New Media

My thoughts on the world environmental summit known as the Copenhagen Summit in the Vancouver Sun. An excerpt:

Canadians are being singled out as premier environmental villains — for legally providing energy resources to an international market that is starved for new sources of energy. The critics might as well just come up with a list of the top ten oil and coal producers in the world and condemn all of them at the same time, while nations continue to purchase all that nasty stuff that makes their cars and factories work.

I also wrote about the real need to confront environmental disasters of our own making — not just what critics like to narrowly define as “climate change”, in Environmentalists Have Been Framed!

This is also interesting: Christ Banned From Copenhagen Global Climate Summit

Also read Why It’s Copendead

So much for sticking to sewers and potholes. Vancouver’s activist city council is spending political capital on some big green challenges that lots of folks think are way beyond our politicos’ pay grade. We’re going to see a more big-government approach to these issues – and that’s a good thing if we’re going to fix them.

That sustainability challenges like climate change and resource depletion are global in nature doesn’t let local governments off the hook to focus on sidewalks and animal-control bylaws. Voters will demand local actions to prevent or diminish local symptoms of global problems.

Read my full article at Granville Magazine, Green Roads and Risky Paths

For shame.

Effects of Arctic warming seen as widespread

CRYING KIDS
Why didn’t Santa come this year?

GLUM DAD
Sorry, children. Rather than following the intuitively reasonable precautionary principle, us grown-ups decided to wait for definitive proof that carbon buildup was causing climate change before spending any significant resources on the problem. As such, I’m afraid Santa and all his elves are bloated corpses floating in the ocean.

CRYING KIDS
That’s why we don’t get any presents?

GLUM DAD
No, you don’t get any presents because your Daddy lost his job at the plant because the grown-ups in charge of managing the economy were greedy psychopaths.

Happy Earth Day, everyone! If you’re not sure how to make the Earth a greener place, here are a few ideas that you won’t find on David Suzuki’s homepage:

1. Set off massive electromagnetic pulses in major cities around the planet to render all vehicles inert. No cars, no carbon footprint.

2. Forced evacuation of cities like Calgary that seem to have been built with the exact opposite of sustainability principles in mind. Write off the loss as a giant tax credit for all Canadians.

3. Have poachers of endangered land and marine species sent to live in Sudbury, Ontario. Do the same to their friends and families.

4. Break into a lab and unleash a zombie plague to reduce the number of consumers.

5. Eat all kittens and puppies. Pets just use up more of our scarce resources.

So says Green Party candidate Jack Etkin. Is it any wonder that so few people take the Green Party seriously, resulting in a 1.2 per cent share of funding amongst the federal parties?

Not getting that many votes doesn’t necessarily mean our democracy is broken. It just means your particular message hasn’t caught on with the electorate. Same goes for freedom of the press.

When your biggest media coverage of the year comes from a candidate who gets exiled from the Green Party for seeming to admire the work of the 9/11 terrorists, a lack of press freedom might not be the underlying cause of your difficulties.

It’s a joke, and a not very funny one at that. On the west coast, in the birthplace of Greenpeace, the Greens ought to be a major political contender, or at the very least, a kingmaker. Climate change and environmental issues are now top of the agenda in many voters’ minds, as they should be.

The Greens need to find a way to become relevant to the average voter without whining that the rules are stacked against them.