Rob both seem to think that there's going to be a next time with electoral reform even after the referendum got crushed yesterday. Uh, sure. Maybe by 2040 or so.

We've learned two things from this experience: First, nobody with a significant bullhorn in this Province is at all interested in substantial reform. Tinkering around the edges is permissible (fixed election dates! additional holidays!) but structural change is off the table. Secondly, all the arguments that were used against MMP will be used against any effort for reform -- I don't care what your preferred system is, they're going to hate it if it actually has any elements that make it substantially democratic.

Moreover -- and this is what really has me depressed -- nobody's going to talk about reform for the next election cycle at least. The results of this referendum are going to be used as an endorsement of the status quo for the next decade. Every time an activist or small party says "electoral reform", the answer is going to be "the people of Ontario already spoke on this issue in 2007, and clearly said they prefer the current system..."

Maybe, by the time I'm drawing a pension, I'll be able to vote in a system considered fair by the standards of the industrialized world. But today, I'm not feeling optimistic.

V-B Day!

My girlfriend just spent two minutes jumping around and cheering because she opened a beer bottle by herself.

Cheering. Because she opened a twist-off.

Never in the field of human conflict has someone been so proud for so little.

God help me, I cheered with her.

Election day!

Somehow, I almost feel sorry for John Tory. There's little evidence that he personally was a big fan of the disastrous school funding idea that ate his campaign. Rather, it was supposed to be red meat for the base so they felt that somebody up there still loved them.

Still, the effect is clear: Dude went from being Premier-presumptive to being Opposition-leader-presumptive to now not knowing if he's going to even win his own seat. Ouch. Now, unless there's a really weird hiccup in the polls, we're looking at a Liberal majority. The talk before the election was about whether or not there would be a Conservative majority, and I remember speaking with Liberals a year ago who were worried about that.

What's next for the Conservatives? I imagine, the old Harris caucus will demand a leader with more ideological purity, which normally I'd say was a death sentence for their party. Except, and this is where the next few years will be interesting, Dalton McGuinty is probably not going to run for a third government -- his sixth election! -- in 2011. Neither, I'm assuming, will Howard Hampton, meaning that in the next election all three major parties will have new leaders and not a single one of them has an heir-presumptive for the top post. The next few years are going to be very interesting as the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP all hold leadership campaigns -- probably all within the next two years, so they're ready for the election. (Journalists, clear your social calendars.)

Anyway, go vote. After all my whining about how my incumbent NDP MPP is going to for sure win, it looks like he's worried about something, based on the last-minute flurry of campaigning I'm seeing. Also, the Liberals seem to have gotten a second wind in my riding. Maybe the Greens are taking enough votes (like mine) that the Liberals are going to win it.

Why you should vote for MMP tomorrow

So I was out with friends on the weekend, and between the third or fourth round (it gets fuzzy) they started talking about the referendum tomorrow, and how they weren't sure which way they'd vote. And then one of my friends said, of me, "he's a real MMP partisan."

See, the funny thing is I'm not, really -- at least, not a partisan for MMP in particular. Over the years, I've been a fan of pure list proportional representation, Instant Runoff Voting, and all sorts of other systems. I'm not really picky in the end as to which system we choose, so long as we arrive at some measure of proportionality. Don't get me wrong -- I think MMP is a good choice, and better than some of the other possibilities, and I'll be voting for it happily and enthusiastically.

What's really animated me for the last few weeks is not, however, my enthusiasm for MMP. Rather, it's been the sloppiness and stupidity of the anti- side. I've already smacked around Murray Campbell and his idle thoughts about MMP bringing about an Islamic government. And, though this is clearly more arguable, I think I've presented a decent and honest argument for why List MPPs would be at least as legitimate as some of the current MPPs, who frequently win their seats with only a few thousand votes in a province of over 10 million people.

I don't want to rehash all of the arguments for MMP and against the status quo, but the Toronto Star ran yet another editorial today against MMP. The last line of the editorial is really the only thing you need to read:

Tomorrow voters who care about good government should vote to retain the existing first-past-the-post method. Our system does not need a "fix," because it isn't broken.

Amazing. The Star has run any number of editorials complaining about many different Ontario governments, I'm sure. But it's apparently never occurred to the Star that, if the system keeps producing bad results, regardless of the party in charge, that maybe, just maybe, the system is flawed. Nope. The system isn't broken -- at least, not for the people on the Star editorial board.

It's said that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Today, the Toronto Star has thrown it's lot in with the comfortable, and would prefer not to be afflicted thank you very much. It's laziness of the worst kind -- Ontario politics is broken, but the journalists of the Toronto Star get paid whether it's broken or not I guess. Journalists are supposed to highlight the flaws of the way we do things, and supposed to show us how they can be improved (in any sphere, not just politics.) The Star, apparently, can't be bothered. Or worse, the Star thinks it's job is to hide our flaws, to keep sunlight away from dark places, and to keep criticism to a minimum. Whatever that is, it's not journalism.

Frankly, I can't wait until the next Conservative government in Ontario, and to listen to the Star's mewling supplications then -- Please, Premier, don't hurt us! If they only had a minority...

What's most infuriating about all this is the simple refusal of the anti-MMP side to deal with the reality of Ontario politics: a vast majority of voters simply do not matter, myself included. In my riding, I can either vote for the incumbent, and simply pad his victory margin, or I can vote for another candidate and not be counted at all. And that's it. Those are my choices, once every four years. If you read the Star or the Globe, you'd think this either a) didn't matter (I am a smelly hippy, after all) or b) isn't true (I'm a figment of my own imagination.) As Greg Morrow has pointed out, the outcome of this election is going to be determined by about 75,000 people -- that's it. Or, to put it another way, if you're one of the 98.5% of Ontarians who didn't get a golden ballot tomorrow, and you'd like that to change, then vote for MMP tomorrow.

There's one other thing I'd like to deal with in the Star editorial:

Consider Ontario's case. Where would McGuinty have to turn for enough support to govern, if the proposed new system were in place today, and he won less than 50 per cent of the vote and half the seats?

He could form a "grand coalition" or cut some other kind of deal with John Tory's Conservatives. But they have made funding religious schools a big part of their campaign.... Alternatively, McGuinty might try to make a pact with Howard Hampton's New Democrats, whose program is progressive and far closer to the Liberal one. But even there, the New Democrats oppose investing in new nuclear reactors.... The point is, even with like-minded partners, deal-making does not always deliver the best policies.... And where would McGuinty be forced to turn if both the Conservatives and New Democrats balked? To the Green party?

My usual thing here would be to take the latest poll numbers and show that, if they hold, McGuinty could form a coalition with not just one, but any of the three potential opposition parties. (For political and mathematical reasons, I think the NDP would be the best bet.) This puts McGuinty in the perfect position to make the Greens, Tories, or NDP moderate their positions and demands, not pull the government away from it's core decisions.

But that's not really what's bugging me about that passage. What bothers me is the Star (and other people) seem to want to make all the political divisions in Ontario seem insurmountable. We need a less democratic system, they're saying, because otherwise we can't govern the rabble. I think it's insulting to be told that, despite the success of MMP in places like Germany, the voters and representatives of Ontario just aren't smart enough to work through their differences. More than that, it shows that the main ingredient in the anti- side's cake o' inaction is fear. They can't win unless they scare you about the future. My God! We could be as poorly governed as Germany, what with their huge manufacturing exports, better health care and excellent environmental policies! Die gasp!

