Anybody Want to Start a Pool?

I wonder what the voter turnout will be this year.

Since Confederation we've averaged just over 70 per cent. The highest turnout came during the Diefenbaker/Pearson era when 79 per cent came out to vote ('58, '60, '63).

The lowest turnout was just under 59 per cent when Harper defeated the Dion Liberals in 2008. Three years later, 61 per cent turned out to see Harper trounce the Ignatieff Liberals who dropped 34 seats, handing Harper his ill-deserved majority.

In 2015 the turnout bumped up to just over 68 per cent as Canadians voted for the fresh-faced Justin Trudeau and/or against Stephen Harper.

So what do you think it'll be this time? There's no hated Harper this time around but no unsullied Liberal either. We've got a 'summer help' counter-clerk up against a disappointing school marm. The campaign has been a pissing contest between Scheer and Trudeau. Nothing there to inspire a big turnout. If there was a "none of the above" option on the ballot, Mr. None might take it in a landslide.

I just don't see a big voter turnout this time around. What do you think?

Do You Think We're Not in the Grip of Nihilists?

In his book, "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," anthropologist Jared Diamond explores how societies past have repeatedly made absolutely rational, short-term choices that carried nihilistic consequences in the longer term. Societies have done things for their short-term benefit knowing full well that they would devastate future generations. Failure is often a choice.

We are one of those societies.

Among the crises we're facing - runaway climate change, overpopulation, rapid exhaustion of the planet's finite resources - is the Mother of them all, Earth's sixth mass extinction.

Now you might think that the prospect of mass extinction, in which complex life forms such as humans and other mammals are directly in the crosshairs, would trigger an appropriate response from our corporate and political leadership. If you did think that, you would be wrong.

Maybe you’ve read King Lear and remember this famous line: “‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.” The words were written more than 400 years ago as a comment on the deadly consequences of greed, delusion and political folly, but they could serve just as well as a Republican party slogan today. They’re a fitting description of the Republican party’s delusional campaign to deny the environmental crises that threaten our planet and our civilization. 

For decades now, Republican politicians and their patrons in the fossil fuel industry have used thinktanks, front groups and public relations operatives to promote faulty science and perpetuate the myth that the climate crisis is a hoax. This campaign of climate deception, which is elegantly documented in books like Merchants of Doubt, has exacted a huge toll on the planet and its people – it has sabotaged domestic and international efforts to combat greenhouse gas pollution and exacerbated a crisis that is acidifying oceans, melting polar ice caps, supercharging storms and making the Earth less hospitable to human and animal life. We have a name for the purveyors of this deceitful campaign: we call them “climate deniers”.

At least in the US the Republicans are open about it. They openly ridicule the prospect of mass extinction in Congress. Ain't gonna happen, that's an end of it, move on. Here in Canada we're more discrete. We prefer not to mention it at all, not after we've just grossly overpaid for a crazy pipeline with an election looming. Best if we just ignore it and hope no one notices.

So, Like, Where Do You Find Your Truth?

This being the Sabbath and all I thought it a good time to consider the idea of truth and what it means to us, to me and to you.

As far as I can tell there are two main types of truth, one that is becoming vastly more popular than the other. There is truth founded on belief. That's the sort of truth you'll find preached in pews wherever Christians gather today. It's a lot like the truth our Jewish brethren exchanged yesterday and the children of Islam delved into on Friday. When it is embellished with religious overtones we call it "faith."

'Truth' founded on belief is a lot more prevalent than you might imagine. It has a vast secular dimension.  As John Ralston Saul observes in his book on globalism, all ideologies, economic or political, are belief-based. He devotes several pages documenting how economic models, at least historically, have lasted on average about 30 years before they're replaced by the next great thing which we believe to be more sound or convenient, a correction to our former flawed notions. Political ideology is likewise a belief-based construct. Communism, socialism, social democracy, capitalist democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy - they're belief based and, perhaps with a bit of occasional blood-letting here and there, interchangeable.

The other side, fact-based truth, that's in trouble. It impedes things like unfettered commerce. Ask Monsanto or Exxon. The last thing they want to do is confront facts, particularly scientific fact. Not for nothing do they attack science as a modern "religion." It may not cut much ice with the scientific community or those who prefer fact-based truth but that doesn't matter. It works just fine with their target audience - those who need to believe and will reject what Al Gore called the "inconvenient (fact-based) truth."

This leads to the now predictable faith-based response to fact-based truth, usually in the form of attacks on Gore for the size of his house, Suzuki for the number of his children or scientists generally for their massive (five figure) salaries. It becomes like a mantra, more compelling with each additional chanter. It's a bit like a quasi-hypnotic reaction, a mass psychosis.

Our political leadership has become disturbingly belief-based. Our current prime minister solemnly pledged that his government would follow the science. He left out the part about 'how far' because the honest answer would be 'not very.' His mandate letters to his ministers made each and every one a vassal to the nation's economy and his neoliberal vision of what that should be.

