March 2008
Monthly Archive
March 29, 2008
John McCain wants voters to believe he’s a true champion of the environment. That’s what he says. What he does – that’s a different story.
When tough environmental initiatives come to a vote in the US Senate, you can count on John McCain to be – well, to be absent. From The Guardian:
“Twice in the last three months, the US Senate has come within one vote of overturning $1.7bn in tax benefits for oil companies and using the money to promote renewable energy. Both times, McCain has skipped the vote, effectively killing the proposal and alarming leading green groups.
“McCain also was a no-show during controversial votes on subsidising the conversion of oil to “clean” coal and relaxing rules for oil refineries.
“When the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) released its annual environmental rankings last month, McCain – whose campaign website declares him “a leader on the issue of global warming” – earned a zero for missing all of the group’s votes on key green issues. He was one of nine Republicans scoring the lowest possible rating.”
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups intend to publicize McCain’s environmental voting record in the runup to the November elections. From his embrace of Christian fundamentalism to his call for even more deregulation of the financial sector to his insistence on keeping the Iraq War on the front burner, John McCain is showing the world that there’s a lot more to him and a lot less to him than he’d like you to believe.
March 28, 2008
It’s an idea I’ve endorsed for some time – carbon tariffs on imports. Work out the carbon footprint associated with an import and then levy a tariff on it as the product arrives at our docks.
By fixing the tariff to the product, it becomes possible to circumvent the principal arguments that block progress on a meaningful and effective plan to combat global greenhouse gas emissions.
The more populous countries, China and India, have a sound argument that because their per capita emissions are just a fraction of a citizen of the West, they should get a pass until we lower our per capita emissions. This, of course, ignores the fact that they’re largely poor, over populated, agrarian societies which gives them an enormous advantage on the per capita scale.
The smaller, Western countries also have a sound argument when they point to China having already emerged to become the top GHG emitter. Leaving aside issues of population, that’s a powerful argument but it’s no more powerful than the per capita argument so – stalemate.
Carbon tariffs levied on production cut through both arguments and break the deadlock. Those tariffs, however, must be applied to imports as well as domestic production. Then fair is fair.
CIBC World Markets has released a report endorsing carbon tariffs and noting they could even restore North America’s manufacturing sector. From the Toronto Star:
“It becomes absurdly quixotic to ban coal plants in North America while at the same time China’s got 570 coal plants slated to go into production between now and 2012, 30 plants between now and the Olympics,” CIBC economist Jeff Rubin said.
“We’re moving in opposite directions.”
With some advanced countries enacting carbon taxes, carbon trading systems and other measures to lower emissions, CIBC believes the growing pollution from developing countries will provoke penalties against their exports.
That would benefit the environment, and will also bring certain jobs back to North America, since carbon emission taxes and high oil prices would offset the benefit of cheap labour, Rubin says.
“Chinese goods will have to pay for the carbon that they emitted and they’ll pay for that when they enter our market place by paying that tariff,” Rubin said in an interview.
“Once we impose the tariff on Chinese goods, some of those industries will be coming home, because . . . energy and carbon efficiency is going to matter more than labour costs.”
We still have an edge on clean technology and we do the country no good service by failing to use that edge to our own betterment. We need to see carbon taxes not as something that will endanger our economy but something that can stimulate and restore our economy.
March 28, 2008
Unless you’re over 70, you probably don’t remember a time when the United States of America wasn’t global top dog. The transition, well underway by the late 30’s, was really cemented by WWII. When that one was over no one was in the slightest doubt of who was ruling the roost.
It’s been a terrific run. The 50’s, 60’s and 70’s were the grandest time to be an American, heralding real social, political and economic advances. Whatever was new today would be the basis for something newer next year. No one could even foresee that ending. But ending it is.
George w. Bush has caused enormous damage to his country. With the help of a Saudi guy, he’s dragged the US to the far right and perched it precariously very near the end of the limb.
Six months ago there was very optimistic talk about how the next president would put America back on an even keel and, eventually, undo the damage left in the wake of a departing Bush. There was still time to set things right. It wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be quick but there was still at least some time. Lately, however, it seems that hopeful optimism may have been misplaced.
Take Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. When they were introduced, even John McCain opposed them. That was then. Now McCain favours making them permanent and even Clinton and Obama are talking about which cuts should be kept and new ones to be added.
Now the line is that these ruinous tax cuts are necessary to see America through its current fiscal crisis. Say what? Even the Washington Post which seems to oppose the tax cuts then goes on to make a bizarre claim:
“The direction of the tax debate is frustrating deficit hawks in Washington, who worry that none of the candidates is charting a course toward a balanced budget. Meanwhile, Bush and other politicians are telling voters alarmed by a sagging economy that keeping the cuts past their 2010 expiration date can help revive the nation’s fortunes, a claim many economists say is nonsense.”