Be not afraid, the Book says. (It says it over and over again, in fact. And yet we're still afraid all the time.) If we approve MMP tomorrow, we'll have 4 years to work out the kinks, and 4 years of medicore Liberal government to soothe your jangled nerves. Ontario will keep working, and even after we bring MMP in, we're not going to all become too stupid to run the Province properly. Calm. Down. Be not afraid.

We vote for these governments once, and then spend years complaining about how they don't listen to us. And then, when we think of changing the way we do things, suddenly we're told "stability" is a virtue. The press lets them get away with bald-faced lies about how "dangerous" these changes are, or worse yet the press lies itself. And we still don't do anything.

At this point, you've basically got a choice: either vote for MMP tomorrow, or stop complaining about government. You've got a chance to make it better. This isn't like the weather, you -- yes, you in the chair -- have a chance to actually make some good come out of this waste of time we call an election. Or, you can do what the Toronto Star would prefer you do, and simply endorse the status quo, and everything that goes along with it. If you wished you could have punished McGuinty for raising your taxes, or Mike Harris for throwing your kids out of school, or Bob Rae for, well, anything he did, you've got a chance to change things now. Don't throw it away.

Can we call these people terrorists yet?

I mean, I know they're not Muslims, but by the time you're stalking and threatening a family with sick children, you're well in to Cape Fear territory.

Oh, and as for the protests that this is just "citizen journalism", give me a fucking break. You want to ask these people questions, fine -- call them on the phone and ask. Stalking is generally considered the mark of sleaze, even among journalists.

The nightmare scenario

"Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout".

I know we've all been girding for some bloodletting when the white people British soldiers leave behind those savages innocent Iraqis, but it turns out that even Arabs can bring things under control if there isn't an occupying Army providing a target and motive for every crazy who "inherited" a few pounds of plastic explosive.

Of course, to some this is the nightmare scenario: if the Iraqis can bring things under control after a withdrawal of UK/US forces, it's possible they might be able to... do exactly the same thing elsewhere. That would seem to mean the last reason to stay in Iraq -- for the Iraqis own good, don't you see? -- is so much hot air, just like all the others.

Don't worry though, I'm sure Will Kristol can find another reason to stay.

Look, insanity in print!

William Kristol thinks America should bomb Burma to help democracy there. In a column titled "Talk is Cheap", he ends with this little nugget:

In his second inaugural address, President Bush, quoting Lincoln, put "the rulers of outlaw regimes" on notice: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." Couldn't the Bush administration do more to give that just God a helping hand?

Um. Sure, if that's where you want to go. There's an old precedent for this kind of thinking, and it's variously translated as "Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius," or "Slay them all, God will know his own." Bush is Texan, so he might know it better as "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." Time and again we've seen that aerial bombing lacks the precision needed to separate the innocent from the guilty. Hell, the Catholic Church has been judging sinners a lot longer than GPS or laser-guided bombs, and they still protect the occasional pedophile.

I mean, what are we supposed to make of this man? Nobody treats him like the unmedicated mental patient he so clearly is -- quite the opposite, he's given space in the Washington Post to advocate bombing a nation of buddhists. And he continues to show absolutely no conception that the US military has limits. Limits, I hasten to add, made necessary by the various wars America is already in, and which he advocated for and continues to.

You mean, pregnant women have their own free will?

I was shocked, when Vicki's sister was pregnant, at the number and intrusiveness of the bizarre restrictions on her diet/behavior that family (and total strangers!) felt free to suggest. Some of it was well-intentioned but silly, and other stuff was basically just weird. (This intrusive do-gooderism continues well after pregnancy, of course!)

What was really funny was the unanimous consensus among elders that there was going to be a baby boy at the end of nine months. 9 months later: a healthy baby girl! So much of the "suggestions" were offered in the spirit of "folk wisdom" or whatever, that generations of women have passed down, etc etc etc. Well, sometimes your annoying and silly ideas are just annoying, silly, and wrong to boot.

Anyway, I thought about this a bit more today after reading Natasha. It might occur to us one day that women not only are intelligent actors with their own agency, but that they remain such even after they've been impregnated.

Energy links!

Engineer-Poet, always one of my favourite bloggers for coming up with, uh, unique notions on how to solve energy problems, proposes we mine fluoride waste for it's silicon content. The result: 112,000 tons of silicon per year, enough to make 48 gigawatts (10% of US demand!) at a cost of about $0.35 per watt, or competitive with your current roof's shingles.

And I keep paying attention to Focus Fusion -- one of the hydrogen-boron fusion proposals out there -- for reasons that really escape me. But if you'd like to listen to a physicist talk for about an hour about what he thinks they can accomplish for a few years' and $2 million worth of effort, the head of Focus Fusion gave a talk at Google recently.

One of the interesting things about FF is they don't require any water input for their ongoing electrical production (just a bit for radiation shielding, they say.) One of the many, many limiting factors on expanding our electrical generation if we only stick to status quo technologies is where we're going to get all the water we need to power nuclear or coal. Already, power plants make up a substantial fraction of the water that gets used by human industry every day.

Or, if this guy's right, maybe we're all doomed anyway.

The Coveted Dymaxion World Endorsement!

If these numbers are right, any non-Conservatives out there who live in Carleton-Mississippi Mills should probably vote Green. NDPers who want to stick it to the Liberals can do so, while sticking it to the NDP and the Tories at the same time!

It's like the Lunar Eclipse of Ontario Politics -- a rare confluence of events, which come together in perfect harmony.

Welfare for white folk

Here. Basically, white kids still get more money from universities (for being the kids of alumni, or whatever) than browner folk.

Now, here's a predicament for me. I'm a white man, and getting substantial funding from my university. The evidence seems to show that this is at least in part because the University is betting on me becoming a success, and giving them a bunch of money in turn later in life. (Also, my marks from undergrad kicked ass.) So, if I've been given an unfair advantage (possible) because the university expects a certain result (success, money for them) what is the proper response for me, from a social justice viewpoint?

Can I strike a blow for class equality by becoming a lifelong mediocrity? Can I attribute a life of sloth and indolence to my righteous refusal to bend to the will of the class hierarchy? Or should I simply choose to never give a single red cent back to my particular institution?

THD on feedback

Thomas Homer-Dixon on global warming, and feedback loops:

his summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.

When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.

In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.

Hard-core

Yowza.

DUBLIN, Ireland – Dan Keating, an IRA member and the last surviving veteran of Ireland's 1919-21 war of independence from Britain, has died, his nursing home and fringe political party said. He was 105....

Keating spent his entire adult life committed to the most hard-line branch of Irish republicanism on offer. He said Ireland should never be at peace until the border dividing the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – both states he considered illegitimate – was eliminated and the island united under one government.

In 1970, he switched his allegiance from the "Official" IRA to a new, Northern Ireland-based faction called the Provisional IRA that spent 27 years trying to overthrow the British territory.

When the Provisionals called a 1997 cease-fire and supported Sinn Fein politicians' push for a negotiated settlement, he switched support to a breakaway faction, Republican Sinn Fein, that opposed compromise and continued bombings. He became honorary patron of the fringe party in 2004.

Republican Sinn Fein president Ruairi O Bradaigh said Keating was committed to the cause "to the very day of his death and an inspiration to all true republicans.''

Keating opposed the existence of the Republic of Ireland so much that he refused to accept the state's old-age pension. In 2002 he also refused a $3,500 award from President Mary McAleese that is offered to all Irish citizens who reach age 100; Keating argued that she wasn't the real president of Ireland.

