Sammy's Dot

I just discovered the blog Sweet Juniper, and a powerful photo essay about Detroit, via Obsidian Wings.

Perhaps the foremost thought I had in reading this article was about what will happen next to this neighbourhood, and others like it.

Many people (at least on the Toronto Star’s somewhat regrettable comments pages) have responded to the request of the big North American auto makers for government help to get through the current recession (depression? slowdown?) with variants of “let them fail, they’re not producing what people want”, “it’s all the fault of the unions and their greed”, and so on. I like to think that I’ve avoided the union-bashing response, but I know I’ve had the occasional Schadenfreude moment at the thought that big, gas-guzzling, noisy cars might someday stop running.

I certainly don’t think that an open-ended handout to the auto industry is an appropriate response, but at the same time, I don’t want to see Oshawa or London or Windsor look like Detroit, as depicted in the photos of an abandoned school. These cities may need to change – they do need to change – but as a society, Ontario and Canada as a whole need to ensure that change happens in a controlled way. (more…)

I picked up Jeffrey Sachs‘ Common Wealth on Tuesday, and it’s an interesting book so far. Sachs and I seem to agree on a lot of issues; for example, population size and climate change are both concerns for long-term human sustainability.

However, we part ways in a big way when it comes to talking about what solutions are going to look like.

Not on all things, of course; for example, Sachs argues in favour of a carbon tax, combined with hard emissions targets, in order to stabilize and reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Lots of evidence out there that this is a good way to go, and probably less cumbersome than a cap-and-trade system.

However, Sachs is an optimist. This is probably a good way to be, but sometimes it gets out of hand. Sachs argues, in the first chapter, that world-wide, incomes are growing and will converge at some point, upwards of where those of us in the developed world are now, provided we begin to substitute sustainable technologies and work to stabilize the population. It’s not clear from Common Wealth, at least to this point, whether he’s talking about everyone when he talks about incomes, or just average incomes. And given everything else I know, I think he has to be talking about averages. If some 70% of the world population is not actually catching up, but only treading water or even falling behind in terms of the ability to consume, I think it’s a bit ridiculous to argue that we’re all going to end up with roughly higher living standards with only a few small tweaks, as nice as that idea is.

The chapter on climate change which follows is also problematic, for a similar reason. Sachs argues that climate change is a pressing problem that will effect everyone in the world to some degree. He does, as noted, make some good points; in addition to arguing in favour of a carbon tax, he also argues for a global fund to support mitigation efforts and technology transfer, especially for the most impoverished and hardest hit countries. However, for Sachs, the main two efforts should be improving efficiency and carbon capture and sequestration. Both of those are great ideas, and the first in particular should certainly be a major R&D focus in my opinion. But both of these concepts, particularly CCS, involve new technologies. The benefits are only potential.

If climate change is an urgent problem, and Sachs and I agree that it is, shouldn’t we simultaneously be arguing hard for public policies – such as the carbon tax – that will reduce our overall emissions now, instead of waiting for new technologies to emerge? Shouldn’t we allocate most of our public resources to what we can do right now, in order to buy time for the new technologies that might help in the future?

Unless I’m misreading Sachs, I think he’s arguing that we should put our efforts into these new technologies instead of trying to stabilize and reduce consumption in other ways. I’ll update my thoughts when I finish the book.

Updated to add: I just learned that the term for what Sachs is advocating is weak ecological modernisation.

The election on 14 October 2008 was probably the most devastating for the Liberal Party of Canada in my lifetime. This has necessarily prompted a great deal of thought within the party about what to do next and how to revitalize the party base, starting with electing a new leader. Unfortunately, the Liberals are starting wrong. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Green Party of Canada, and the Liberals are, of course, a rival party. However, since the GPC is not going to be forming a government any time soon, and I for one am not looking forward to a Conservative majority under Stephen Harper, I would appreciate it if the Liberals could form a credible opposition.)