Mr. Trudeau is a disciple to the cult of perpetual exponential growth. It's entirely belief-based given the premise that our economy can continue to grow, steadily ever faster, endlessly on a planet that is decidedly finite, not growing, not a bit. If anything, our rapidly metastasizing human civilization is shrinking, as in degrading, the planet's ecosystem. Earth's carrying capacity is no longer what it historically was. Doesn't sound like someone is 'following the science.'

Like all cults, neoliberalism's quest for perpetual exponential growth is entirely belief-based and, like all belief-based truth of its dimension, it won't end well. It may end abruptly but it won't end well.

Like all cults, the neoliberal order and its High Priests ignore whatever doesn't suit their belief-construct. They still chase a toxic growth paradigm even though the Earth's envrionment, its biosphere is already reeling.

Neoliberalism's cult needs a collaborator to spread the news. Enter the mainstream media. This bit posted to Facebook gives you the idea:

Like it or not, we're at a moment when we need a lot more fact-based truth and not so much faith-based 'truth' whether that's religious, political or economic belief. One and only one of them leads us to a future. The other only leads us to Armageddon, extinction.

We're coming to a point where we need solid, fact-based leadership. We're in a jam. It's man-made. A lot of this mess traces straight back into belief-based thinking, really messed up ideas that flew in the face of knowledge, fact and truth. It worked, or so it seemed, for a few decades but it's not working any more. The economic model we continue to cling to has outlived its utility. It's not working for us any longer. It's working against us, driving critical resource exhaustion, climate change and the looming collapse of biodiversity. Now, more than ever, we need leaders clear-headed enough to try to steer us in another direction.

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's [climate change] summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

I Know, You Know, So Does Antonio

UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says the political will to fight climate change is "fading." From Deutsche Welle.

Guterres said the world was "not on track" to confine the rise in global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as agreed in the 2015 Paris agreement. 

"The paradox is that as things are getting worse on the ground, political will seems to be fading," said the UN secretary general. 

"Climate change is running faster than what we are … the last four years have been the hottest registered," he said, adding that political inadequacy was evident "everywhere."

Gutteres urged the world community to, "protect the lives of our people."  As if.

His remarks precede a Climate Action Summit he plans to convene in New York in September where nations will be asked to present "concrete, realistic plans" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% over the next decade and reach net zero by 2050. 

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

"Concrete, realistic plans" by September? With Canada in an election campaign? Canadian governments don't do "concrete" or "realistic." Our governments are, however, world class when it comes to peddling horse shit.

And, as for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model, Justin, like Chuckles, is an avowed neoliberal.  So that idea is simply not on.

Meanwhile, in Canada, it's wildfire season, again.  The 2019 season was officially kicked off with a state of emergency declared for the Fraser Lake area.

The Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako issued a state of emergencySaturday night and ordered people to leave an area near the community of Lejac, about five kilometres east of Fraser Lake. 

An evacuation alert is in place for a larger area, meaning people there have to be ready to leave at a moment's notice.

A big shout out to the home team, the oil heads of Team Carbon Canada - Alberta and Saskatchewan, Scheer, Kenney and Moe, and Kid Pipeline, Justin Trudeau.

What Yesterday Meant to Me

Since that first time I heard Greta Thunberg, I sensed that something wonderful might be about to happen.

Eventually she inspired a resistance. The school children's revolt and then Extinction Rebellion - children and adults saying there no longer could be, nor would be, tolerance of the status quo.

As altruistic Britons were refusing to move, they were arrested, charged and taken into custody - for what is genuinely trying, in a most modest way, to save humanity by changing minds.

And it worked.

With more than two-thirds of the population now realizing that the UK was in a climate change emergency, Jeremy Corbyn took that as his cue to table a motion calling on Parliament to declare a state of national climate emergency that easily passed in the House of Commons bolstering similar declarations from Wales and
Scotland.

As Westminster was declaring a national emergency, across the Atlantic, Canada's finance minister, Morneau, was beating his chest over fracked gas, LNG, as proof of Canada's ability to deliver on big carbon-energy projects. The prime minister, meanwhile, was begging Alberta premier, Jason Kenney, to save emissions caps by promising to just look the other way on bitumen extraction.

Brits take pride in their "stiff upper lip" image, the "Stay Calm and Carry On" national mantra. The people of the UK aren't afraid to look over their shoulder and spot what's coming and, when they did, they demanded action.  Canadians, apparently, aren't made of such stuff. All we have to hear are empty threats such as "this will hurt the economy" and we're in full rout. It seems we don't care if this cherished economy or that small fraction represented by fossil fuels has led us to a cliff edge. We're not stopping.

We don't care. Not enough of us anyway. Sure, we're worried about climate change but not enough to insist that real measures be taken to at least give us a chance at a soft crash landing. Ah, the kids'll figure out something. They'll have to with the future we're bequeathing to them.