I think I need to go listen to "House of Orange" a few times...

To the polls we go, I guess

I agree with Greg: this kind of behaviour is bizarre. How does it serve Harper to broadcast early that he's going to slip unacceptable language in to the Throne Speech?

OTTAWA — Federal Conservative organizers say they have been told that their election campaign offices should be ready for opening on Oct. 20 and that candidates should begin canvassing constituents immediately.

They also say campaign chairman Doug Finley told candidates in a conference call yesterday that there will be four or five items in the Throne Speech that will be absolutely unacceptable to the other parties. And they say Mr. Finley told them the Conservative brass is currently trying to decide between three different election dates.

Or let's put this another way: What, exactly, could Harper put in the Throne Speech that would be totally unacceptable to the other 3 parties but not unacceptable to the 65-70% of voters they represent? I suppose there's been some electoral success in heightening the contradictions, but not when your party is stuck at 30-35% and has been for a year.

I would want to be very, very sure that I could wallop the hell out of Dion before I made a move like this. And I don't see it -- neither the Conservative attacks nor the Liberal feet-shootings over the last little while have moved the poll numbers significantly. Dion would have to screw up hugely to hand the election to Harper, and meanwhile Harper's caucus could always choose to de-muzzle on some issue like abortion or teaching creationism. Elections, in short, are terribly risky things.

Oh, and there's the little fact that Canadian voters seem to show an incredible amount of agency -- every time Harper gets to within a few % of majority territory, his number bounce like a superball off the ceiling.

You're kidding, right?

"One Cent of the GST" would provide Toronto with approximately $400million per year, funding that would be dedicated to transportation, maintaining infrastructure and helping Toronto keep pace with the pressures for City services brought about by growth.

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words "one cent" in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters. (The Mint has come to this amount by taking the total number of materials printed divided by the approximate population of Toronto, and then using a percentage of that number to arrive at a dollar figure.)

So now we've got a federal crown corporation suing a municipal government for infringing copyright on the penny. Brilliant. Maybe Joachimsthal should sue the US Mint for use of the word "dollar", while we're at it. I suspect they could collect quite a bit more...

Happy Sputnikaversary, everybody

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia on Thursday celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch that opened the space age, with officials seeking to revive the glory of the Soviet program, although some experts worry about a loss of momentum for new missions.

Goose-stepping guards and medal-bedecked space veterans laid flowers at the tomb of the father of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov, at the foot of the Kremlin wall.

"We are rightly proud that it was our nation that opened the way to stars for the humanity," President Vladimir Putin said in a statement marking the launch of Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957.

The launch of the beachball-sized satellite caused a global furor and prompted the U.S. to build up its own space program quickly, entering a race it ultimately won when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in July 1969.

I'm sorry, exactly who just abandoned DRM?

Microsoft starts selling DRM-free music tracks. As Cory Doctorow writes, "In other news, Satan just sent out for a snow-shovel."

The collapse of industry support for DRM has been even faster than I'd imagined it would be. On the other hand, Microsoft had their own people telling them years ago that DRM wouldn't work, so it's not like they deserve a prize.

I've been Kinsella-ed!

Not that it's had any impact on my traffic or anything.

Oh, Warren, no need to beg, you can have a link...

An Israeli historian on the settlements

An important point about Israel-Palestine:

Beyond that he had the striking observation that since Israel signed on to the "road map" and thereby committed to dismantling "unauthorized" settlement outposts (i.e., the ones that are illegal under Israeli law) only nine houses have been removed. Meanwhile, he said that while just two percent of the Occupied Territories are actually under settlement control, a much larger swathe of the West Bank is now off-limits to Arabs, either because it's been set aside for further settlement expansion or else because it's part of the network of no-Arabs-allowed roads that connect the settlements, etc.

And, if you take a look at a map of the West Bank, you'll see that Israeli control extends up and down the actual west bank of the Jordan River -- nobody expects this control to be relaxed, so even if the rest of the West Bank were released, the Palestinians would be fundamentally at Israel's mercy.

This is a pretty elemental fact, but somehow we keep expecting the Palestinians to meekly accept this without resorting to violence. I wonder if we'd be so sanguine if the Americans seized our side of the St. Lawrence.

Only real leaders shoot themselves in the foot with such vigor!

Okay, enough beating up on Ian Urquhart. He thinks he knows why John Tory adopted the laughably self-destructive policy on religious schools:

...Tory's policy can be traced back to his bid for the provincial party leadership in 2004.

His two opponents – Jim Flaherty and Frank Klees – were in favour of restoring the tax credit for private schools, an initiative of the previous Conservative regime that the Liberal government had killed.

Tory felt the tax credit was vulnerable to attack by the Liberals on two grounds: 1) it would go to parents who send their kids to elite schools like Upper Canada College; and 2) it would be funnelled to schools with uncredentialed teachers and dubious curricula.

But under pressure from the Harrisite wing of the party, Tory agreed to bring the tax credit back in one form or another.

This, I think, is the real body-blow to Tory's claims that this scheme wouldn't hurt public school funding: the policy was put together for the sole purpose of appeasing people who want to hurt public school funding. To put it another way, the prime lesson of Bushism is that interests (and interest groups) matter: if you're not interested in, say, making sure that prisoners of war aren't tortured, then watch out what happens. If you don't take civilian deaths seriously, you can end up with a bloodbath on your hands. And whatever fringe benefits your policy may have, you can't escape the paternity of it's creators.

Just one more reason to not vote for him: despite all his talk of leadership, he wasn't man enough to tell the base to go pound sand.

Da only Bybill I reeds is Revalayshuns

This is a form of Christianity that I'll never understand.

Christians have a biblical mandate to be "good stewards of God's creation," Ms. Paynter says she told the Rev. Frank Brown, pastor of the Bellmead First Baptist Church here in the county where President Bush has his ranch. So, Texas Baptists should demand that controversial plans to build a slew of coal-fired power plants be put on hold.

Mr. Brown was not impressed. God, the pastor said, is "sovereign over his creation" and no amount of coal-burning will alter by a "millisecond" his divine plan for the world. Fighting environmental damage is "like chasing rabbits," he recalls telling her. It just distracts from core Christian duties to spread the faith and protect the unborn.

I'm not sure what's more depressing -- the incredibly narrow view of what a "core Christian duty" is, or the incredibly narrow conception of "protecting the unborn." Does it not occur to the minister that protecting the unborn might, I dunno, include making sure the world is worth living in when they emerge from their mothers?

As always on religious matters, Jerry Falwell had a sense of balance and moderation:

Shortly before his death in May, Virginia Baptist preacher the Rev. Jerry Falwell denounced the clamor over global warming as "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus."

So if any of you Christians out there thought the articles of your faith included anything other than the following: who's having sex with who, what the results of that sex are, and whether those people should be allowed to marry each other, well, Jerry Falwell wanted to set you straight, but the good Lord took him to a better place.

Of course, Falwell thought Jesus would drive an SUV. I think he'd walk. We'll see who was right when I die, I guess.

On the margin

So Ian Urquhart wrote a column last week -- and yeah, I double-checked the name this time! -- that was headlined "How MMP could sneak to victory". In short, his column was all about how the pro-MMP side on the referendum could eke out a win due to a number of factors. Sample quote:

Yet when the votes were counted, the proposed new system came within three percentage points of reaching the required 60 per cent threshold. The reason why, according to one post-referendum analysis, is that voters in B.C. were impressed that the new system had been recommended by "people like us" in a citizens' assembly.

