Today, Canada's House of Commons approved a motion calling for a permanent ban on oil tankers off British Columbia's coast. The passed NDP motion introduced by MP Nathan Cullen urges the government to immediately propose legislation to "ban bulk oil tanker traffic" through the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound, off the north coast of B.C. The bill received Parliamentary support in a tight a vote of 143-138, with all opposition parties supporting it and Conservatives opposed.
British Columbia is now one step closer to having a full legislated ban on supertankers off its north and central coasts. The opposition is sending a clear message to the Conservatives to legislate a formal moratorium.
Today's ban could seriously impact Enbridge, who has plans to develop a $5.5 billion 1,170-kilometre pipeline to carry dirty tar sands bitumen to Kitimat, B.C., where it would be loaded onto supertankers bound for growing energy markets in Asia.
Canada is off to an impressive start at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, if what you're measuring is climate inaction and environmental embarrassment.
Today, at the first set of the Fossil of the Day awards, Canada took home not one, or two, but all three of the awards. The dubious 'honour' is voted on by an international coalition of than 400 leading international environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, who vote on the countries that performed the worst during the past day’s negotiations. Turns out if you are really committed to climate inaction, fail to have any plan to meet already weak targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, defeat a climate change bill that was already passed in your House of Commons by holding a snap vote by an unelected Senate after no debate, and are complicit in trying to weaken climate policy outside of your own national borders, you can win all three of the humiliating prizes.
The gentleman accepting the shameful awards on behalf of Canada hopped from podium step to podium step, barely able to juggle his armful of awards. Looks like Canada can clean up humiliating awards, but can't clean up its act.
In the next two weeks, we'll see if Canada will take home the Fossil of the Year for the forth year in a row. From the look of things now, we might as well preemptively cue the Jurassic Park theme music.
Watch this hilarious video to see Canada's flagrant lack of commitment to climate change policy given its due recognition. We can only hope that history does not repeat itself once more. Prove us wrong, will you Mr. Baird?
Republican candidate Scott Brown has won the race to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts and, as I wrote earlier today, this does not bode well for the clean energy and climate change legislation currently being considered in the Senate.
Up until a couple of weeks ago this was seen as an easy win for the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, but as the polls began to tighten, the political punditry began to speculate what a Republican win would mean for President Obama's health care reform package. In a nutshell, and without getting into wonky talk about super-majorities and the like, a Brown win in the Bay State most likely means health-care-for-all is dead in the water.
While the ramifications for the health care package have rightly been the talk of the town and the cable news talking heads, there are other parts of Obama's plan that will also suffer. One of the biggies is the American Clean Energy And Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill or the green jobs/clean energy bill.
ACES proposes, among other things, to invest in renewable energy, energy efficiency incentives for homes and buildings, grants for green jobs and a cap-and-trade program that aims to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020.
It’s tempting, but most certainly optimistic, to view President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union as his last gasp at blocking progress on global warming. He will, after all, be gone from office before the year is out and it’s tempting to think he hasn’t sufficient time to further damage efforts to reign in climate change.
But there’s no time to lose. And continued obstructionism by the Bush Administration doesn’t just highlight its continuing failure to grasp the urgency of the problem, it also ensures far greater difficulties for its successors, who will have to arrest the problem at home while pressing other major polluters like China and India to act.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed energy legislation that would extract $16 billion in annual subsidies from oil companies while supporting ‘clean’ energy sources like biofuels, wind, solar and geothermal. But the bill, opposed by President Bush, must be merged with Senate measures before it can become law.
As one governor described it, "We are looking for the silver lining in a black cloud." But even as they grappled over the scientific consensus, religious and political skeptics were scrambling to discredit it.
Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.
There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.