Okay, the tax cuts are bad. But then the paper goes on to describe how wonderful the Bush cuts have been:
“The tax cuts, the signal economic achievement of the Bush administration, are among the three biggest federal tax reductions since the end of World War II, comparable in size to the Reagan tax cut of 1981 and the Kennedy tax cut passed in 1964, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation. By the time the Bush cuts are scheduled to expire, it’s projected that they will have saved taxpayers $1.6 trillion.”
They will have “saved” taxpayers money? Only if you ignore the fact that these cuts have been funded by enormous government borrowing. America’s taxpayers, particularly the working and middle classes, are going to have to repay that money, with interest, to foreign lenders – every last dime of it. And the longer this madness goes on, the more debt those taxpayers are going to carry, with interest, and the more they and their kids and grandkids are going to have to pay.
It’s sad really. The American people seemingly can’t be trusted to accept tough measures necessary to restore their country. If Chretien and Martin had shown as little faith in us they would never have embarked on the road to balanced budgets and debt reduction. Imagine the mess we would be in today.
I think one thing is obvious. If no presidential candidate runs seeking a mandate to reverse America’s fiscal slide there’ll be even less chance of reform coming through Congress. Debt is a disease that has spread through the United States at all levels and America will have enormous problems retaining its place on the global scene if it doesn’t deal with this problem.
March 27, 2008
When it comes to the Global War Without End on Terror, the less democracy we have to overcome the better.
Look what happens when those brown people get democracy? You get Hamas elected by the Palestinians. Hezbollah gets in to the Lebanese legislature. Now you’ve got moderates in power in Pakistan. What next?
You see the thing is, once they get elected, they get all uppity. They just don’t do what they’re told, they’re hardly any use at all – or worse.
Take Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former dictator. He swept the decks; threw uncooperative judges in jail, tossed the parliament – now there was a guy you could double-deal with. Sure he conned you a lot of the time but at least he said he’d do what he was told. And then, along comes democracy. Great.
Now Pakistan has fallen into the hands of a bunch of “free thinkers” who’ve announced they’ll actually hold talks with the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership in their country. When Bush sent diplomats John Negroponte and Richard Boucher to meet coalition leader Nawaz Sharif, they got a chilly welcome and a scolding. From The Guardian:
“…senior coalition partner Nawaz Sharif gave the visiting Americans a public scolding for using Pakistan as a “killing field” and relying too much on Musharraf.
“…body language between Negroponte and Sharif during their meeting on Tuesday spoke volumes: the Pakistani greeted the American with a starched handshake, and sat at a distance .
In blunt remarks afterwards, Sharif said he told Negroponte that Pakistan was no longer a one-man show. “Since 9/11, all decisions were taken by one man,” he said. “Now we have a sovereign parliament and everything will be debated in the parliament.”
It was “unacceptable that while giving peace to the world we make our own country a killing field,” Sharif said, echoing widespread public anger at US-funded military operations in the tribal belt.
“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorism, we also want our villages and towns not to be bombed,” he said.”
Well, there goes the neighbourhood and it’s all the fault of that damned democracy again.
March 26, 2008
Clean Coal theory is dangerous. As global warming skeptics constantly point out, there’s always some uncertainty about theories.
Why is Clean Coal just a theory? Because no one has yet shown that the amount of CO2 that needs to be captured to establish a viable, clean coal-fired electricity system can be safely and permanently sequestered. It requires a lot of emptiness – underground reservoirs where the carbon can be stored under very high pressure. The reservoirs need to be in reasonable proximity to the capture source. The further you need to pump the stuff the greater the expense and the risk of something going wrong.
Here’s a little something they don’t want to tell you: there’s not remotely enough reservoir space to pull this off. That’s why it’s all gimmickry, a diversion. So if, in theory, you had an infinite amount of reservoir space and if, in theory, enough of that reservoir space was suitable to safely store high pressure CO2 and if, in theory, enough of that suitable reservoir space was sufficiently close to make sequestration economically viable, then you’ve got, in theory, an answer.
So, the first question for Mr. Harpo – how much viable storage capacity exists? Second question – how much CO2 can be safely and permanently sequestered in the existing storage? Third question – how much of Canada’s electricity requirements can ever be realized through clean coal technology?
It sounds great, in theory, but sometimes you have to ask the practical questions.
March 26, 2008
Stephen Harper has unveiled the cornerstone of the Tories’ environmental programme – a “clean coal” power plant in development in Saskatchewan.
The idea behind clean coal is to capture the CO2 emissions and sequester the carbon somewhere that it can’t escape into the atmosphere. That goal presents a host of technological challenges, all of which have to be met if it is to be worth the expense and effort.
The way the Saskatchewan project is being hyped you would think that Canada scored some enormous breakthrough, something the rest of the world has been able to only dream of. Now you wouldn’t know it to listen to Harpo but the Saskatchewan project. to which he’s now conveniently lashed himself, was announced in 2002 and it was in 2002 that Saskatchewan announced its plans for a demonstration clean coal electricity plant in 2007.
Carbon capture technology has come a long way since 2002 but the problem then, as now, remains in sequestration. Capturing the CO2 is only good if you can find a way to store it – safely and permanently.