So Urquhart is worried that a momentous political change could happen if -- and only if -- 60% of Ontarians vote for it, with at least 50% support in 2/3 of the ridings. And his editor decided the appropriate headline was about "sneaking" to victory.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Star endorsed keeping the status quo, where 37% of voters got to form the government in 1990. But, you see, that's a manly margin of victory -- a whopping 5.2% difference between the NDP and Liberal polls led to the NDP winning twice as many seats! Not like those sneaky reformers, sneaking in with their sneaky 60% margins of victory. Those dirty sneakers.

Ah yes, I recognize this feeling....

Hm. It's 1:30 am, but I'm over-caffeinated and can't get to sleep.

Oh, I remember now. I'm in school again, and have an assignment due tomorrow.

Former-Soviet-blogging

What's a wingnut to do?

The New York Times reports that, wonder of wonders, life is returning to some semblance of peace in Grozny. The NYT attributes this in no small part to the iron-fisted rule of Moscow's local bastard, Ramzan Kadyrov. But you've got to wonder how the Bush-sycophants read an article like this. On the one hand, you've got an endorsement of the "more rubble, less trouble" mania they're so fond of. On the other hand, the guy getting most of the credit is a muslim. On the other other hand, he's a Sufi muslim (are they friends for the US, or not?) On the other other other hand, he's a tool of the Kremlin and Putin -- and Vlad Putin's basically one war from being the next Hitler at this point, right?

Oh wait. The nutters don't believe anything printed in the New York Times. Nevermind.

In other eastern European news, the Prime Minister of Ukraine is running for parliamentary elections using Bob Dole's advisors. Bizarrely, he seems to be poised to win.

One of the interesting elements in both these stories is the continuing ability of Russia in particular, and the FSU in general, to confound prediction. You could say it about any country over a decent time span (try predicting American politics 4 years from now!) but what shocked me is how quickly Yuschenko in Ukraine went from being saviour to Satan, and how quickly Yanukovich was put back in the PM's office. You could also point to Turkmenistan, where the death of (crazy crazy crazy) dictator Saparmurat Niyazov seems to have given the Turkmen government the idea of trying to break Russia's monopoly on natural gas pipelines -- something I daresay Moscow didn't see coming.

Another day, another bad anti-MMP column in a newspaper

Ian Urquart [a-doy, I need to read bylines more closely...] at least, isn't making up wholesale fantasies of dhimmitude or anything. But he persists, like so many journalists, in worrying about fringe parties. Apparently, journalism now requires that we narrow the bounds of acceptable politics, not expand it.

But what's really annoying about this trope -- not just when Walkom uses it, but always -- is that it's not simply the size of a coalition that matters, but the stability. So a minority government has a very strong interest in seeking the cooperation of a large, moderate party with a number of seats. Tory's first attempt if he wanted a coalition government could very well be the Liberals, like the current government in Germany.

Oh, and on that note, it's incredibly aggravating that Ontario's media persist in pretending that Germany doesn't exist for the purposes of this discussion. Only Andrew Coyne is busy pointing out the comparison, because it looks really, really good.

Who's Greener?

NOW Magazine has a good article on one of the primary disagreements I have with the NDP as it's presently constituted: it's reliance on the support of extractive or otherwise environmentally destructive industries. In this election, the spotlight is on the forestry and paper industries, but not too long ago Hampton was saying that we needed to leave Lambton and Atikokan (coal power plants) online.

I understand Hampton's political pressures-- and I don't want to diminish the economic problems of the north -- but from here it's hard not to see the NDP's committment to the environment as taking second place to propping up old legacy industries because their workers give the NDP lots of votes.

Meanwhile, the Greens have, to put it charitably, a bunch of really bad ideas too. But the difference is that the wackiest of the Green ideas (such as the unsustainable green tax shift idea) is probably impossible in the real world -- as in, it's not going to happen, so the pro-Green points (their school platform among them) remain while the anti-Green points are irrelevant. Doubly so, when you realize that the Greens won't win anything.

I wouldn't be voting Green if I lived in a riding where the NDP wasn't fielding such a lopsided incumbent. (The Liberals and Conservatives, as far as I've seen, just aren't advertising in my riding.) But it's possible for my vote to not count even if I vote for the winning candidate, if that pol is guaranteed victory anyway. So I'm increasingly leaning towards voting Green.

Like Chet, I find myself wishing that I'd written this post by Rick Perlstein. Sadly, I haven't even written the best blog post reacting to Perlstein -- that honor goes to Robert Farley.

It's truly mystifying that, in 2007, a country of 300 million with thousands of nuclear warheads is whipping itself up into stroke over a country of 90 million with no nuclear weapons and that would pose exactly zero threat to America if the US government hadn't put hundreds of thousands of Americans within arms' reach of Tehran.

So yeah, here's Perlstein:

Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people...

Pot, kettle

So Ann Coulter's new book is titled "If Democrats had any brains, They'd be Republicans".

In other news, President Bush requires the big words in his speeches be spelled phonetically for him. And he still can't get "nuclear" right.

Yes, that's right, Ann Coulter thinks that Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar) would've needed more brains to be admitted in to the Republican Party, currently led by George Bush (C student.)

More media ranting

So the CBC finally put up the Northwest Passage story, at 11:58 eastern. (Thanks, Shani.) That's exactly 2 minutes before the National aired on Newsworld in Vancouver.

This is exactly the kind of behaviour you expect to see from an institution that simply doesn't take the Internet seriously. At best, the CBC is seeing the Internet as nothing more than an adjunct to it's legacy broadcast functions. Maybe the website is only update every day at midnight -- though that's even worse, frankly, than what I think is probably the real reason for these kinds of delays: a fear that putting a page up on the web would cannibalize TV viewers.

Well, that's a real enough concern in this case, because the web-hosted page has absolutely nothing that the broadcast didn't -- I'd be far better off reading the web page than watching the broadcast version.

But you'd think that the CBC would pay some attention to what's actually going on in the media world -- the NY Times has just opened up a huge chunk of it's formerly-protected content to the Internet, because they make more money from "incidental" traffic (Googlers, blog links) than they did from subcriptions. The Guardian in the UK has an extraordinary online policy, and then you've got the sleepy little CBC which seems to not be getting it.

I don't want to dump too much on the CBC, because there are some high points -- the CBC's podcasts are fairly popular. But when you've got a 24-hours news channel (Newsworld) there's no excuse for the web to be your dumping ground.

Dear CBC

Please make your website suck less.

PS, you smell.

...okay, let me clear that up. The National tonight leads the news with a report that Ottawa is planning to bug the Northwest Passage. Essentially, it sounds like we're borrowing the SOSUS idea -- the hydrophones that the US buried in the North Atlantic to track Soviet submarines.

So, a really interesting story, and sufficient reason for me to write one of my rare "Stephen Harper does something I think might not suck" posts.

Except, because this is the CBC we're talking about, as of 10:10PM tonight, I can't find a single mention of this lead story on their website. So no link, meaning I'll have to wait until tomorrow and hope that somebody at the CBC discovers this Internet thingy the kids are all talking about.

Arctic potpourri

An interesting article in LiveScience -- more bad news from the Arctic! Yay!

A new study examining satellite measurements of the winter sea ice covering the Barents Sea (located north of Scandinavia) over the past 26 years has shown that the ice edge has recently been retreating in the face of rising sea surface temperatures, said study leader Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University.