Maybe we can still change but the clock is quickly running out and our governments aren't courageous enough to declare climate change a national emergency even though Canada is vulnerable. We have the longest coastline of any nation, from sea to sea to sea. Our vast forests are being ravaged by heat waves, unreliable snowcap and summer precipitation, mass infestation by pine beetles and other pests that are now moving steadily out of the West toward the Atlantic. The Arctic ice and snow that once kept our tundra and permafrost stable is disappearing, giving rise to the release of potentially massive quantities of methane and CO2. To the south, "once a century" floods are now becoming once every few years, our "new normal." Science now shows that the prairie petro-provinces are looking at a future as parched wasteland. Mega drought imperils our domestic food security. Our essential infrastructure is in decay and in no shape to withstand the severe climate that is even now setting in. Even our fisheries are being changed as native species migrate in search of colder waters. Wildfire smoke now perfumes the skies of the West, forcing ordinary Canadians to shelter indoors at what used to be the very best time to be outdoors.

But no, we don't have a climate change national emergency and, if we do, we're too cowardly to deal with it.  We won't change, not in time. When we go to the polls this October look for 70 per cent, perhaps more, of the vote to go for the very worst petro-state parties, the Liberals or the Conservatives.

Yesterday was a bittersweet moment, one eagerly awaited. I'm proud of the British people for forcing their politicians' hands. I wish we were made of that same stuff.

BRITAIN WINS! Parliament Declares Climate National Emergency

From CNN:

Lawmakers in the UK Parliament have declared "an environment and climate emergency," making it the first country in the world to do so, according to the opposition Labour Party. 

The motion was called by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

WE DID IT! Thanks to pressure from the Labour Party, the UK just became the first country to declare an environment and #climateemergency. Now it's time for real action to tackle climate change. Share this. pic.twitter.com/hOheWxQQHf—  

The Labour Party (@UKLabour) May 1, 2019

I realize I've flogged this story pretty relentlessly lately but I only did that because it's so important for life on Earth, all life on Earth.

What we need to do now, here in Canada, is turn on the petro-pimps, the fossil fuelers and their political handmaidens and tell them they have no place in Canada's future. They won't switch their allegiance back to the people of Canada and our future until they fear us again. As Jeremy Corbyn put it this morning, "we have no time to waste."

And what did we accomplish on the climate emergency front today? Why, it was Bill Morneau boasting about how our fracked gas/LNG venture shows that Canada can still deliver on big, carbon-energy projects. And then Justin went groveling to Jason Kenney.

Ottawa is vowing to exempt certain non-mining projects that use steam to extract crude from deep under the earth — known as in-situ projects — as long as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney maintains a hard cap on emissions from his province's oil sector.

Is that a prime minister you can respect?

May Day. M'aidez. Mayday.

p.s. yes, I know, Scotland and Wales previously declared a climate change state of emergency.

A Window Into the Hateful Minds of Canada's Far Right

The Globe & Mail has got its hands on what they were never supposed to see - 150,000 chat room messages exchanged among Canadian rightwing extremists.

They come from all walks of life: tradesmen, soldiers, a student teacher, a financial analyst, an aspiring lawyer, among others. And they are in every province, in communities large and small. 

They gather on the internet to strategize and seek pathways into mainstream politics. They are anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, sexist and racist. They are young and radicalized. They are the new far right in Canada. 

The Globe and Mail has obtained a trove of 150,000 messages posted between February, 2017, and early 2018 that reveal the private communications of a loosely aligned node of Canadian right-wing extremists. The record of their continuing conversations reveals a movement, energized by the rise of white ethnonationalism in the United States, that aims to upend a decades-old multicultural consensus in this country.

The discussions reviewed by The Globe and Mail originally took place on a text-and-voice application called Discord, an app meant for gamers that is also popular with the far right. The group called itself the Canadian Super Players, apparently to disguise themselves as video gamers.

The discussions celebrate Nazism and joke about the Holocaust. They contain boasts of racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour on the part of participants. Many of the in-jokes and memes the members share resemble those propagated by the far right in the United States and Europe.

Our "friend" may run cover for Andrew Scheer and his dog-whistle messaging but the Tories and their leader are not on the side of the angels.

The threat of white nationalism, and the failure to denounce it, has become an increasingly pressing political issue. Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer has been criticized for attending the same United We Roll rally as Ms. Goldy, and for failing to specifically mention, in his initial statement, that the Christchurch attack targeted Muslims. Mr. Scheer has called the criticism baseless and said that he condemns all hateful ideologies, but the criticism continues. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Mr. Scheer of not doing enough to condemn racism and extremism, a signal that the Liberals may seek to make this a ballot-box issue in the upcoming election.

EXPLORING CONSERVATIVE PARTY INROADS 

In early 2017, members of the Canadian Super Players chat group set out to make their mark on mainstream politics. Their vehicle for doing so: the leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The first candidate they rallied behind was Kellie Leitch, who was proposing screening immigrants for cultural values. When her leadership campaign stalled, they moved en masse to support Maxime Bernier. 

