Parasitocracy

Yup, an aristocracy of parasites. George Monbiot points out the latest in the painful saga of the economically insane: notably CEO's of major financial institutions. Mr. Monbiot:

Matt Ridley used to make his living partly by writing state-bashing columns in the Daily Telegraph. The government, he complained, is “a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them.”(1) Taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, intervention of any kind, he argued, are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom.
Then he became chairman of Northern Rock, where he was able to put his free market principles into practice. Under his chairmanship, the bank pursued what the Treasury select committee later described as a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”(2). It was able to do so because the government agency which oversees the banks “systematically failed in its regulatory duty”(3).
On 16th August 2007, Dr Ridley rang an agent of the detested state to explore the possibility of a bail-out. The self-seeking fleas agreed to his request, and in September the government opened a support facility for the floundering bank. The taxpayer eventually bailed out Northern Rock to the tune of £27bn.
When news of the crisis leaked, it caused the first run on a bank in this country since 1878. The parasitic state had to intervene a second time: the run was halted only when the government guaranteed the depositors’ money.

And now Matt Ridley has written a book. As expected, it indulges in the same magical thinking that got Northern Rock into trouble in the first place. Evil governments, terrible parasitic bureaucrats, crippling regualtion all come in for the usual bollocking.  As usual, the remedy is more of what failed the last time. Not only should these idiots not be allowed near levers of economic power, clearly they shouldn't be allowed near a cup of coffee. this belief that their ideology must be correct, must actually justify what they do and who they are, that they cannot give it up without a complete mental breakdown. Like cultists at the end of the world; when it doesn't arrive, you double down.
To let Mr. Monbiot finish up:

It is only from the safety of the regulated economy, in which governments pick up the pieces when business screws up, that people like Dr Ridley can pursue their magical thinking. Had the state he despises not bailed out his bank and rescued its depositors’ money, his head would probably be on a pike by now. Instead we see it on our television screens, instructing us to apply his irrational optimism more widely. And no one has yet been rude enough to use the word discredited.

Screwing Up And Never Paying The Price

From The Washington Post:

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.

Yeah, the top economist for the IMF got it wrong. Of course, he still gets to keep his job, his house, his benefits package and the respect of his peers.Unlike, say, the Greeks, the Spanish, and the other members of the 99% that got done over by his policy demands.
These are the people who really are the Masters of the Universe--at least of the economic universe. And their decisions have real-world consequences--consequences they never have to face. So it becomes very easy for them to do incredibly stupid stuff and not think twice about it. Like Edward Greenspan, acknowledging that he was utterly wrong on so many things before the 2008 smash. These are generally people who come from privilege and will be certain to pass that privilege on to their kids, and its no damn wonder they keep getting it wrong--they don't live in the same world as the rest of us poor buggers. They are just as prone to mistakes and misjudgements as the rest of us, but, as a rule, they don't have to pay any price for being wrong--as long as the  wrong only affects us.
It won't do us any good to keep this system in place; it is chockablock with perverse incentives and the rich protecting the wealthy. All that's happened since 2008 is to re-establish a system that will crack up even bigger next time, until it either fails completely or is brought under significant regulation.

Three Stories

From Aljazeera

Earthrise, Al Jazeera's environmental program, ran a show back in July 2012 which I missed. But I've caught it up now, and I'm a bit excited. It covers three stories: wind generators in Kenya, end-of-life plastic reuse in Ireland, and land reclamation in Indonesia.



 Makers
If you haven't read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano,

 or Cory Doctorow's Makers,

from the website

you really should. They are both about humans and their relationship with their monkey-brains, about our inveterate need to fiddle with stuff. And they're both really good reads.
In Kenya, approximately 82% of the population is off-grid--entirely. They rely on batteries and hydrocarbon fuels for power. Access Energy, a local company, uses re-purposed parts and re-used automobile alternators to build not brilliant, perfect wind generators, but appropriate-tech wind generators that can re-charge cell phones and power a light. Which takes care of a large number of the power requirements the off-grid Kenyan's have.
In Ireland, the urge is the same; to take waste and re-purpose it into something useful. Only this is re-using end-of-life plastic to create synthetic diesel. Endlessly more complex than the wind generators, but born of the same need.
And in Indonesia, a born-again tin miner works to repair the damage done by himself and those like him. Here, desolate cratered land is transformed by energy and cows into something beautiful and livable. A model project for restoring lands we'd prefer didn't get destroyed in the first place.

