Politblogo

The scientist as actor

My Canadian readers may be familiar with this common phenomenon: I have a few American readers of this blog, and even among them, it is not uncommon to hear frustrated expressions of desire to become Canadian when their politics adds another razor-wire loop to the loopiness that it is.  My Canadian readers will also be familiar with the both the feeling of flattery tinged with a small amount of guilt: justified guilt that it is not deserved.

Via ReWind.it at Bread'n'Roses, we find this charming bit of news in the Notional Pest:

Until now, Environment Canada has been one of most open and accessible departments in the federal government, which the executive committee says is a problem that needs to be remedied.

It says all media queries must now be routed through Ottawa where "media relations will work with individual staff to decide how to best handle the call; this could include: Asking the program expert to respond with approved lines; having media relations respond; referring the call to the minister's office; referring the call to another department," the presentation says.

Gregory Jack, acting director of Environment Canada's ministerial and executive services, says scientists and "subject matter experts" will still be made available to speak to the media "on complex and technical issues." He would not explain how "approved lines" are being written and who is approving them.

This sort of thing will be no surprise to anyone following the saga of the frankly excellent Linda Keen, the Canadian nuclear regulator who stood up to a Canadian government presently dominated by an unadulterated Bushian neocon.  (Her total smackdown testimony linked from here.) And by dint of that, these tactics should be highly familiar to American readers, as they were learned from You Know Where.

The second day of Oilmas

Yesterday was Oilmas! $100 NYMEX, baby!

Waste and liberty

Contrary to what you may think of us pinko commie types in these particular times, some of us do like the idea of personal independence in that systems of dependency can turn into systems of power.  What differentiates us from libertarians, I think, is the belief that the side-effects of such independence must be curtailed or mitigated or compensated.

This brings me to a recent post by lesbian separatist Amy's Brain Today, who is currently exploring the possibility of women's liberation through women's land-ownership:

Feminist Reprise - Leave 'Em Thinkin': I leave you with this arresting bit of food for thought, which jolted my brain when it occurred to me one day when I was enjoying Kya's house and considering the ways in which I might build my own: How would this continent, and our lives, be different if each and every building had been designed and constructed to independently and fully provide for its own energy and waste disposal needs? Think about it.

The answer, alas, is that while this sort of existence may feel more liberated, it almost certainly isn't---at least from the perspective of waste.  The energy it would take for everyone to live a healthy existence with this level of self-sufficiency I am suspecting would be far greater than the absolute requirements of the present situation.  You'd have to greatly reduce the world's population in order to do this.  And even so, I'm really skeptical that it would be better than the economies of scale gained from collective processing of waste.

I guess it's a bummer that capitalism and the Big State and La Patriarchidad controls the means of waste-disposal.  The question is whether this is the nature of collective, "alienated" waste-disposal in itself or whether this is a corruption of these systems by the dominant paradigm.

And that is a suspiciously common question in many situations.

 

Environment and justice redux

MurkyView has a positive post regarding the electoral prospects and value of the Green Party.  I am not so sanguine, as can I have discussed before. In sum, I think that an environmental platform is impossible with a commitment to economic justice.  Some people think that they can be decoupled, but they cannot. 

Economic and social justice may not lead to environmental remediation.  I know this.  But environmental remediation has an insurmountable obstacle to overcome one wants it to occur without economic and social justice.  The latter two are necessary conditions for the former.  Anyone who watched some of the fights over logging in BC can see this obvious truth.

Comforting

Every time I start feeling down about the overall state of the world, indeed, down enough to say that I'm depressed abou it, I visit JunkScience.com.  I don't believe most any of it, and can see the transparent way it operates: in order to distract from the vested interests it represents, it spends a lot of time vociferously claiming that environmentalists are a powerful industry helping to oppress the entrepreneurial spirit.  A particularly inspired post:

Concerned about the Amazon burning they're going to... set fire to it? "Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest" - "Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these, and the forests' ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Grosso state, at Fazenda Tanguro in Querencia, from late August into early September." (Woods Hole Research Center).

So obviously if you're concerned about the burning of the Amazon forests, then the correct response is to do no research whatsoever as to the consequences of it.  Right. Note that their primary complaint against environmentalism is an alleged lack of research.   The ignorance being license to continue on the same course, naturally...hmm, it all starts to make sense now.

But like I said above, the site is such a comfort to read.  Because if they're even a little bit right about anything, it should be a major relief to all well-intentioned people.  Even if they came to those conclusions for the wrong reasons.

Game of doom

There's a lot of depressing news going on these days.  But it was ever thus.  However, there's something a little bit worse in character about present-day bad news.  In the past, we could rely on the hope that whatever bad happened now, there was a "progress" way out; time and ingenuity would solve our problems.  But with Peak Oil apparently looming over our shoulders, now seeming to overshadow the long-term threat of global warming, it seems like the opposite is true: it's all downhill from here.

It's an immobilising sentiment.  And you'd think that that was irrational---a sentiment generated by the scale of the problem, but I'd like to play the "Devil's advocate" and say that it is, in fact, the rational response.

Like most people, I'm used to many of the comforts of technology.  However, there are some I do without: I don't own a car, which is a biggie, and in fact most of my day to day travel is done on foot.  (Let's leave aside the plane travel for now...)  But I cannot imagine living in or surviving a world in technological and economic decline.  And if I cannot imagine it, how can the masses who rely even more than I on cheap energy would be able to go without, let alone actually choose to do what needs to be done and let go early enough that there is sufficient available energy for the truly important things, like health care and so on.

In fact, I cannot imagine human (North American) society as a whole choosing to scale back in advance.  There's always one group or another that thinks it's sufficiently important to continue to consume ever-increasing amounts.  The only scale-backs I can think of are those which are forced by supply: Peak Oil.

The optimists tell us that there is a way out: the Julian Simonesque dictum that human ingenuity and the market are sufficient to solve most problems and can be assumed to work.  As the price of energy goes up, so does this incentive to find new, hitherto unknown (not-so-)cheap sources, and this can be reliably counted upon---inventiveness given demand seems to be quite powerful through history.  However, this seems like a risky fantasy to me.  So much safer to conserve, isn't it?  But let us survey the existing options for action:

1. The pollyannas are wrong, and there is no cheap energy escape hatch from the Peak Oil Problem.  Then we're doomed (assuming I'm right that people won't stop consuming).  Then the smart thing to do is to continue to enjoy life as before---worse, yet, perhaps to consume even more before it becomes impossible to do so.
2. The pollyannas are right, and the supply problem is solved by the ingenuity of demand.  In which case, it is still appropriate to consume as before.  Perhaps, to consume more than before, in order to hasten this economic process!

Either way, it seems to be worth it to be consuming, not conserving.  Make of that what you will.  But if the truth lies in between the two, then the calculation is a little different.

Why the NDP and not the Greens?

Simple answer: for me the problem of environmental destruction and amelioration are tied to matters of wealth and income inequality, and efforts to mitigate the problems with human use of the environment are directly tied to efforts to mitigate inequality. 

So many politico-environmental problems are problems of class.  The logger sees the environmental protester as an urban hippie brat.  The logger has to feed his family, and he has a love/hate relationship with the owner of the mill, who is not only of a higher class, but of such a higher class that the logger depends on him.  The environmental protester, taken out of the context of class, can only see the logger as a source of ruin for the environment, instead of a dependent on the economic process that brought it about.

This is just the most superficial way at which class and environment intersect.  But it in itself is a vital observation.  To me the NDPs approach towards class is more viable and consistent with a long-term view of human relations with the environment than any movement that takes the environment apart from this.