One person in the chat room, who went by the name of Cyrus online and who described himself as a law student, said he attended a Bernier event in March, 2017, and described the politician “dog whistling pretty hard. He mentioned western values and western civilization a lot.” But Cyrus was less persuaded by Mr. Bernier’s libertarian policies and was unhappy that he did not take a stronger stance against asylum seekers crossing the border on foot. 

A few other chat-room participants praised Andrew Scheer, but the consensus was that Mr. Bernier was the better bet. Dank, the student teacher, even expressed dismay that he couldn’t cast more than one ballot for Mr. Bernier.

It's a pretty dark look into these groups and it's pretty obvious they're not supporting the Liberals or the New Dems or the Greens. It deserves to be read in its entirety. Check out the link at the top.

Okay, This Might Sting a Little Bit. Time for Ottawa to Declare Climate Change a National Emergency.

Imagine the nerve - debating climate change as a national emergency. Britain's Labour Party intends to force a debate on the issue this week in Parliament.

Labour will this week force a vote in parliament to declare a national environmental and climate change emergency...  

Jeremy Corbyn’s party will demand on Wednesday that the country wakes up to the threat and acts with urgency to avoid more than 1.5°C of warming, which will require global emissions to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” before 2050. 

The move will place Conservative MPs under pressure to back the plan, or explain why they refuse to do so, now fears over the combined problems of air pollution and climate change have risen to the top of the political agenda.

On Saturday night Corbyn said the recent wave of protests were “a massive and necessary wake-up call” that demanded “rapid and dramatic action, which only concerted government action and a green industrial revolution can deliver.” He said that if parliament backed the move and became the first national legislature to declare a climate emergency it would “trigger a wave of action from governments around the world”.

Why not bring the Extinction Rebellion right to the floor of the House of Commons? How many nations are not already experiencing climate change emergencies? Certainly not Canada. Definitely not the United States either.

Governments, especially in petro-states like our own, have resisted recognizing reality but we do exist in a state of climate change emergency, a national emergency that manifests in a variety of ways - droughts, floods, severe weather events, sea level rise, species and pest migrations, on and on and on.

Canada lives in a state of climate emergency and it's not going away. Every national academy of sciences will tell you that. NASA, NOAA, NCAR and others carry the same message, even spelling it all out very bluntly in the recent National Climate Assessment that Trump dismissed with a profoundly ignorant, "I don't believe it." Environment Canada will tell you that. The British Met Office tells you that. The governor of the Bank of England and his predecessor have been telling us that for years.

Trump may have the ignorance to say, "I don't believe it." We do the same thing only not so directly. Instead of treating climate change as a national emergency we fall back on sops such as a minuscule carbon tax to give the public false hope and then we build pipelines and subsidize the fossil energy giants to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

The motion was welcomed by Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who has criticised the inaction of the world’s politicians. “It is a great first step because it sends a clear signal that we are in a crisis and that the ongoing climate and ecological crises must be our first priority,” she said. “We can not solve an emergency without treating it like an emergency. “I hope the other UK political parties join in and together pass this motion in parliament – and that political parties in other countries will follow their example.”  

Mexico Bumps Canada as America's Largest Trading Partner

Despite all of Donald Trump's bluster about Mexico and its people, America's southern neighbour has become its largest trading partner.

U.S. census data released last week showed that Mexico’s trade with the United States rose to $97.4 billion for the first two months of the year — enabling it to leapfrog ahead of Canada ($92.4 billion) and China ($90.4 billion).

“The fact that this surprises a lot of people is a reflection of the ignorance in the United States about this theme,” said Luis de la Calle, a former undersecretary of the economy here. “Mexico is a very important market for the United States, and it’s going to become the biggest market for the United States in the world.” 

It’s not quite there yet. For the first two months of the year, Mexico was the second-biggest export market for the United States, trailing Canada $45.8 billion to $42.1 billion. Exports to America’s southern neighbor were flat compared with the same period in 2018.

Much of the U.S.-Mexico commerce involves multinational firms that send products back and forth across the border as part of a giant, integrated manufacturing process that has flourished since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. 

“For the rest of the world, the U.S. is a market — that’s true for China, Korea, et cetera,” De la Calle said. “With Mexico and Canada and the United States, we trade in order to produce things together.”

The Bill for Thawing Permafrost? Try 70 Trillion Dollars (USD)

This is one we're not going to be able to duck. We can't kick this can down the road. It's already underway, one of the knock-on effects of existing global warming. It is the thawing of the permafrost across the far north. And it's going to cost us dearly.

Dmitry Yumashev and a team of researchers at Lancaster University have studied the effects of melting ice sheets in the Arctic and concluded that an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, coupled with added absorption of heat from the sun due to a lack of sea ice reflecting sunlight away from the surface of the Earth, will lead to an increase in the cost of global warming by a staggering $70 trillion. That is ten times the amount of economic benefit that might be derived by easier access to mineral resources in the Arctic and lower shipping costs across the top of the world.

The study, entitled “Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements,” was published on April 23 in the journal Nature Communications.