Australia on the Front Line

Fascinating overview of Australia's record breaking temperatures. From The Guardian:

What is causing Australia's heatwave?

Does the country's record-breaking heatwave have something to do with climate change?

Australia has started 2013 with a record-breaking heat wave that has lasted more than two weeks across many parts of the country. Temperatures have regularly gone above 48°C, with the highest recorded maximum of 49.6°C at Moomba in South Australia. The extreme conditions have been associated with a delayed onset of the Australian monsoon, and slow moving weather systems over the continent.
Australia has always experienced heat waves, and they are a normal part of most summers. However, the current event affecting much of inland Australia has definitely not been typical.
The most significant thing about the recent heat has been its coverage across the continent, and its persistence.
It is very unusual to have such widespread extreme temperatures — and have them persist for so long. On those two metrics alone, spatial extent and duration, the last two weeks surpasses the only previous analogue in the historical record (since 1910) – a two-week country-wide hot spell during the summer of 1972-1973.
A good measure of the spatial extent of the heat is the Australian-averaged maximum daily temperature. This is the average of the highest daily temperature of the air just above the surface of the Australian continent, including Tasmania. The national average is calculated using a three-dimensional interpolation (including topography) of over 700 observing sites each day.
On Monday and Tuesday last week (January 7 and 8) that temperature rose to over 40°C. Monday's temperature of 40.33°C set a new record, beating the previous highest Australian daily maximum of 40.17°C set in 1972. Tuesday's temperature came in as the 3rd highest on record at 40.11°C.

Old Style Thinking in a New World

Lake Mead via Wikipedia

 Actually, that's a little misleading. Really, it's about American hubris and Las Vegas. The world hasn't changed, it's just that capitalist/technocratic thinking hasn't been in the real world for a century or more.
Tara Lohan writes about the water wars of Nevada, with Los Vegas slowly and deliberately destroying the rest of the state with its water demands. As she puts it:

The future that Las Vegas and the rest of Nevada face is one where climate change is likely to make life harder, water scarcer, and decisions about the future tougher. And it’s a future that will be shared across the Southwest. K. Kaufmann writes for the Desert Sun about the National Climate Assessment Advisory Committee’s findings on climate change will affect the country. In the Southwest, Kaufmann writes: 

Snowpack and streamflow amounts are projected to decline, decreasing water supply for cities, agriculture and ecosystems.

The Southwest produces more than half the nation’s high-value specialty crops, which are irrigation-dependent and particularly vulnerable to extremes of moisture, cold and heat. Reduced yields from increased temperatures and increasing competition for scarce water supplies will displace jobs in some rural communities.

Increasingly, wherever you live in the U.S. this will be a shared problem as water resources and potentially energy resources become strapped, if we continue unchanged on our current trajectory.

Murdoch Watch Day...whatever

Two of my favourite US political journalists (a list that includes Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone), Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow had a chat the other day on Rachel's show. They were discussing the Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal and its implications for the Murdoch empire in the US and about what it says about big journalism. Two very smart, very well informed people chatting about a topic both are familiar with--what a concept.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thanks to MSNBC for the clip.

If You Won't Stop Climate Change...

...then you should learn to love it. As it is becoming clear that we will not be doing a damn thing to stop global warming and the resulting chaos, we'd better plan on doing things differently in order to maintain our current capitalist lifestyles. Thus:

From the Daily Mail Online

The area around this house is expected to flood every 20 years or so, and so this house is designed to cut loose from its foundation and float when that happens. The house is nearing completion in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
The Guardian ran a short clip on the designers and the development that's been proposed.