I don’t think that either Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae are bad guys at all. (I don’t imagine Dominic LeBlanc is, either, but I don’t anticipate another surprise leader.) That said, neither one is a good choice for leader. Both of them come prepared with baggage for the Conservatives to attack, and neither really offers much to the Canadian electorate to offset that handicap.

Rae, although his profile in the media suggests that he’s recovered somewhat from his period as Ontario’s NDP premier, is still strongly associated with the recession of the early 90s. All the Conservatives will have to do is say “Remember Rae days?” and watch their numbers soar in the polls, especially with the current economic climate. This isn’t necessarily fair; Rae certainly didn’t cause that recession, and he clearly tried to deal with it without making things harder for people. But that isn’t going to matter. In terms of what he offers, Rae has a long career in public service, and has been the foreign affairs critic since the 2006 elections. However, his work on an education commission and dispute-resolution hasn’t caught much attention, and he doesn’t seem to have sponsored any legislation of his own since becoming an MP. Where does Rae think the country should go? Why should he be running for leader of one of the major parties if he hasn’t already articulated this vision? If he wins, why should Canadians favour his party? It has been obvious for some time now that the Liberal party needs to redirect itself; electing a leader who hasn’t yet expressed what that direction should be, and who is widely disliked in one of the most populous provinces, seems like a bad idea.

Ignatieff, unlike Rae, has very little Parliamentary baggage; he was elected to office for the first time in 2006. He also does not appear to have sponsored any legislation in that time, although he does have a stated position on the economy, the environment, Canada’s role in the world, immigration, and aboriginal issues. However, most of those positions are a statement of what is currently wrong and how things should be, without any statements about how we get there. Say what you will about Stephane Dion‘s carbon tax policy (I note, no longer available from the Liberal website), and his inability to convince Canadians that it is a good idea, at least he stood up and offered a clear solution (even if it isn’t an original idea!) to a major problem. Ignatieff has not done so any more than Rae has, and that is what the Liberals need to shift direction. Besides having relatively little political experience, though Ignatieff is obviously very intelligent, he is also going to be held up as an example of Liberal elitism if he wins. After being out of the country for two decades, he returns and is parachuted into his Etobicoke riding, and a mere two years later he expects to lead the party. The Conservatives will ask, what has he done in his public life in Canada? Why should you vote for a man who didn’t even fight to win his nomination on the ground in his riding, but was offered it by the party leadership?

Stephen Harper has more than enough advantages, given the fact that the Liberals cannot credibly threaten to topple the government until their new leader is elected in May. Rae and Ignatieff do have five months to prove me wrong about them, but I don’t expect that the Conservatives will sit still and wait for one of them to win before they start mounting the attacks. What the Liberal base really needs to do right now is sit down and talk about policy. Rae and Ignatieff both need to start putting out clear proposals for what they want to do and how, and they need to start doing it now. They need to start pushing for the laws that they want in the Commons, and they need to start the dialogue with the party rank-and-file on what kind of party the Liberals should be.

Many months after registering a domain name, and setting up web hosting, and struggling (off and on) to figure out wordpress and my web host, my dad finally solved the last problem, and blogging is enabled. I will figure out how to make it look good later, as that’s probably going to take me at least twice as long.

I plan to use this blog to write primarily about environmental politics and policy. Haven’t quite settled on a main interest in terms of policy, although I’m gearing up to propose a thesis topic this winter, so hopefully this will help me to sort out my thoughts. My problem has always been too many interests – sprawl and associated issues with food and energy policy, water and air quality, and conservation are my main occupations, but since beginning a bachelor’s in environmental studies I’ve had a chance to become much more aware of the problems that face developing countries, and the question of environmental justice. And with a background in psychology, I’m curious about why people behave the way we do vis a vis our environment, and how we can change our behaviour, and how that behaviour relates to our explicitly- and implicitly-held values. I’ll also save the people I know from listening to me rant about Canadian and American politics, especially environmental politics, by posting my thoughts here instead.

In short, lots to write about. Focusing is going to be my problem!