...“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” says Yumashev. “Even at 1.5 C to 2 C, there are impacts and costs due to thawing permafrost. But they are considerably lower for these scenarios compared to business as usual. We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough.” That lack of urgency is precisely what the Extinction Rebellion protesters, Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are talking about.

...The studies continue to pile up, but most countries are still pursuing a business as usual path, risking the very existence of the human race and every living thing on Earth to preserve the hegemony of fossil fuel companies. If there is any record of humanity’s all too brief time on Earth left after we die off, perhaps whatever species comes to inhabit the Earth in a few million years from now will shrug and look to William Shakespeare to explain the insanity that lead to our demise. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” wrote the bard.

Coincidentally, Captain Pipeline was discussing climate change today and yesterday. One was on Twitter where the prime minister observed, quite righteously, that, without a healthy environment, there would not be a healthy environment. I think he stole that line from David Suzuki who later called JT a 'twerp.'  Then there was this epiphany from yesterday.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that cities across Canada will experience more frequent flooding because of climate change and governments need to adapt to this new reality. 

"We're going to see more and more of these extreme weather events more regularly," he said during a visit to an evacuation centre in the city of Gatineau. 

"It means we have to think about adaptation, mitigation and how we are going to move forward together."

What he has to think about is how we are going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Everything else is bullshit.

We know that little Canada with just 0.5 per cent of the world's population is in the top 10 nations for total greenhouse gas emissions and in the top three for per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Top ten, top three. Despite that we've got a Liberal prime minister and his would-be Conservative successor both hellbent on ramming through a mega-pipeline to flood world markets with high-cost, high-carbon, low-value bitumen.

He's dead wrong when he preaches we must think about adaptation and mitigation when we need to be thinking about how a succession of political leaders, Libs and Tories, have betrayed us on climate change and the cost future generations will have to pay for their cowardice and neglect.

Ford Says Ontario Has Done Enough.

At least there's something Doug Ford can thank his Liberal predecessor for - cutting Ontario's greenhouse gas emissions. He's positively boastful about that, to the point where he's shining an unwanted light on his anti-climate tax comrades, Kenney and Moe.

Doug Ford's government in Ontario is now insisting the province should not be expected to do more than its "fair share" to meet Canada's national commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But Ford's definition of "fair" might present a significant challenge to the rest of the country — particularly Ford's conservative allies in Alberta and Saskatchewan. 

Under Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government, Ontario was committed to reducing its emissions by 37 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. While tearing down large portions of that government's climate agenda, Ford's Progressive Conservatives settled on a less-ambitious target: a cut of 30 per cent below 2005 by 2030.

That new provincial target matches the national target. It's also (conveniently enough) within reach already. As the Ford government now loudly notes, Ontario's emissions have declined by 22 per cent below 2005 levels. 

"Today's report confirms Ontario has decreased emissions by 22 per cent since 2005, while the rest of Canada's input continues to increase," Rod Phillips, Ontario's environment minister, said last week when the federal government released the latest inventory of Canada's emissions. "Families in Ontario have already paid a significant cost for these efforts, yet the federal government continues to ask us to pay more than our fair share."

But what is the real picture? It's pretty grim. A recent report from the University of Western Ontario's Ivey School of Business shows Canada's greenhouse gas emissions by province, both overall and per capita.

Ford says Ontario has done enough and it's now up to the "rest of Canada" to do their share.

Here are some of the findings from the summary to the Ivey report:

• Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions currently represent about 1.6 percent of the global total. Canada is among the top 10 global emitters and one of the largest developed world per capita emitter of GHGs. 

• Canadian federal governments have committed to reduce annual GHG emissions from the current level of 726 megatonnes (Mt) to 622 Mt in 2020 and 525 Mt in 2030. • Within Canada, GHG emissions vary widely across provinces ranging from 267 Mt in Alberta to 1.8 Mt in PEI in 2013. 

• In per capita terms, Saskatchewan and Alberta are among the developed world’s largest emitters at 68 and 67 tonnes respectively.* Per capita emissions in BC, Ontario, and Quebec are in the 10-14 tonne range, comparable to best performers in Western Europe. 

• For provinces with announced GHG emission targets, the level of ambition varies widely. Alberta plans to increase emissions towards 2020, and then return to today’s levels by 2030, while Ontario Quebec and Manitoba plan to reduce emissions by 56, 27 and 8 Mt respectively. 

• Even if all provincial targets were fully achieved, Canada would still need to reduce GHG emissions by an additional 45 Mt in 2020 and 55 Mt in 2030 to meet its international commitments.

* The Ivey analysis was before the federal government's report this week showing that the Tar Sanders massively understated their GHG emissions from bitumen extraction.

So, since Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia have the lowest, per capital emissions, "comparable the best performers in Western Europe," while Saskatchewan and Alberta, by contrast, are off the chart even using their dodgy numbers, Ford must be referring to his comrades in arms, Kenney and Moe. They're the dirty buggers, the climate wreckers, and they should be easy pickings for Justin Trudeau. Wait, I'm sorry, when it comes to bitumen Trudeau is in their canoe.