From the article:

They may lack the exotic ring of Venice's Piazza San Marco or Marrakech's Djemaa el-Fna, but Norwich's planned Rain Square and Flood Park may one day earn a little renown of their own in the epic battle with the weather.
After England's wettest year on record, planners this spring will be asked to grant consent to 670 homes by the confluence of the Wensum and Yare rivers featuring these new public spaces, where half the site has a high probability of flooding and its edge is only 45cm (18in) above sea level.
The project, described as a folly by opponents, is a bellwether for Britain's readiness to tackle the twin pressures of rising floodwaters – which the Environment Agency estimates put one in six homes at risk – and ever increasing housing demand in popular places such as Norwich.
In a counter-intuitive attempt to persuade homebuyers to set aside their fear of the rising tide, the scheme proposes homes around marshes, squares that are designed to become ponds, and parks that become small lakes.

So really, why bother to fix the problem when 1 in 6 homes may be at risk of flooding, when that just gives you the opportunity for business as usual selling these creations? From the same article:

The Guardian has learned that the government chose to delay the introduction of critical anti-flood measures until 2014 after lobbying by Britain's biggest house builders. Regulations to demand better drainage of new housing developments using wetlands, reed beds, drainage channels and porous driveways to help prevent run-off flooding that threatens an estimated 2.8m homes was postponed last year after the Home Builders Federation complained to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) about the cost.
Barratt Homes, Redrow, Bovis and other house builders were supposed to take responsibility for building systems to ensure water that drains from new estates soaks into the ground rather than running off to cause flooding locally. But they have written to Defra minister Richard Benyon saying the standards, which have been championed by ecologists and flood experts, are "flawed and would raise design, cost and other problems for house builders". They also warned the scheme would "present a significant risk to the delivery of new housing", and the government announced an 18-month delay.

This, this is why we're all going to die. Probably screaming.

Soot, Diesel, and the Black Carbon Problem

Image via Wikipedia

While the study  is not yet published and will probably be behind a paywall when it is, the abstract is pretty clear:

However, global atmospheric absorption attributable to black carbon is too low in many models, and should be increased by a factor of almost three.[...]

Thus, there is a very high probability that black carbon emissions, independent of co-emitted species, have a positive forcing and warm the climate. We estimate that black carbon, with a total climate forcing of +1.1 W m^-2, is the second most important human emission in terms of its climate-forcing in the present-day atmosphere; only carbon dioxide is estimated to have a greater forcing.

 Some 7.5 million tonnes of soots are released into the atmosphere  each year, coming from cooking fires, open burning (like clearing land or wildfires) and diesel engines. This means that there's actually room to reduce soot production, with diesel engines producing about 70 percent of the soot emissions in Europe, North America, and Latin America. In Asia and Africa, wood burning domestic fires make up 60% to 80% of soot emissions. Coal fires are also a significant source of soot in China, parts of Eastern Europe, and former Soviet bloc countries.
Coal, one of the great evils in fuels, should already be seeing its use cut. Trimming diesel use would also provide other health benefits, as micro-particulates emitted from diesel engines have been linked to a number of respiratory ailments. And the whole cook-fire issue is another reason added to the heap of reasons for bringing the undeveloped world forward.
So bad news: soot is worse than we thought--by a whole lot. Good news? Soot production is something that could potentially be managed. Not that I expect we will....