Her research, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed that the warming waters in the Barents Sea—which have risen about 3 degrees Celsius since 1980—are to blame for the reduction in winter ice cover. Two factors contribute to the warming of the Barents Sea: warming Atlantic waters funneled in by the Gulf Stream and solar heating of the open ocean as ice melts in the summer, both of which make it harder for new ice to form in the winter.

Retreating summer ice is one thing -- retreating winter ice is quite another. Meanwhile, there's some explanation for why the ice has disappeared so quickly the last few years:

Julienne Stroeve of the NSIDC used satellite data that tracked the movement of the sea ice over the last 30 years to estimate the age of the ice—the older the ice, the thicker it is. Newly formed ice (about 1 or 2 years old) will only be about 1 meter thick, whereas ice that is closer to 5 years old will be between 2 and 3 meters thick.

Ice thickness is key to the survival of sea ice, because thinner ice vanishes much faster in the summer than thicker ice.

Stroeve and her colleagues found that while most of the Arctic sea ice in the 1980s was around 5 years old (with some sections even climbing up to 9 or 10 years old), the oldest ice the researchers can find now is only 2 or 3 years old. All the 10-year-old ice has melted away.

Which brings me to the news that world leaders are gathering in New York to discuss global warming. Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious: nothing of substance is going to happen until Bush leaves office. No country in the world is more in need of a better way to bring a government down. But Brian Beutler points out more obviousness: "Al Gore could become president next November..." and the US would still be years away from meaningful change.

Meanwhile, in our little corner of Canada, PM Harper is apparently planning to defend his government against slurs and accusations that he's lying to the Canadian public about his climate change policies. Slurs and accusations, incidentally, coming from within his own government.

Meanwhile, this quote from an American scientists seems as apt as any description of humanity's dilemma in the 21st century:

“We understand the physics behind what’s going on,” Dr. Serreze said. “You can always find some aspect of natural variability that can explain some things. But now it seems patterns that used to help you don’t help as much anymore, and the ones that hurt you hurt you more.”

Positive-feedback loops where harmful behaviour is magnified and beneficial behaviour is minimized. Yes, it describes climate change. But it's also, interestingly enough, one description of the effect drug addiction has on the human brain. When it becomes severe enough -- when an addict has made a total mess of their lives -- the only way to break the cycle is to take someone out of their lives, isolate them for a period of usually more than a month, and help them build new cycles in their brain that don't require whatever substance they were jonesing for.

Comparisons between the North American love of fossil fuels and drug addiction aren't novel, and I don't particularly like the idea that we require a crisis before meaningful political change can happen, but there's a pretty solid psychological and political basis for it.

This is going to be one of those days where I'll be really angry all day, I can tell.

Leadership material

Shorter Tom Flanagan: The Conservative Party of Canada can't possibly win an election with fair rules. Thank God the rules aren't fair!

(Hey, the Jurist is on vacation or something. Somebody's got to step up.)

About that 3% threshold...

(Update: Uh, there's something wrong in this post. A commenter points out that 3% of the votes will get you 3% of the seats, not a single seat like I say below. I don't think this changes much in the argument -- the math still works out to local seats being something like half as hard to scrounge up votes for, especially in by-elections. So while the math below is a bit off, I'm going to leave it as is.)

So, yeah. Apparently, the 3% threshold that Ontario's proposed system requires is too low, and it's going to create a forest of small parties, all of whom will collectively tear apart Ontario's politics. Because apparently massive political changes are made by parties with only one seat in Parliament.

Let's try some math, here.

In the 2003 Ontario general election, 4,497,244 people voted. For simplicity's sake let's say 4.5 million. 3% of 4.5 million is 135,000 votes. So in order for a party to get one list seat in the Legislature under MMP, they'd need to get 135,000 votes across the Province.

Meanwhile, in the actual 2003 election, we can see that actual ridings were won with vastly less voters. In London-Fanshawe, the Liberal candidate (Khalil Ramal) won with a total of 13,920 votes -- 0.31% of the vote, one-tenth as many votes required to win a hypothetical list seat. In the 2005 Scarborough-Rouge River by-election, Bas Balkissoon won his seat with 9,000 votes (0.2% of the 2003 provincial vote!) And remember, in the MMP system, the vast majority of ridings will still exist, only some of them will be larger. This will mean that slightly more voters will be needed to win a single riding, but not nearly enough to make up the difference between a riding and a list seat.

There's this idea out there that somehow, list seats will be "easier" to get. But elections are made by a party getting a bunch of people out to vote, and the fewer people you need to get voting for you, the easier it is to get a seat. Clearly, if you were a fringe party looking to spend some money to win a seat in the Legislature, grabbing a list seat would be the hardest possible way to do it. In terms of actual people voting, your money would be 15 times more effective in Scarborough-Rouge River (2005) and almost ten times more effective in London-Fanshawe (2003).

It's easy to underestimate how hard political campaigns actually are. They take a lot of money, and a lot of volunteers, and despite what Murray Campbell thinks, Youtube voters aren't particularly eager to throw their votes away. Indeed, those crazies he disparages are probably more engaged in the political process than most of his readers. Getting 3% of Ontarians to vote for you is really, really hard -- the Greens are the only "fringe" party that's come close, so far, and they only got 2.8% of the vote. The next runners-up, the Family Coalition Party, got 0.8% of the 2003 vote -- they'd have needed to quadruple their vote in order to get a single seat. (And once more, a single seat in Parliament and fifty cents will get you a phone call.)

For reference, here are the three party leaders, and the number of votes they got in their respective elections (Tory won a 2005 by-election):

Dalton McGuinty: 24,647 (0.55% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)
Howard Hampton: 15,666 (0.35% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)
John Tory: 15,633 (0.35% of the 2003 Ontario vote.)

Only one of the three party leaders who currently hold a seat at Queen's Park got even one-sixth as many votes as they'd need to win a list seat.

Murray Campbell is Googlestupid

(Googlestupid: "the act of looking like a complete idiot by saying something you could have realized was completely wrong by searching the internet for less than five minutes.")

Lordy, lordy, lordy. I try to be charitable (sometimes) to political disagreement, but the anti-MMP people in the upcoming Ontario referendum just keep saying incredibly stupid things, or relying on outright fantasies. First we had Liberal diehards worrying about the NDP running a decoy list -- because the NDP is known to have buckets of cash sitting around with nothing to do, and because it's certainly not the Liberal Party that's been trying to, for example, co-opt the Green Party federally. But today's example comes from a Murray Campbell column a few days ago:

It offers the same potential to rip apart Ontario's body politic as Mr. McGuinty fears financing more religious schools would.... New parties would spring up because the threshold is so low - just 3 per cent of the vote. (Rick Mercer passed that mark in four days with his 2000 spoof of Stockwell (Doris) Day and YouTube gamers would love the challenge of persuading 135,000 voters to support a spoof party.) MMP advocates say it's speculation that parties based on religion or ethnicity would be formed but, equally, it's speculation that they wouldn't. Could Mr. McGuinty have resisted the pressure to adopt sharia law if he had needed an Islamist party to govern?

Are you kidding me? Seriously? Jesus Christ...

Here's news bulletin: According to Statistics Canada, only 3.1% of Ontarians are Muslims. (And by "news", I mean of course the 2001 census.) If you type "Muslims in Ontario" in to that obscure research tool academics call "Google", you'll find the statscan link deviously hidden in 2nd place. So, even if we insultingly assume that all of them are slavering Al Qaeda recruits in waiting, they'd still need 96% unanimously voting for an Islamist party for them to get a single seat. And exactly how many Muslim women would vote that way in a country with the secret ballot? And how many of them are children ineligible to vote? Or is Murray Campbell counting on the 1.7% of Jewish Ontarians to back up the Al Qaeda Party? And even if the Ontario muslim population has doubled since 2001, will one seat ever, in the remaining history of the Province Ontario, be enough to swing the fate of a government? Wouldn't Ontarians demand a new election instead?