No matter how much they shuck and jive, the petro-provinces and the petro-state simply cannot get past this:

According to the latest statistics, Canada emits about 1.6 percent of the world’s GHG emissions.  Despite this relatively low share, Canada is among the top 10 global emitters on an absolute basis, and stands firmly in the top 3 for emissions per capita. By way of comparison, Canada’s population makes up about 0.5 percent of the world total so that our emissions’ share is about 3 times our population share.

Trudeau acolytes at this point tend to drag out SFU economist Mark Jaccard's recent comment that, thanks to the Dauphin, Canada is the climate change envy of the world. It's not. We are among the top 10 overall global emitters even though we're just half a per cent of the world by population and, yes, we are "firmly in the top 3 for emissions per capita." That might make us the envy of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela but the rest of the world, really?

A Global Green New Deal?

It is as logical as it is implausible - a global Green New Deal to harness the community of nations; big and small, rich and poor; to a plan to collectively tackle climate change.

It's logical. Climate change is a global problem, an existential threat to all.

It's implausible. A global Green New Deal might require the rich, developed world to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

The idea of a global Green New Deal is being floated by Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe 2025 movement, and DiEM25 co-ordinator and writer, David Adler.

In times of crisis and catastrophe, children are often forced to grow up quickly. We are now witnessing this premature call to action on a planetary scale. As the adults in government accelerate their consumption of fossil fuels, children are leading the campaign against our species’ looming extinction. Our survival now depends on the prospects for a global movement to follow their lead and demand an International Green New Deal.

Several countries have proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal. ...But these campaigns have largely remained siloed. Their advisers may exchange notes and ideas, but no strategy has emerged to coordinate these campaigns in a broader, global framework.

Unfortunately, climate change knows no borders. The US may be the second-largest polluter in the world, but it makes up less than 15% of global greenhouse emissions. Leading by example is simply not enough. 

Instead, we need an International Green New Deal: a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP – each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs, rather than their means.

That does have that ring of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" mantra once hyped by those Commies. Wish there'd been another way to phrase that, one that wouldn't get blood boiling on Capitol Hill.

Their case is built on three principles. The first recognizes that every country, big or small, north or south, has ample sources of renewable energy. For some it may be predominantly wind power. For others it's solar.

The second principle is that a collective effort has a far greater chance of succeeding over ad hoc efforts.

Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in the ground. We will also need major scientific breakthroughs to develop renewable sources of energy, adapt existing infrastructure, detoxify our oceans and decarbonize the atmosphere. No country alone can fund the research and development necessary to meet these challenges. The OEEC would pool the brainpower of the global scientific community: a Green Manhattan Project.

The third and final point will be the most contentious - reparations. This is where the affluent, developed nations would dig deep to help out the poorest and most vulnerable.

For centuries, countries such as the US and the UK have plundered natural resources from around the world and polluted them back out. Less developed nations have been doubly dispossessed: first, of their resource wealth, and second, of their right to a sustainable life – and in the case of many small island developing states, of their very right to exist. An International Green New Deal would redistribute resources to rehabilitate overexploited regions, protect against rising sea levels, and guarantee a decent standard of living to all climate refugees.

The UN climate change conferences will not save us from extinction – the demise of the Paris agreement should be evidence enough. These frameworks lock us into prisoners’ dilemmas, in which every country has an incentive to defect on their climate commitments, even if cooperation between them would yield a greater collective good. As long as climate cooperation is framed around sacrifice, it is vulnerable to strongmen like Donald Trump who vow to buck international rules in the name of national interests.

... Just like in the original New Deal, public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks agree collectively to support in the secondary markets. 

Suddenly, countries with large trade surpluses will realize they are better able to invest their excess capital if green investments in deficit countries are coordinated under the auspices of an international plan. The positive-sum dynamic will prevail. 

In this sense, the stakes of the International Green New Deal are not merely environmental. By uniting countries in the project of bottom-up economic transformation – and coercing multinationals to fund their fair share of it – it will also stem the tide of bigotry and xenophobia engulfing the world. 

“Advanced” capitalist countries today are literally falling apart. In the US, net public investment has fallen below half of one per cent of GDP. Across the eurozone, net public investment has remained below zero for nearly a decade. It is little wonder that political monsters are rising again: just as in the 1930s, the grapes of wrath are ripening and “growing heavy for the vintage”.

To revive the liberal democratic project, some pundits have suggested making China into a bogeyman. But the real bogeyman is of our creation: a climate crisis wrought by decades of inaction and underinvestment. To address the true existential threat that we face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this brink. Austerity means extinction.

Sadly, we don't live in the world Varoufakis and Adler would need to pull this off. Neoliberal capitalism is corporatist and not apt to embrace the idea of siphoning off five per cent of GDP to help the little brown people. Trump has already convinced the Gullibillies that many of America's problems stem from its foolish generosity to other, lesser nations. Besides, many of the proposed "donor class" of countries are, like Canada, petro-states determined to preserve foreign markets for our high-carbon fuels.