One Hundred Plus Reasons

BC independent journalist Laila Yuile writes for community newspapers, 24, blogs for HuffPo and on her own blogsite. She has a pretty good group of people following her work, which is why, when she asked them to come up with reminders of the Liberal record here in BC, they responded quickly, efficiently, and in volume.
The Liberal Party, first under Gordon Campbell and now under Christy Clark, have weathered some pretty strong political storms. Through it all, they've managed to maintain a majority government, even though they haven't broadened their support. Then they ran a campaign that swore they wouldn't bring in a harmonized sales tax, folding the federal and provincial taxes together. Six months later: harmonized sales tax.
Campbell thought he was running the standard playbook--bring in massive changes all at once in the first year of your mandate, and then spend the rest of it managing for re-election. It worked a treat for Ralph Klein in Alberta, and has proved successful enough that it's been used in Ontario and at the federal level as well. But the HST was different.
First, it was egregious. Negotiations on harmonization had to have been taking place for months before the election. And while harmonization was going to be good for large corporations, it was going to be brutal on smaller, local enterprises--like restaurants. And that pissed off the small business community who thought they had a champion in the Campbell government.
But the small business community found a new champion--even though he wasn't really all that new. Charismatic politician Bill Vander Zalm, former premier of the province leading a Social Credit government (precursors to the Liberals who fouled their brand so thoroughly under Vander Zalm that the party folded itself into the Liberal brand), picked up the banner. Using legislation brought in under a former NDP government (under great pressure from the Socreds), Bill announced a referendum drive to repeal the legislation harmonizing the two taxes.
With Zalm leading the charge, the HST was no longer a purely partisan issue in the legislature, but became a populist movement transcending partisan politics. The HST probably wasn't the worst Liberal idea to come out (abusing the poor and indigenous populations, a perennial favourite, was clearly worse), but the people of BC decided enough was enough, and used the referendum push to spank the ruling class.
The NDP admitted during the campaign that the referendum legislation had been crafted so that it was almost impossible to successfully complete a recall campaign. But when the people gets riled up.....
The referendum ultimately called, passed. Meaning that the government was compelled to reverse course on the HST ( still not reversed, btw), and started a slide in Liberal popularity even among their traditional supporters. Campbell, his personal brand trashed as badly as Bennett's and Zalm's before him, took a powder. The party, taking a leaf from the Socred playbook, elected a woman to replace him--figuring that the public and media would have a harder time attacking a female premier. But Christy Clark has been up to the challenge, and it looks like the province will get at least one term of NDP government starting in 2013.
But just to make sure that the boobs in power get what's coming to them, laila Yule's crew have provided a reminder to the province  about the last decade of Liberal rule: 100 reasons the Liberals have to go.

Briony Penn Takes on Oilberta

Focus Magazine used to be this sleepy little mag read by seniors and, well, pretty much no-one else. But over the last couple of years, it has transformed itself into one of the most hard-hitting, deep-digging, and well-written magazines in Canada. And pretty much nobody outside Victoria knows about it.
We also have some of the smartest and most committed environmental activists in the world here. The local environment pretty much demands it of a person. There's Alexandra Morton taking on the fish farms of the Broughton Archipelago. David Suzuki just keeps getting smarter and more focused. And let's be frank; who else has elected a Green to Parliament? And then there's Briony Penn.

photo from The Province newspaper

Yes, Briony is not unwilling to use pretty much any means to get an issue attention. She rode through Vancouver as Lady Godiva to bring attention to logging on Salt Spring Island. And, if you've seen Salt Spring
Island, youll know why she did it.

Photo from findfamilyfun.com

Briony is also an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, and continues to write--currently in Focus Magazine.  Where she has written this excellent article on the way the two sides are approaching the expansion of pipeline capacity through British Columbia.

Despite [Ian Anderson, CEO of Kinder Morgan}'s claim to be committed to more genuine consultation, it’s not clear that he or any of his colleagues in the oil patch understand British Columbians’ deep opposition to exposing their land, rivers and sea to the risks posed by oil pipelines and tankers and our even broader concerns. Many of us are sensing that we are on the verge of environmental collapse and that any one of these major projects could put us over the edge. Gerald Amos, past chief councillor of the Kitimaat Village Council, at the end of Enbridge’s proposed pipeline between the tar sands and the coast, articulates the crucial point around consultation: “The big issue for communities—one that really hasn’t been grappled with yet—is the cumulative impact of what we call progress.”
Whether it’s Jasper grappling with the cumulative impacts of man-made corridors on wildlife populations; or Kitimaat with the rising toll of logging, mining, hydro projects and the eight proposed liquefied natural gas plants; or Victoria facing another 300 oil tankers in our waters each year to service the expanded Kinder Morgan depot, the big issue for British Columbians is not just the next big project planned, but the sum total of where we are going as a nation with our energy needs, our distribution, and the rate of exploitation.

