GreenerPolitics

Hi Everyone:

Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy end-of-year.  Whether that be Christmas, Hannuka, Winter Solstice,  — whatever stirs your eggnog.

GreenerPolitics has made great strides from its rebirth from a cyber-attack in February to the creation of newsfeed focused on the Green Party, an on-again off-again Forums page, Green Video and, of course, the advent of GP Radio.

GP Radio has brought us thinkers, business people, open source gurus, musicians, artists and politicians.  The very breadth and depth of the interviews is astonishing. 

We have also been priveleged to have the regular contributions of Jan Triska, Ariel Lade and Arden Bonokoski and their thoughts on green and greener ideas.  And of course, all would be for nought without the support of our webmaster, John Baker.

So to all those people as well as those who have taken the time to contibute their ideas and energy to greenerpolitics, thank-you very much.

As the snow-wrap’t silence descends on we who live in the Great White North (that’s Canada), I would like to take this opportunity to listen to your thoughts about what you’ve seen on GreenerPolitics (the good and the bad) and what you would like to see in 2008.

My sense is that while the mandate of GreenerPolitics has stayed pretty constant since its inception in 2005, it seems that the external world has changed: there are many, many Green Party blog-enabled websites currently in operation, both in Canada and around the world, facebook has connected many people with both green and political leanings — the ultimate networking tool and more people are starting their own websites as forums for discussion.

As the world evolves, GreenerPolitics needs to evolve as well.  This reinvention is one of many rebirths for this site and one in which I would love to hear your opinion.

Mark

By Jan Triska, Greenerpolitics correspondent

What do you get when a top-flight journalist teams up with a well-known expert on economics of sustainable development and they take on the issue of Canada’s response to climate change?

After hearing that Jeffrey Simpson and Mark Jaccard have co-written a book titled ‘Hot Air’, I couldn’t resist the temptation to actually hear Mr. Simpson speak to a live audience. And I must admit, the presentation, although detailed and quite technical, held my attention for the full hour or so…it was definitely an insightful and critical examination of our struggles to put forward meaningful policy on the climate change issues.

What Simpson and Jaccard argue - and, in my humble opinion, prove - is that our federal government has been caught in a difficult spot, unprepared, insufficiently aware of basic underlying facts, and facing a tall order that Canada had originally set out for itself. Our GHG emission reduction targets, as adopted under the Kyoto protocol, are nowhere close to being met, even with the increasing number of policy tools and methods available to policymakers. Despite having no fewer than seven distinct ‘Climate change action’ plans or similar federal strategies over the past decade, Canada has not made any significant headway. Simpson and Jaccard discuss the root causes, point out the political context, and, ultimately, try to provide some alternatives to get Canada back on track.

Mr. Simpson wasted no time pulling out detailed graphs. Among the more interesting ones was the comparison of the long-term effects of the ‘Dion plan’ (as adopted in 2005 when Liberals were still on power) and the ‘Baird plan’ (the current federal government action plan). According to the projections of how many tonnes of GHGs Canada might reduce due to different strategies and policy tools, the authors demonstrate that neither of these two most recent ‘action’ plans will lead the country into a long-term carbon reduction scenario, and will get us nowhere close to Kyoto-compliance status. If anything - and I’ve found this particularly ironic - it is the Baird plan that came looking a bit better, a bit more forceful than the Dion plan.

Why, does one ask, is Canada having such a hard time with achieving meaningful and lasting GHG reductions?

Jaccard and Simpson argue that we have not chosen the appropriate strategies: instead of reaching for regulatory measures and establishing a viable carbon trading market, Canada’s policy leaders put forward a suite of voluntary measures, small consumer incentives, and a whole batch of short-term programs to aid the development of some clean energy technologies. Simpson, in his presentation, stated that voluntary measures rarely work, that the consumer incentives available to Canadians to motivate us to “alter our carbon footprint” are too low to achieve the behavioural change necessary; and, last but not least, the carbon market is only coming in now, years later than it would have been useful.

It was interesting to hear the authors critically pan programs such as the One Tonne challenge. Promising in theory, programs of this type often grind down due to insufficient implementation, insufficent technical and other staff to go and perform the actual work of inspecting people’s houses and doing assessments. Canada may have state-of the art environmental legislation and a growing list of programs to lower energy use but if we are not prepared to invest in the resources to implement, monitor and verify the changes, then we are doomed to fail.

