The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

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 — [...]

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 [...]

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 built up [...]

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 politics
May [...]

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 Association [...]

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 dimensions of sustainable [...]

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:

A [...]

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 [...]

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 contain [...]

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

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

Exports

176.4

264.4

Personal Expenditure

196.2

209.8

Other Internal Demand

112.1

99.7

Total

484.6

573.8

Of course, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 used to heat the plant.
Turning pig blubber [...]

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 “plan” [...]

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 signing [...]

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 labelling [...]

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 other [...]

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 Dion [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A rather strange - not to say bizzarre - hypothesis on the Conservative decision to restrict income trusts was put forward today (March 31) by Green Party Leader and ostensible progressive, Elizabeth May. Speaking to the Council of Canadians Integrate this! conference on the “deep integration” Security and Prosperity Partnership with the US, May said [...]

Of more than passing interest given Harper’s ramped up subsidies to ethanol - more of a farm support program than a genuine climate change solution it would seem (though perhaps we should be more supportive of the newer biotechnologies which can convert wood and agricultural wastes to ethanol.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2043724,00.html
If we want to save the planet, we [...]

I’ve posted below an interesting commentary from Dennis DesRosier in favour of gas tax increases as an alternative to the proposed incentive increases. His chart shows a near perfect correlation between monthly gas prices and % monthly auto sales going to entry level ( fuel efficient) vehicles. It strikes me that - to reduce the [...]

Announcing the Center for the Applied Study of Economics & the Environment, a new US grouping of progressive economists. Here is their manifesto:

Real People, Real Environments, and Realistic Economics
The wealth and power of humanity in the 21st century could be used to create a far better world.
We write as economists who are troubled by environmental [...]

http://www.canadianlabour.ca/index.php/briefs_to_parliament/1096
The Canadian Labour Congress today submitted to the Parliamentary Committee looking at Bill C-30, the Clean Air Act which deals with greenhouse gas emissions. Our brief sets out a broad labour perspective on climate change issues - focusing on the need for a planned transition to a more environmentally sustainable economy. Labour supports sticking with [...]

… is working nicely, says the Mayor:
Charging ahead
Ken Livingstone
February 16, 2007 2:45 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ken_livingstone/2007/02/of_course_the_catastrophe_didn.html
In 2003, congestion charging was introduced in the most clogged-up central area of London against a backdrop of almost universal media scepticism and many gleeful predictions of catastrophe.
Of course the catastrophe didn’t happen. London is now in the position of being the [...]