Anderson’s speech suggested that he believes it’s a waste of time trying to educate British Columbians about the importance of the pipeline to national security, that we’re simply concerned about our own backyard. In reality, though, it’s Anderson who doesn’t understand the big picture.
We get it that we are moving perilously close to the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Or, more aptly, in the case of the Rockies, the mountain caribou’s back. And on the coast, the southern resident orca’s (another species at risk) back. Environmental collapse cannot be addressed with such solutions as one discussed by the Heavy Oil club: saving caribou in the tar sands by fencing them into compounds to “mitigate” their decline.
“Cumulative impact” is the scientific term for what we intuitively sense is happening to our environment. While assessing such impacts is central to environmental assessments—and true national security—in jurisdictions around the planet, Canada’s policy on such matters, unfortunately, has regressed back to the 1950s.

Read the article. Particularly if you're an Albertan--the days of blithely assuming that oil will sell, the economy will expand, and "Alberta will be the  envy of the country," well, those days are over. BC is one of the reasons Harper decided to gut environmental protections in this country. We are squarely in the cross-hairs, and we know it. Ans still two thirds of BC residents are willing to flip him the bird. Harper's worried about bodies in front of bulldozers day after day on the news. He should be.

 "¡No pasarán!"

Talk-aoke

This punches a lot of my buttons: open-source, community-based, inventive, alternative media. Essentially a talk show-styled piece, it took place at GreEngaged event during the Design Council week. The host acts mainly to draw out anyone who wants to speak, knowing that he can be replaced at any time by someone off the floor. The discussion here is about fashion and the environment, but the process would certainly be translatable to pretty much any event.
It's worth noting that haute couture operates in a copyright-free world, where everything can be stolena dn reproduced at a moments notice. And yet, somehow, the world of fashion manages to keep going.

Something's Coming

No one expected the Battle for Seattle. The Arab Spring was unforeseen. So  was the explosion of Occupy. And now the Canadian government is facing Idle No More and the hunger strike of  Attawapiskat Chief  Theresa Spence.
Ever since MP Charlie Angus brought his constituents issues before the House and the Canadian people, the Harper government has handled things badly. First, it was claimed that the Chief and band were incompetent at managing and a non-First Nations manager was dispatched to clean up the mess. That story stuck with a few Canadians, but then the Attawapiskat band threw the manager off the reserve and refused to pay him--after all, he was to be paid a percentage of what was already seen to be an inadequate budget. As Michael Posluns writes in SLAW (the Canadian online law magazine):

I have witnessed Third Party Management. Not much good can be said about it. The outside manager typically begins by freezing all the band’s accounts, and opening up an account in his own name, often at his own bank. He does not spend much time in the community; he may administer Attawapiskat from Timmins or from Toronto. If Duncan’s appointment is true to form for TPMs past, he may have some managerial experience but he will also have a record of longstanding service to the governing party.

When he closes or freezes all the band’s accounts all the band’s programs stop. I’ve seen situations where summer employment programs, hot lunch programs, recreation programs, road maintenance and everything else that is needed to sustain a community came to a screeching half. The only person who continues to get paid is the TPM himself. Typically, he pays himself 25% of the band’s income for the period he is there.

Yup, the Third Party Manager shuts everything down, takes 25% of the money, and then pretty much does what his political masters tell him to.