The popular concept of sequestration is to pump the gas under high pressure into existing oil wells where it will actually help in the extraction of remaining oil reserves. It sounds good, in theory, but there can be problems. For starters, the gas sits there waiting to escape. It just sits there, at high pressure, waiting and waiting and waiting for something, such as a fissure to develop. If one of these reservoirs is breached you don’t want to be living anywhere near it, at least if you want to go on living.
What’s troubling is that the most technologically challenging part – sequestration – is the part that’s almost never mentioned. Instead our attention is diverted to the shiny bits – carbon capture.
But, for Harpo, it’s all sleight of hand. It’s a promise he won’t be around to keep anyway and it’s something he can use to conceal his deliberate failure to take any meaningful action to curb GHG emissions.
March 26, 2008
Posted by MoS under
DB Cooper
[4] Comments
It’s been almost 20-years since a young boy found $5,800 of D.B. Cooper’s stash of twenty dollar bills decomposing along the banks of the Columbia River. The bills were determined to be part of the $200,000 Northwest Orient Airlines gave Cooper after he hijacked their plane on a hop from Portland, Oregon to Seattle in November, 1971. Cooper also demanded, and got, four parachutes after threatening to blow up the plane.
Somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, Cooper put on one of the parachutes, took the money and walked off the plane’s rear ramp into a raging storm. It’s been widely believed that Cooper didn’t survive the jump. Now it seems he might just have made it after all.
The FBI is now conducting forensic tests on a parachute discovered by some kids two weeks ago in a field 100-miles south of Seattle. The chute had been buried in the dirt. The FBI has confirmed that the field was on the flightpath taken when Cooper jumped.
March 26, 2008
The best thing that John McCain has going for him is Hillary Clinton. So long as she’s in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination his popularity soars. By the time November has come and gone the toughest opponent McCain may have faced in his march to the White House could be Mike Huckabee.
David Brooks, writing in the International Herald Tribune, says Hillary simply can’t help herself – or the Democrats.
“The door is closing. Night is coming. The end, however, is not near.
Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent.
Let’s take a look at what she’s going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping.
For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism. The policy debates between the two have been long exhausted, so the only way to get the public really engaged is by poking some raw national wound.
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring.
About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.
Why does she go on like this?
Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support?
Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands of times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic.”
March 25, 2008
Posted by MoS under
Cheney
[2] Comments
According to Dick Cheney, the greatest burden of the Iraq War isn’t being carried by those soldiers now enduring their fourth combat tours in that hellhole. It isn’t by those who find themselves trapped beyond their enlistments thanks to the military’s “stop loss” policy. No, the real burden is being carried by President Bush.
“The president carries the biggest burden, obviously,” Cheney said. “He’s the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm’s way for the rest of us.”
There are no words to describe how vile this creature is. Dick Cheney knows a lot about fighting. He fought to bag five draft deferments during the Vietnam War to keep his ass safely at home while others went off to do his share of the fighting. This man is the poster boy of Chickenhawks. It’s no wonder he has no idea, none, of the burden his country’s trapped soldiers are truly bearing.
March 25, 2008
Hillary Clinton isn’t having a good time of it lately. After running a pretty effective smear job on her rival, Barack Obama, to the enternal gratitude of Republican John McCain, Hillary has been pulled back into the realm of reality, her own reality, and she’s not liking it.
To use the phrase of the judge at the McCartney divorce hearing about Heather Mills, Hillary has “over-egged the pudding.” That’s a polite way of saying she’s been a bit carried away with her many claims to fame.
To hear her tell it, she was instrumental in helping her husband, the Big Dog, cope with the many crises he faced during his terms as president. Why she must’ve been right there by his side, guiding his hand. Except she wasn’t. It turns out that some 11,000 pages of her record – pried loose by a Republican Freedom of Information proceeding – shows a considerably different picture to that painted by Hillary. Often she was on holiday at critical moments or having a tea social somewhere else.
Now Hillary is up against the “Phantom Sniper.” This little, self-serving figment of Hillary’s imagination came up in relation to her 1996 visit to Bosnia. Just last week Hillary told everyone how she had to brave sniper fire when she arrived at Tuzla airport:
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base,” she said in a speech last Monday.
Brave stuff indeed, presidential even – except it didn’t happen. She just made it up. Also along on that junket was the comedian Sinbad who said the greatest crisis they faced was figuring out where to eat.
Caught with her drawers down and unable to claim the dog ate her homework, Hillary did the only thing she could do, she says she “misspoke”:
“I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.”
Yes, Mrs. Clinton, you do say a lot of things – a lot about your Democratic rival, Mr. Obama, and a lot about yourself. Maybe if you focused on saying less – maybe by just sticking to things that are true – you would do yourself a lot of good.
A weekend poll found that 60% of American voters said that McCain and Obama were believable. 57% said that Clinton was not believable. This is a candidate with a serious credibility problem and it’s all of her own making.
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