GreenerPolitics

From Vision of Humanity.com

Peace and sustainability are the cornerstones of humanity’s survival in the 21st century. The major challenges facing humanity today are global – climate change, accessible fresh water, ever decreasing bio-diversity and over population. Problems that call for global solutions and these solutions will require co-operation on a global scale unparalleled in history. Peace is the essential prerequisite, for, without peace, how can the major nations of the world co-operate to solve these issues?

The Global Peace Index is a ground-breaking milestone in the study of peace. It is the first time that an Index has been created that ranks the nations of the world by their peacefulness and identified some of the drivers of that peace. 121 countries have been ranked by their ‘absence of violence’, using metrics that combine both internal and external factors. Most people understand the absence of violence as an indicator of peace. This definition also allows for the measuring of peacefulness within, as well as between, nations.

 Check out the rankings here

From Elizabeth May’s Blog

It is the question of the moment. Everywhere I go, on web sites and blogs, I stand accused of doing something: (pick one)

1. stupid
2. egomaniacal
3. deluded
4. courageous, but still stupid, or
5. selfish.

This is all because I decided to run in Central Nova. True, this criticism is most severe the farther one is from Nova Scotia and the least aware one is of life in Central Nova.

Read the rest of her blog here!

From the BBC

Japan had said it would consider scrapping plans to include humpback whales in the catch.

In return it sought approval of its request for limited commercial hunting by four coastal communities.

But anti-whaling countries at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission rejected the move as a “needless act of provocation”.

The IWC meeting opened in Alaska on Monday.

Read the rest of the article 

From Bloomberg.com

By Dara Doyle

May 27 (Bloomberg) — Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern may seek his party’s first-ever national coalition with the Green Party to cement a third straight term running one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies.

Ahern’s Fianna Fail party won 78 seats in the 166-member parliament, according to the final results of the May 24 general election. That’s short of the 83 needed for it to govern alone.

Ahern, 55, may have to find a new partner to secure a parliamentary majority after a slump in support for his current coalition ally, the Progressive Democrats. The Green Party, which wants to limit road building, end corporate donations to political parties and invest more in buses and trains, won 6 seats.

Read the full article here! 

From the CBC

John Baird defended his handling of the environment portfolio Tuesday as a leading environmental group filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the Conservative government to live up to its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

Facing an at-times hostile parliamentary environment committee on Tuesday, Baird said the Tories’ plan was an “ambitious policy package” that balanced Canadians’ demands for action on climate change with the need to safeguard the country’s economy.

“No one else is doing as much as we are,” Baird said of the Tories’ Turning the Corner plan, which sees Canada reaching its Kyoto emissions targets between 2020 and 2025, instead of 2012, the year laid out in the international plan to curb climate change.

Read the rest of the article