Forging Community

Two years ago, I was having coffee with a friend (now, sadly, deceased) and he asked if I would come help him out at the Rainbow Kitchen. He was the lead cook for the day, and claimed that he wasn't sure he'd have enough help. I agreed, we went down, and about an hour and a half after getting there, I was asked if I could be lead cook two weeks on. I hadn't even known if I was coming back!
Well, four months later and I was being asked to be the Kitchen coordinator, a position I held for about 8 months. Simultaneously with my leaving, the Kitchen closed for two months while it was being transferred to Esquimalt United church, as the Anglican diocese had sold the previous home.
Being coordinator changed my morning habits quite a bit--which was noticed by the staff at my local Starbucks. I chatted about what I was doing, and eventually started getting the occasional donation from the staff. It really took off when I ran a program to try and get reusable mugs into the hands of the Kitchen's clients. Starbucks was a big contributor to that.
When the Kitchen re-opened, the manager of my local, Leanne, suggested that maybe her staff could adopt the Rainbow Kitchen as their volunteer cause. We hashed it out, and worked out that Starbucks (which actively encourages community volunteering) staff would come in one evening a month and prepare a make-ahead meal to help out the kitchens regular volunteers. This wasn't unheard of: a local tai chi school also does a once-a-month make-ahead lasagna. It's a way of helping out when you can't get volunteers there between 8:00 am and 2:00 pm. And the volunteers appreciate it as well, as it takes quite a bit of stress off of them.
This has been going on for most of a year now, and with Leanne's pushing, staff from several stores now show up and have a great time prepping a meal.  They have a lot of fun, there's a lot of team-building going on, and the teams can put together a full meal in two hours and always leave the Kitchen cleaner than they found it.
About a month ago, Leanne asked me if there was anything they could do around the Christmas season. After some brainstorming, we decided on presents. The local stores put out donation baskets, asking for things like toiletries, toques, mittens, socks, and the like. On the 15th, the donation boxes arrived at the Kitchen, along with a large group of volunteers. We spent about 3.5 hours sorting donations (with additional donations from the United Church Compassion Warehouse), packing them in shoe boxes, and then wrapping them.

Starbucks volunteers December 15th

There's 125+ presents boxed and wrapped behind them. That's a lot of people who'll get an extra present this holiday season. Why? Because communities are forged from small actions, by individuals, by caring.
This is a small example. Because I like to talk to people, I end up involved. Then I talk with others, and they get involved. This is the secret: Have fun. Spread love. Do one small thing. Because when you do, bigger things happen.
There was a Margret Mead quote on the wall of the old Kitchen. It said: "Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." And as Jack Layton said: "Love is stronger than hate."  Go now, and do great things.

Perils of the Progressives

Well, that might be a bit misleading.... it's not exactly clear that the Green party is progressive. But be that as it may, this whole "unite the left thing" might be running into some early problems. The CBC (and other outlets) are reporting that once Andrew Weaver got the nod as the Oak Bay-Gordon Head candidate for the Greens, Michael Byers, a member of the provincial NDP (and former federal candidate) called him up and suggested it might be for the best if Weaver did not run, but instead might think about taking an ADM position in the expected ND government next spring.
Nothing really wrong with the phone call. After all, this kind of horse-trading is pretty much what progressives have been calling for federally. The question is, was the offer a bribe (as Weaver characterized it) or more of a carrot or inducement (as Byers characterized it)? If you remember, the federal Conservatives were accused by Chuck Cadman's widow of having offered a seven figure "inducement" to get the terminally ill Mr. Cadman to cross the floor and shore up the Cons minority-status government.
The Conservative offer was never taken to court, but cash is always considered a bribe. The opportunity to serve and influence government policy, however, is considered fair play in the political jungle. And why not? Power and policy are the goal of parties and candidates, and the process can allow a party to shore up policy areas that are a little thin with out-of-party help. But a position cannot be guaranteed to an opposition candidate who then agrees to drop out or run a poor campaign.
So why has this little chat come out in the media? I suspect because it offered Weaver and the provincial Greens an opportunity to present themselves as making the NDP nervous. There's nothing better to make your party look like a contender than some twitchiness on the part of another party. Just ask the BC Conservatives, who were bleeding hard right support from the provincial Liberals--at least until they imploded.

More About Cheese

14c cheesemaking   photo credit: Wikipedia

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Bristol in the U.K., has pushed back the date of earliest cheese producation to 7000 years ago.There's suspicion that it was happening a thousand years befor that, but the researchers, working on pot shards, have confirmed the presence of fatty acids found in milk.
The shards were from pottery seives, used in making cheese from cow's milk. At the time, most people were lactose intolerant, losing the ability to digest milk at an early age. Processing raw milk into cheese would break down the lactose and make it tolerable. But when dairying from what is modern-day Turkey made its way morth into Europe, it met with mutant humans who continued to be able to consume milk well into adulthood. Dairying provided these people with a new, high-quality food source, and helped them spread their genes across the continent.

Wheels of Gouda   photo credit: Wikipedia

Listen to CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks on Dec. 15 for an interview with Richard Evershed, who co-authored the study of ancient cheesemaking at the University of Bristol.