I prefer to think that my glass is most often half full. After hearing Mr. Simpson, I had to admit to myself that our collective glass is still half full, that there is still some time to install the kind of policies that will eventually start lowering the overall GHG emissions…but, we have certainly missed the first significant opportunity to reach the opening period of Kyoto Protocol. 2008 is soon, in a mere month or so. Canada will continue to belch the much-maligned greenhouse gases, at one of the highest per capita rates in the world, for some time to come. Perhaps with the current crop of regulations and ‘hard cap’ programs for industry, we’ll lower those emissions levels in the next 10 years. I am hoping we will.

written and researched by Jan Triska, Greenerpolitics correspondent

When one looks at the map of North America, one of the most prominent geographical and hydrological features are the five vast Lakes that sit on the US-Canada boundary. Bounded by the Canadian Shield in the north and by agricultural lands and many an industrial cityscape in the south and seath-east, these inland seas are a massive reservoir of water and aquatic ecology. They are the ‘Blue Lungs’ of North America, just like the boreal forest has been called the green lungs of our continent. They have also been in the news many times for all the wrong reasons- invasive species, toxic pollution levels, ships dumping blast water and oil. Protecting the Great Lakes and improving the science and data collection on this huge region is a tall order. But, in an international effort that is rare in the world, the Canadians and Americans have had a process to keep up with the various developments - and to ensure the Great Lakes will be handed down the next generations in better shape than thus far.

The Great Lakes Regional Collaboration (GLRC) is a massive effort by governments and other stakeholders. All the US states bordering on the watershed - 11 of them in all, plus Ontario and Quebec, are involved. More than 1500 people were involved in brining about the 2005 Great Lakes Strategy; political leaders, scientists, NGO staff, regulators, biologists and transportation specialists, fishermen and fisheries experts and ordinary citizens from both sides of the border. The GLRC is a kind of a unique animal from an admininstrative viewpoint; nowhere else in the world does one find a similar environmentally-driven institution with similar resources at its command.

The GLRC works in several key areas - invasive species, toxic substances, fisheries, coastal health, indicator development and data gathering, and sustainable development. It is a vast collaborative effort. And, as if to prove that environmental improvements sometimes come from unlikely political sources, the impetus for GLRC’s work came from none other than President George W. Bush when he’d signed a Presidential Executive Order (in May 2004), thereby declaring the lakes a ‘national treasure’ and directing the US state governments to work with regional leaders on strengthening the environmental protection measures.

To read more about some of the work of GLRC and the specific projects they are championing, go to:

http://www.glc.org

The Aussie Greens are going to do very well this election on the 24th of November.

In the Australian Senate, they have made preference deals with Labour and the Democrats which means they swap any “surplus” vote from other parties to help them win senate seats on a proportional state-by-state basis. Keep watching… Go bob go!

PS - check out the video file… nice news coverage.
Ariel Lade, Foreign Correspondent

Greens set to hold balance in Senate
By Deborah Cornwall, abc.net.au

One of the most unexpected results of the last federal election was the Coalition wresting control of the Senate away from Labor and the minor parties.

This cleared the way for the Government to push through legislation like WorkChoices in the certain knowledge they had the numbers in the Upper House.

No matter who wins this election, analysts say it is unlikely either of the major parties will have a majority in the Senate in the next term. And there is a strong possibility the Greens may end up holding the balance of power.
(more…)

By Bernard Schoenburg, The PJ Star

SPRINGFIELD - Given the legal right in Illinois to get on the ballot just as easily as Democrats or Republicans this year, Green Party candidates took advantage of the new rules - but not in great numbers.
As the eight-day filing closed for certain state, federal and party offices Monday at the State Board of Elections, totals showed just 18 Green Party candidates among the 960 candidates who submitted petitions.

Phil Huckelberry of Chicago, chairman of the Illinois Green Party’s government and elections committee, said he estimates the number of Green Party county board candidates across the state would be in the low teens. But he also noted that with the party’s power to fill ballot vacancies in races where nobody is picked in the Feb. 5 primary, he hopes the party reaches its goal of having 100 to 110 candidates, state and local, on November ballots in Illinois in 2008.

Read the rest of the article