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Archive for 'environment'

On climate, Canada is a rogue state

On Sunday, CTV leaked Canada’s intentions to pull out of the Kyoto treaty process on climate change. What is significant about Kyoto is that it is a legally binding international treaty, and one that puts the onus of emission reductions on the countries that have done the most to cause the problem (and who have most [...]

The Ontario NDP Platform

Pollsters tell us that Ontario’s New Democrats may double their seat total in next month’s provincial election. It’s also entirely conceivable that they could be part of a coalition government at Queen’s Park. But what’s actually in the party’s election platform? One central feature of the NDP’s proposals is to implement a tax credit for companies that hire new workers. The tax [...]

Does Capitalism Save Lives?

I was watching CNBC and happened to see this panel about how the number of Americans killed by natural disasters has declined over time. It was also noted that, in early 2010, fewer people died in Chile’s earthquake than in Haiti’s earthquake. The discussion quite reasonably outlined how improvements in emergency preparedness, building codes, and [...]

The US Business of Pollution

From the PEF’s mailbag, here is a guest post by Nick Scott, a recent college graduate and aspiring writer with a passion for environmental conservation. He currently resides in the southeastern United States. The United States and the Business of Pollution In light of the recent environmental tragedy in Japan, there has been a growing [...]

So what’s a green job, anyway?

Today CCPA released a new report by myself and Ken Carlaw, an economist at UBC-Okanagan, called Climate Justice, Green Jobs and Sustainable Production in BC. I doubt you’ll see any headlines about it in the major news dailies, but I think it will have a longer-lasting impact as a key economic framing piece for our [...]

With a thud on my door, it arrived …

… The Labour Day issue of the Vancouver Courier. It even had a story I was interested in, a lead article on local food, and another on the sustainability of fisheries. Good on small-scale independent journalism, I thought, until the moment I took off its rubber band to reveal an inch-thick pile of glossy inserts. [...]

Green Jobs in Transit and Passenger Rail

I’ve posted below an introduction and link to a short piece I wrote a while back for the Green Economy Network on possible job creation from the development of transit.  A student will be doing some work in this area at the CLC this Summer and we would welcome any input or leads on the [...]

BC’s GHG emissions shell game

The BC government recently announced a new climate action of some consequence: the phasing out of the Burrard Thermal plant in Metro Vancouver. The unit was used largely for back-up purposes, producing electricity for BC Hydro to supplement hydropower during times of high demand. But at a large GHG cost per unit of energy — [...]

Vancouver bids to be world’s greenest city

Last week, the City of Vancouver’s task force, the Greenest City Action Team, issued a plan for the city with short and longer-term goals and policy advice on achieving them. The report covers more than climate change, a good thing as it is important to identify win-wins that lead to improvement on other environmental, health [...]

“Bigger Isn’t Better”

A thoughtful op ed from today’s Ottawa Citizen by Peter Victor, the author of “Managing Without Growth” (Edward Elgar)  on the case for a no growth future. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/fp/Bigger+better/1590471/story.html Here’s an extract: “Although no 21st-century Keynes has emerged to prepare the intellectual ground for such a change in thinking, we do have a body of knowledge [...]

Planet Before Politics

I signed the following open letter published in the Globe on the weekend. I cannot take any credit for organizing or writing the letter (hat tip to Ian Bruce of the David Suzuki Foundation). On the other hand, I can say that I have co-published with David Suzuki! It’s time to put the planet before [...]

What are we going to do with the oil and gas industry?

We all know about Alberta, but BC’s green image is increasingly, um, tarred by the expansion of the oil and gas industry, with tens of billions of dollars in new investment in the past eight years. And according to some, the best is yet to come. In today’s Vancouver Sun, David Collyer of the Canadian [...]

The Sustainable Development Paradox

Here is a note to Relentlessly Progressive Economics readers from Dr. Luis T. Gutierrez: The January 2009 issue of the E-Journal of “Solidarity, Sustainability, and Nonviolence” has been posted: The Sustainable Development Paradox As part of a series of articles on “dimensions of sustainable development,” the January 2009 issue shows the impossibility of integrating the social, economic, and political [...]

CUPE Economic Climate for Bargaining June 2008

CUPE has published the June 2008 issue of the Economic Climate for Bargaining publication that I put together on a quarterly basis.  Previous issues are also available through this link at our website.   In addition to regular items on national and provincial economic forecasts and analysis of recent employment, inflation and wage developments, this latest issue includes: [...]

The OECD and the Tar Sands

The 2008 OECD Survey of Canada incorporates a long and surprisingly critical overview of developments in the energy sector, with a major focus on the tar sands. (Chapter 4). It is, in many respects, far closer to the views of the Pembina Institute and the Parkland Institute in Alberta than to those of the Alberta [...]