On and on. Just an incredibly stupid thing to write, much less to have printed in a national newspaper. And we won't go in to the fact that Campbell is creating a Muslim boogey man, when the votes of Christian fundamentalists probably outnumber Muslim fundamentalists in Ontario by at least an order of magnitude. (There's 20 Christians for every Muslim in Ontario.) The reality is that 70% of this Province is either Catholic or Protestant. Other Christians make up another 5%, and then "no religion" makes up about 15%. So between the thoroughly-conventional Christian churches, and the atheists/agnostics, you've got 90% of the population. I don't know why Campbell decided to spin a fantasy about Ontario being reduced to an Islamic Caliphate with the tyranny of 3% of the population, but it's silly and insulting to Ontarian muslims. Not to mention Mr. McGuinty, who apparently is helpless before the Muslim hordes of Ontario.

(I just want to really, really emphasize how insulting it is to assume that any significant number of Ontario Muslims would support an Islamist party. Speculating about it in a national paper does grievous harm to Campbell's cherished "body politic" by convincing Canadian Muslims they'll never be trusted, no matter how much they assimilate. Campbell's doing far worse then MMP will ever do.)

Campbell's broader point, that MMP will "tear apart the body politic" of Ontario, deserves at least a pro-forma rebuttal. First off, the system reccomended for Ontario is explicitly modelled on the German system, a country whose body politic was forcibly ripped apart, not with elections but with tanks, concrete, and razor wire. And guess what? The German system has helped reconcile the two halves of Germany, to the point where an East German woman now leads a coalition government with the SDP. (German Muslims apparently being unable to force a Caliphate on Berlin, either.) Secondly, Rick Salutin makes the excellent point here:

Under stable provincial governments for 20 years, Ontario has been a whirligig of instability: vanishing industries, degraded services, disruptive strikes, fractured communities—largely, I'd argue, due to arrogant behaviour by governments that didn't represent the majority and didn't have to worry about it. I imagine what people really want is stability in their lives and communities. You might get more of that under a more representative, more democratic system.

It's true, Salutin here is "speculating" about the positive impact of MMP, but he's at least not creating fantastical boogeymen out of whole cloth.

Look, the press in Toronto seems to be incorrigibly anti-MMP, with only a few exceptions. I don't know why (PR, when it eventually comes to Canada, will make political reporting far more interesting) but it's there. But if we're going to have a debate about this stuff, let's please stop basing the anti-MMP arguments on total, and totally crazy, fantasies.

(I read the Campbell article after reading Salutin's column, via Chet.)

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Mike Tidwell, at Gristmill:

All those happy lists in magazines and on web sites -- "10 things you can do to save the planet!" -- actually trivialize the scale of the problem. We'll never solve the climate crisis one light bulb at a time. What we need, à la the civil rights movement, are ten historic statutes that ban abusive and violent practices like the manufacture of gas-guzzling cars and inefficient light bulbs.

Other people -- including a whole panel of PhDs from around the world -- were critical of this point of view. They accused me -- wrongly -- of dismissing altogether the virtues of voluntary change. As I type this essay from my solar-powered house, with a Prius in the driveway and a vegetarian lunch in the oven, I assure you I view voluntary measures as very important. They just won't save us in time, that's all. The Arctic ice is melting way too fast....

The problem is we've somehow forgotten how it's done. Martin Luther King famously and repeatedly asked, "Why should we wait one more day for our freedom? Why?" King resisted public pleas to go slow; to let voluntary measures work; to understand that some people just can't change very quickly. No, King said, America must have a new set of laws that address the great moral urgency of now!

So why -- with Arctic ice vanishing, and hurricanes getting bigger, and sea levels rising -- why are we still politely urging Americans to change a few light bulbs and voluntarily spend a little more for a hybrid car? What breakdown in ethical thinking prevents us from insisting that all serious conversations on this topic focus on demanding governmental standards that allow only 50 mpg cars into the marketplace? In other words, given the great ecological, economic, and moral implications of global warming, why should we wait one more day for clean, efficient energy? Why?

On the Civil Rights note, it's worth remembering how many self-described liberals in the US allegedly supported the rights of blacks, but thought that MLK (retroactively re-branded as the moderate of the US Civil Rights movement) was "too extreme".

In June 1963, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King headed was in the midst of the Birmingham campaign that brought images of Bull Connor’s police dogs into Americans’ living rooms, 60 percent of all Americans thought the public demonstrations with which King was by then synonymous “hurt the Negro’s cause” more than they helped it. By May 1964, that percentage had risen to 74 percent. By October 1966, following the SCLC’s nonviolent direct actions in Selma and Chicago, it reached 85 percent.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now see black protesters in the 1960s as the victims of state-sanctioned violence. But at the time, they were seen as the instigators and "trouble-makers" that were causing the problem.

This presents a real problem for the Green movement. Direct action to change people's minds on the environment would, in a far more direct way than MLK's protests, be attacks on their own lives and property (see what happens when people slash SUV tires.) And Tidwell's Civil Rights analogy breaks down because there's no convenient, begging-to-be-defied legal absurdity as there was in segregation*. There's just... our lives, each and every one of them. As Tidwell points out (and I emphasized) we've somehow forgotten what political action means in North America. This is the charitable interpretation: uncharitably, it's possible we just don't care.

On the other hand, the Civil Rights analogy holds up very well in that the solutions that are necessary are far more radical than political consensus will ever allow. For a great summary of how radical MLK really was, read this book review.

I don't know what the answer here is. I suspect, as with the civil rights movement, the result is going to be a job perpetually half-finished. It's just that in this case, a half-finished job means global extinctions and millions dead.

*I feel somewhat queasy writing about how "convenient" bus and lunch-counter segregation was from the point of view of protest politics, I assure you. Outrages upon human dignity shouldn't, I think, be reduced to their tactical benefits. Nevertheless....

Oil stuff 3

So the oil industry's demands of the Canadian people, so far this week, are this:

One: Start fucking. The oil industry needs more workers. (Immigrants are also acceptable, but only if the feds foot the bill for training them and teaching them to speak normal-talk.)

Two: Don't even think about taxing oil profits, you dirty pinko hippie.

Three: Lay out billions of dollars of subsidies for the Mackenzie gas pipeline.

Now, if you're a normal human being with a sense of reason -- or shame -- you might see a conflict between demands 2 and 3. But you aren't privy to the genius of the oil industry (commie.) Let's take this little nugget:

For starters, the line will allow the eventual production of an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas north of the 70th parallel, equivalent to 10 years of Canadian consumption.

There is already up to 7 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves where the pipeline is going. The Mackenzie Delta is a triangular region, 75 miles from point to point.

First of all, "10 years Canadian consumption" is only half the issue (literally) because Canada exports half its production to the US. How much of the natural gas (taxpayer funded, no less) is going to be sent to the US? Will Ottawa be given any say on restricting exports in a time of shortage? (No, commie.) This is relevant because, you see, the Russians are coming!

Moscow is another issue. Ever since Russia's submarine stunt in the Arctic, it's obvious that Ottawa must establish sovereignty, beyond just subsidizing First Nations' traditional way of life and building a few ice roads.