What I find most discouraging is that this idea makes sense. Whether the existential threat is climate change or overpopulation or excess consumption of dwindling resources, there are many ideas that make eminently good sense. Yet those ideas, those solutions, are not compatible with the neoliberal order that we continue to embrace and show no interest in moving beyond.

Have We Lost the Ability to Govern Ourselves?

It was October, 1980, and US elections were just a few days away. Ronald Reagan took to the airwaves and asked Americans "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Reagan was talking about how voters were doing materially. Were they able to get a job? Could they afford the rent? A new car or a family vacation? That sort of thing.

It was a one-two punch followed up by Reagan's "It's morning in America" and he rode it to sweep the high-minded Jimmy Carter straight out of the White House.  Over the following eight years, Ronald Reagan transformed the United States from the world's largest creditor nation in 1980 into the world's largest debtor nation by the time George H.W. Bush took over and America became a fiscal hot mess ever since.

The ghost of Ronnie is with us still. The neoliberal order ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, still has us by the throat. Politicians strive to swell their nation's GDP as one of the most powerful demonstrations of their fitness to serve. "It's the economy, stupid."

That metric, however, is failing us. Much has changed since Ronald Reagan came to power. The world has changed. The world's climate has changed. The size of the global economy has swelled as has the global population.

In 1980, global GDP was $11.17 trillion USD. In 2016 it hit $75.87. By 2018 it had swelled to $87.51 trillion USD. So there's been about an eightfold increase in economic activity from 1980 to 2018. That means a roughly commensurate, eightfold increase in resource extraction, and in production, and in consumption and about the same in waste. That's pretty impressive and it should also be just a bit worrisome.

Population. 1980 -  4.45 billion. 2018 - 7.63 billion.

If you're a statistics freak and interested in other indicia, there's plenty more here in a post exploring The Great Acceleration.

Looking only at GDP and population growth from 1980 to 2018, we've grown GDP about eightfold and while we've almost doubled in population. All of that since Reagan proclaimed "morning in America."

Is the growth metric even relevant any longer? When growth reaches levels seen in nature only in malignancy and pest infestations, shouldn't we revisit the question?

I'm asking this question because of what I keep hearing from some very well-intentioned, thoughtful Liberals when the subject turns to rapidly decarbonizing our economy and shutting down the petro-state. The response invariably turns to how that would "hurt the economy" and see their party punished at the polls.

They're right on the first part. It would cause some economic contraction. How much we don't know. How much it would stimulate growth in other areas such as renewable energy we don't know.  We do know how that would benefit our future over the next twenty years and our grandkids future over the balance of the century. The point is, it's not a net loss proposition.

As for a price to be paid at the polls, how much of that is because governments fail to have a realistic conversation with us about what's at stake, the trade-offs, and our collective responsibility to the future?

Then there's the standard argument about why should Canada act unless every other nation agrees. Isn't that a vague corollary to when your kids say, "but, mom, all the other kids are..." to which mom replies, "if all the other kids were jumping off a bridge does that mean you should also?"

The fact is we've just under 12 years remaining for the nations of the world to slash greenhouse gas emissions by half if we're to have a reasonable chance of averting runaway global warming - truly catastrophic climate change.

Canada is a major emitter of greenhouse gas. Our GHG footprint puts us in the first tier along with Russia and China. Second tier emitters such as the US and Australia aren't far behind.  If the major emitters, the real carbon hogs, won't lead what do we expect of the other countries?  We're the cork in the bottle. Given what inaction portends and we know that so well, what legitimate excuse do we have for dicking around with gestural responses, i.e. carbon taxes?

China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries. 

The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safe level of heating.

What we're doing isn't just wrong, it's not survivable. That's the true measure of this emergency and, as our government's climate commissioner recently made clear, it is an emergency. Tell me, do you see any sign of our major political parties acting as though we're in an imminent emergency?

What are we to make of this self-serving inaction, ducking the question, kicking the threat down the road? We have had thoroughly-researched scientific studies up the yin-yang, clarion call warnings, about where the path we're on leads. It leads to our possible, some say probable, extinction.

Is that how we are being governed? Astounding as it is, the answer is a resounding "yes." Only from the darkest recesses of our mind where the bedrock of denialism is found can we possibly argue "no."

Now I'm not picking on Justin although he is pretty bloody awful. He's not worth having but he's a damn sight better than this crowd:

If Trudeau is the best we can do and we make our plight considerably worse by electing climate clowns like the Rogue's Gallery depicted above, we're in trouble - deep, deep trouble - and it'll be even worse for our children and theirs.

None of them has a vision of governance we so desperately need at this very moment to begin preparing for what is coming. None of them, and that includes the prime minister.

Footnote:

I apologize for the rambling, 'stream of consciousness' nature of this post. Some of the links are from earlier posts, others are from web sites that I search while I'm writing this. I'm lousy at editing and even proof-reading. It's hard enough for me to fashion some sort of ending and hit "post."  That said, for what you're paying for it, you're getting your money's worth.