Dion’s Green Plan or Mintz’s Tax Plan?

There is a lot of the colour green all over Dion’s Green Shift plan.  But after reading it, the greenery appears almost as superficial as the green shift caps that Liberal MPs wore awkwardly with their business suits at the launch yesterday. Dion’s plan is really a proposal for a tax shifting budget and doesn’t [...]

Green Jobs: An Industrial Strategy for Ontario?

Today’s Toronto Star continues the War on Poverty with a front-page report on an  emerging coalition among unions, environmentalists, and social activists.

Exports and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions

Today, Statistics Canada released a very interesting study on the economic demand that is driving greenhouse-gas emissions. Between 1990 and 2002, exports outstripped Canadians’ personal expenditure as the leading source of Canada’s industrial emissions. Indeed, exports accounted for essentially all of the increase in these emissions. Canadian Industrial Emissions (in megatons) Final-Demand Category 1990 2002 [...]

Vive la velorution

Agnès Poirier Thursday August 2, 2007 The Guardian Le Tour is dead, long live le vélo! The French vélorution began the day after Bastille day, or day one of the vélib – short for vélo-liberté. With it, millions of Parisians have been able to forget the shame of the Tour de France and make the [...]

Regulatory “cooperation” in action

In our paper, Putting Canadians at Risk, Bruce Campbell and I feared that lowering our regulatory standards would inevitably happen under the banner of “regulatory cooperation” with the US, something senior government officials think is just great. While this might look like typical Harper policy, it is really just a continuation of an initiative that [...]

Energy Policy in Denmark or How to Delink Growth and Energy Consumption

How Denmark Paved Way To Energy Independence Thirty-Year Plan Uses Wind, Taxes, Pig Fat; Consumers Pay More By LEILA ABBOUD April 16, 2007; Page A1 HORSENS, Denmark — Nothing goes to waste in the new Danish Crown slaughterhouse in eastern Denmark. Even the inedible fat of 50,000 pigs killed and processed here each week is [...]

Simpson on Climate Change

Jeffrey Simpson has a good column in today’s Globe on the new Conservative climate-change plan. He makes the same point that I did about the impossibility of meeting Kyoto’s first-round targets and the importance taking our second-round targets seriously. He also points out how thin all of these climate-change “plans” have been. To me, a [...]

Another Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore has famously and correctly characterized the scientific consensus about global warming as “An Inconvenient Truth”. In today’s Financial Post, Buzz Hargrove identifies another “inconvenient truth” for Canadian progressives: “it is impossible to achieve Kyoto targets in the time frames spelled out in Kyoto.” Canada’s Kyoto commitment was relatively modest and achievable. However, after [...]

Toxics and our failed regulatory system

The Globe and Mail deserves full credit for continuing to publish stories on environmental toxins. After being in circulation for decades, many chemicals are now (slowly) being put to the test, and some may even be taken out of circulation some time in the next decade. A first step being taken by the feds is [...]

Green Strategy and the SPP

At the conference a couple of weeks ago where Elizabeth May mused about income trusts, she also committed to make opposition to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) the centrepiece of the Green Party’s forthcoming election platform. The SPP is an arrangement between Canada, the US, and Mexico that seeks to accelerate tar-sands development, among [...]

Central Nova by the Numbers

Stéphane Dion, who is not progressive, has allied with Elizabeth May, who is not progressive, ostensibly to prevent progressive vote-splitting. As Andrew Coyne notes in tomorrow’s National Post column, this maneuver is clearly directed against the federal NDP, which is progressive. It is worth recalling the 2006 election results in Central Nova, the riding where [...]

Bill C-30 – Climate Change Policy and Impacts on Workers

Bill C-30 – the Clean Air Act – is a strange beast – a government bill which was fundamentally re-written by the three opposition parties to finally move Canada towards a real national action plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.The media are so focused on the politics of climate change that little attention seems to [...]

Toxic chemicals and our flawed regulatory system

Two recent reports from the Globe below point to the failures of our regulatory system. The first is on bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupter, and the second on trans fats. The challenge is a regulatory approach that insists on bullet-proof evidence of harm – which can take decades to accumulate – before action is taken [...]

Internal Trade Conference

On March 30, I attended the federal government’s conference on “Internal Trade: Opportunities and Challenges,” which was hosted by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and by Industry Canada. Other attendees included academics, federal and provincial civil servants, and representatives of business and professional organizations. The academic and policy people all agreed that the material [...]

TILMA and the environment

Last week, the Sierra Legal Defence Fund published a legal analysis on the environment and TILMA. Below is an excerpt from the press release, and the full document is here. This is an important analysis as BC’s point man on the file, Colin Hansen, has been claiming that the environment has been set aside as [...]