By making the Mackenzie Valley pipeline a national priority, Canada will put its money and support where its sovereignty mouth is.

Huh? Moscow's claim is over a huge chunk of the Arctic Ocean, not over any Canadian land, nor even over the Northwest Passage. I'm sure that building a pipeline 1,500 miles away from the North Pole (and 3,000 miles from St. Petersburg) is going to send shivers down Moscow's spine. But even if we take this sovereignty argument seriously, doesn't that just imply that Canada should, I dunno, use its energy resources as a source of national sovereignty? Like, exactly what Russia is doing? Or should we just invoke national sovereignty when it's convenient for the oil lobby?

More oil stuff

So the Albertan government has finally decided to deal with the mess that Ralph Klein left them -- oil royalties were way, way too low by international standards even before $80/bbl prices came along. The report by a government panel concludes that a) royalties should be raised for all oil and gas projects, but especially the tar sands, and b) nobody should be grandfathered out of the hike.

The oil industry is reacting in it's usual calm and measured fashion:

Some Calgarians were angry, with one broker e-mailing his clients with the subject line: “Caracas on the Bow River,” comparing Alberta with Venezuela and its socialist President Hugo Chavez, who expropriated oil assets this year.

“If [the report is] enacted, investment decisions will be impacted … [the report] reads a bit like a Chavez-style manifesto,” Steve Larke, a Peters & Co. Ltd. broker, said in the e-mail.

This is the oil busines' reaction to an incredibly modest tax increase -- being called an authoritarian socialist. (Whether you think Chavez is one or not, it's clearly how it was intended.) Clearly, these people have no sense of perspective, nor any feeling of obligation to the public.

So let me respond in an equally calm and measured tone: Alberta-style conservatism is the Canadian equivalent of Saudi Wahhabism. Not particularly useful or beloved, even by the people who originated it, it's largely succeeded in political and ideological terms simply because of the vast torrent of oil money that it can draw on. It serves no higher purpose except serving it's political masters and their underlings, in this case brokers who got used to treating public property like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

So for once in my life, I'm going to say huzzah to the Conservative government of Alberta. Raise the royalties, piss off these whining toddlers who call themselves businessmen, and take one step closer to joining the political reality of the rest of Canada.

Unsurprising news for the morning

Energy CEOs call for national policy

LONDON -- In Alberta's oil patch, the words "national energy program" are usually uttered as a curse, a reference to the ill-fated 1980s program of oil nationalization and price controls.

But in a possible sign of changing times, several senior Canadian energy executives have used a gathering in London this week to make an unprecedented call for an increased federal role in their industry - some even daring to call for Ottawa to develop a comprehensive national energy policy.

Specifically, the oil industry knows it's currently in the worst of all possible worlds: they know a price on carbon is coming, but they don't know what the price will be. So they can't possibly plan their next round of investments rationally until Ottawa shits or gets off the pot. This, in turn, means that we're going to need an election, and we'll need for the Conservatives to lose it. Harper isn't realistically going to bring in a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, but his intransigence is not going to help the oil industry in any case.

Meanwhile, it's not even that I disagree with this statement, so much as it nicely encapsulates the total alienation from human communities that large market actors live with:

More federal money for education for oil workers is another key demand.

Several of the oil firms are spending large sums funding trade schools in their operating areas, but still are short of skilled workers.

Mainly, though, they said Canada needs a larger population.

You see, there aren't enough Canadians to guarantee the oil industry the profits they would like. So -- rather than restrain the ambitions of the oil industry even a little -- the obvious answer is that we need more people. So get to fucking, Canada: the oil industry needs you!

Change the channel, it's a political debate!

I haven't really posted a lot about the provincial election, but they had the debate tonight.

Funniest moment of the debate, by far: "Premier McGuinty, the next question is for you, and it's about broken promises."

Watching the post-debate press conference with Howard Hampton. He just said, in a very heterosexual way: "I disagree with John Tory, but he's not a scary guy. He's not an ugly guy either."

In my riding, I've got this weird situation of the NDP candidate being a shoe-in. While this pleases me politically, it's also got me thinking about voting for a party other than my usual party. Partly because I think it's silly the Green Party is excluded from the debate, I'm half-seriously thinking about voting for my local Green candidate.

Cautious optimism...

Jesus. I might have to sing the praises of Joe Lieberman. That's gonna need a shower.

The outlines of a bill considered a frontrunner in the Senate, to be co-sponsored by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who caucuses with Democrats, and John Warner (R-Va.), calls for 20 percent of the credits to be auctioned. The other 80 percent, which would be allocated free, would be worth billions in the market that would be created. Some environmental groups are calling for a 100 percent auction of credits.

Lieberman, following a forum sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute Wednesday, said such a change to his legislation was possible. “We’ve heard [calls for a 100 percent auction] from some stakeholders and heard that from some of our members. We’re thinking about it. Warner and I haven’t closed our minds to that. It’s on the table,” he said.

The cap-and-auction solution is infinitely preferable to the cap-and-handout system, though I'm basically lukewarm on cap-and-trade systems generally. But whatever we choose -- carbon taxes or cap-and-trade -- either is preferable to nothing.

First China, now the Saudis

Bailing out of the falling greenback: it's the new black.

Something I did not know, but should have

I knew, as a Canadian, that our population is extraordinarily concentrated in a few small urban areas. This belies the idea that Canada is a large country -- the Canadian people are in fact quite small in number, and aren't even particularly well-dispersed.

But I didn't realize how concentrated Ontario's population actually is. If, on a map, you drew a line of latitude from Ottawa west to Georgian Bay, all the land in Ontario south of that point would consist of only 15% of the land, but over 95% of the population -- more than 11 million of Ontario's 12.5 million people. This also implies that this line and the shores of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario would encompass fully one-third of Canada's population.

Yeesh. A beautiful country, and we're barely living in it.

I'm shocked at how un-shocking that is

So I was walking by Harvey's yesterday, and they had on their windows a poster advertising the following:

CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE!!!! MADE FROM 100% REAL ICE CREAM!!!!

And I admit, I was intrigued. Not enough to actually get the milkshake, but damn close. You see, sometimes the ordinary is bracing in it's very ordinariness.

To put it another way, sometimes we're shocked to see something we really shouldn't be. So when the former Commander of CENTCOM for the US military says

"There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran... Let's face it, we lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we've lived with a nuclear China, and we're living with (other) nuclear powers as well."

You're almost shocked by the implied rationality, the sanity, the ordinariness of it all. No slavering Cheney in the wings yelling about how Iran is planning on some combination of holocaust and world domination (somebody's got to sweep up the ashes, I guess.) No drooling simp of a President talking about how foreign countries need to respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, totally devoid of the self-consciousness that would be required for a sense of irony.

Just a basic statement of fact.

Bracing.

Why insurgents win

Edward Luttwak, in Harpers: (via Yglesias)

The very word “guerrilla,” which now refers only to a tactic, was first used to describe the ferocious insurgency of the illiterate Spanish poor against their would-be liberators, under the leadership of their traditional oppressors. On July 6, 1808, King Joseph of Spain presented a draft constitution that for the first time in Spain’s history offered an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the abolition of the remaining feudal privileges of the aristocracy and of the Church. At that time, abbeys, monasteries, and bishops still owned every building and every piece of land in 3,148 towns and villages, which were inhabited by some of Europe’s most wretched tenants. Despite the fact that the new constitution would have liberated them and let them keep their harvests for themselves, the Spanish peasantry failed to rise up in its support. Instead, they obeyed the priests, who summoned them to fight against the ungodly innovations of the foreign invader. For Joseph was the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, placed on the Spanish throne by French troops. That was all that mattered to most Spaniards—not what was proposed but by whom it was proposed.

By then the French should have known better. In 1799 the same thing had happened in Naples, whose liberals, supported by the French, were slaughtered by the very peasants and plebeians they wished to emancipate. They were mustered into a militia of the “Holy Faith” by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, coincidentally a member of Calabria’s largest land-owning family, who led his men forward on horseback. Ruffo easily persuaded his followers that all promises of material betterment were irrelevant, because the real aim of the French and the liberals was to destroy the Catholic religion in the service of Satan. Spain’s clergy did the same, and their illiterate followers could not know that the very first clause of Joseph’s draft constitution had not only recognized the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church but stated that it was the only one allowed in Spain.

Read the whole thing, dammit.

By-elections

Woo! A big NDP win last night, though tempered somewhat by basement-level turnout. Ah well.

As expected, the knives are already coming out for Stephane Dion. While I'm not really interested in whether Dion or Ignatieff or Rae would be the better Liberal leader, I think coming after Dion because of some bad by-elections is insane.

Let's just point out the obvious when it comes to recent Canadian political history. Gordon Campbell lost his first general election. To the NDP. As did Mike Harris in Ontario. (Losing to Bob Rae!) Dalton McGuinty lost his first election to Mike Harris, in what was most certainly a winnable election.

These men all went on to become Premiers of their provinces. So maybe, even if Outremont was the next best thing to a Liberal fortress, a single bad night isn't reason enough to turf a leader?

Meh

I have very little to say today.

I will say this, however: the idea that Alan Greenspan fell from grace or somesuch after the Bush coup in 2000 is silly. The man was always a wackadoo Ayn Rand cultist who wanted to screw the poor. Bush just gave him a better opportunity.

It always confused me that people treated a Republican appointee, who's on-the-record statements were frequently nutty, with such deference. It served the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party to treat him as an exogenous force in American politics, someone who had to be obeyed irrespective of party politics, because the Clinton wing was more interested in winning Wall Street votes. (How'd that go?) But Greenspan was never that shy about his role as economic prognosticator.

We need a most wanted list for these people

Amir Taheri is one of those names that should set off your spidey-sense, if it doesn't already. This is the guy who sold the National Post the (totally fabricated) story about Iran forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.

Apparently, he's been a useful source for Washington media for decades, despite the fact that he's a proven liar.

Of course, journalists have high ethical standards while lowly bloggers are just smelly hippies who live in their basements.

The occasional Peak Oil post

The Hindu Business Line (what, you're not a subscriber?) says that the facts of oil production are increasingly corresponding with not just one, but all four of the competing theoretical predictions for Peak Oil. The key part:

In the Graph, the ‘all liquids’ fuel production shows a peak in July 2006 at about 85.39 mbpd and production by May 2007 was down by about 1.2 mbpd to 84.17 mbpd. Again, this is line with the estimates made by Matt Simmons and Dr Campbell in their studies.

This is even more remarkable considering that we have not had any major disruptions due to above-ground factors such as hurricanes or a drop in Iraq production due to political factors since 2005.

So in all probability we would have passed the peak oil scenario within this decade with 2006 as the most likely candidate for the event.

But this is something I didn't know, and I've been reading Skrebowski for years:

Chris Skrebowski started his ‘Mega Projects Database’ study to disprove the peak oil theory and after completing the study, became a convert to the peak oil camp.

Meanwhile, more evidence that the Ghawar oil field, the world's largest, has peaked:

The Ghawar oil field is the kingdom’s crown jewel. Stretching for more than 150 miles beneath the desert, it is the largest known deposit in the world. It produces perhaps twice as much oil as any other field, and has doubtless accounted for more than half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. Yet the Saudis have been removing oil from this reservoir for half a century. Sooner or later, its production must fall....

But the total amount that the kingdom produces has been declining, down a million barrels a day over the last two years of data.

The Saudis have claimed these cuts have been in response to weak demand. However, the big drop in production began in the spring of 2006, when the price of oil was rising from $60 to $74 a barrel; the claim that no one wanted to buy Saudi Arabia’s light crude strains credulity. The drop in production has also coincided with a huge new Saudi effort to find and pump more oil: The number of active oil rigs in Saudi Arabia has tripled over the past three years.

Declining production at the same time as massively increased efforts in exploration is pretty much the definition of peak production (the same situation Canadian natural gas production is in, btw.)

So we've got a cataclysmic decline at Mexico's Cantarell field already happening, and the potential for a similar decline at Ghawar. The North Sea is collapsing as well, and non-OPEC production can't make up the margins.

Good time not to own a car.

Re-wilding Canada

Karl Schroeder had the same reaction I did to the idea of skyscraper farms. But, if you check the bylines, you'll see that I got printed first. Canadian science-fiction author, 0. Me, 1.

One of the most common responses to this idea I get is something like: "forget that, better we learn to live with nature as stewards than apart from it like this." And I admit, the whole "big-box farm" concept is pretty much the definition of separating ourselves from nature. And the idea that we could heal the planet after having wrecked it so thoroughly is tempting. But guess what? We've never, not once, demonstrated the ability to be careful stewards of the Earth.

Anyone who's read Guns, Germs and Steel (or the more recent The World Without Us) understands that the "balance" that pre-contact North American natives lived in with the Earth was less a model of good stewardship, and more the result of having used the Earth to the point of exhaustion their technology allowed: hunting every large mammal to extinction, repeatedly burning forests for better hunting, and a number of other practices. (There's a version of this line of thought that says the First Nations were worse to the environment than we are today, or any number of racist talking points. I hope I don't need to bother stating that simply isn't what I'm saying here.) The old Maya cities are perfect examples of civilizations that overshot the capacity of their natural environment and collapsed.

I proposed in that same Gristmill piece that the basic tenet of environmentalism should be that nature exists independent of human desires or purposes. The prairies don't exist for our benefit -- they were prairies before they were farms, and they'll be prairies when we leave again. This also means that nature doesn't exist to make us feel better about ourselves, or to give us something to do. The best thing we can do with nature is let it go wild. It will recover remarkably quickly if we just leave it alone for a bit. (Making exceptions for places where we've stored truly disgusting stuff like radioactive waste.) So yes, let's replace our horribly destructive, petroleum-dependent methods of farming with something more compact and close the loop -- better that than our current practice of using the Gulf of Mexico as our continental toilet.

But read Karl Schroeder anyway.

So much for that, II

Oh, and while things turned for the worse in Iraq today, Rob Farley cheers us up with the good news from Somalia: nope, just kidding, the US' war against Muslims* there has turned balls-up, too.

*I really truly wish there was a more charitable descriptor there, but there really isn't. The Islamic courts who were running Somalia seem to have been targeted by the US not for any provable collusion with al Qaeda, but because they had the name "Islamic" in them, and the US saw an easy win with Ethiopia on its side. Blech.

So much for that

Leader of the "Anbar Miracle" killed.

The leading suspects include all of the nationalist insurgent groups, AQI, and some of this internal Sunni rivals to boot.

And here's an important point: the Sunni nationalist insurgency is simply put the largest and most problematic force in Iraq for the Americans. They are the ones primarily responsible for attacks on US troops (though all sectors of Iraqi Arabs increasingly support attacks on Americans) and today's assassination shows that they have the ability to respond to American strategy with a strategy of their own.