I don't write this with any expectation that it will change anything. I don't have any pipe dreams. Several years ago I joined the Dark Mountain collective, a refuge for writers, poets and artists, veteran environmental activists, who "are walking away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway."

Dark Mountain isn't about giving up as some, such as Naomi Klein, have claimed. It's very much about continuing to fight the good fight, as I'm trying to do with these posts, but doing that without the burden of false hope that anything is going to change.  It's that false hope that so many cling to ("oh, they'll think of something") that prevents us from "seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway."

Would a Progressive Kill for Profit?

In today's NYT, columnist Paul Krugman writes "Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You."

Krugman explores how Trump's de-regulation rampage is giving rise to threats that will accelerate premature deaths among Americans. It's a limited focus piece and I won't get into it.  However it did raise the question of whether many of our leaders have clean hands when it comes to policies that will spread death, misery and dislocation throughout the world.

In Canada, that's an accusation that can attach to most of our political caste of all persuasions. We're a growing petro-state at the very moment when the last thing the world needs is petro-states.

Many of us politically positioned to the left of the Conservative Party of Harper and Scheer fancy ourselves as "progressive." I've found that laurel used in the most vague and flimsy way. Those schooled in the progressive movement would not recognize much of their ideology in Canadian politics today. Perhaps we think of ourselves as progressive neoliberals, a true oxymoron.

Which invites the question, would a progressive kill for profit?

There are lots of ways to kill for profit. We used to be a major exporter of asbestos, continuing even as only the most unscrupulous governments would accept our lethal product. Harper had to be shamed into stopping the asbestos trade and he did not do that willingly.

Yet aren't we doing pretty much the same thing with our exports of thermal coal and bitumen, two huge sources of greenhouse gas emissions that, to put it bluntly, our planet and the species that inhabit it, can no longer bear?

It's not 1980 anymore. We're forty years past that. We know what we're doing. We know what it causes. We know what it portends for our young people and future generations.

For now the worst impacts, that will emerge with far more grotesque clarity during the coming decade, are mainly absorbed by the people of other, more equatorial countries. Little brown people from poor and vulnerable societies that cannot push back against us - for now. Eventually, perhaps sooner than we imagine, our young people and those that have followed them, will have to take their turn to endure what we are bequeathing them.

Tell me, what kind of progressive would knowingly do that? Please, explain to me what is the progressive justification for that? Perhaps it's just me. I never understood progressivism to be a death sentence for anyone. I'm not saying I can't be wrong but that's not my take on it. Is there a new, anthropogenic progressive ethic?

Enlighten me, if you can. But if you can't, please give up the whole conceit of being a progressive if you're going to support the very neoliberal petro-state of Canada and the leaders who drive it.

Progressivism in the early 21st century confronts a reality that didn't exist in the early 20th century. In the earlier days it was a weapon of reform and advancement. But there is much in it that can also serve as a weapon of conservation and protection in this far more dangerous time.

A "National Emergency" - Who's Kidding Whom?

Change is afoot. The latest report on climate change in Canada is unsettling. It's even ominous.

The only surprising part is that anyone would be surprised by the report or its findings. They closely mirror reports that we've been getting, at least weekly, for the past several years.

The CBC's Neil Macdonald says this time it's for real. This time the Trudeau Liberals will answer the fire hall bell.

To the Trudeau government, this is core-mission stuff. Last week, scientists from the environment department were brought in to the Prime Minister's Office for briefings. The report will be public and online Tuesday, and Justin Trudeau and members of his cabinet will be pushing the issue as something bordering on a national emergency, which is not an unreasonable way to characterize it.

Think of it this way. If your house was on fire and you wanted to save your home would you douse the flames with gasoline? I'll bet that wouldn't be your first choice. You would realize that could only make your problem vastly worse.

Okay, now let's consider climate change as a national emergency and it is. A national emergency is something that you expect the national government to fight with all of its strength and means. Only despite this gestural farce of carbon taxes, our government is actually dousing the flames with gasoline.

That Trans Mountain pipeline? Perfect example. We've been told that Athabasca tar sludge has to be left in the ground. Trudeau has said no, we've got to get it out, fast, as much as possible while we still can.  He even paid Kinder Morgan, the former owner and Enron alumni,  a massive profit to make that happen. He's already sunk 4.5 billion into that pipeline and he's got easily another 7 billion to go.

Does that sound like somebody who's worried about climate change?

He's still paying billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel giants. They admit to a couple of billion per year. The IMF has priced not only direct subsidies but also "in kind" benefits such as minuscule royalties, grants, deferrals and other benefits at a whopping $46 billion.

Does that sound like somebody that sees shutting down the highest-carbon fossil fuel projects as "core mission stuff"?

Cast your mind back to the heady days of early December, 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals had just been installed in office. Justin and his enviro-min, Dame Cathy McKenna, strode onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit and proclaimed "Canada's back." The dark days of the Harper era when Canada was regularly rebuked as a climate change pariah were over. No, under new Liberal management, Canada was going to put its shoulder into the fight against climate change.

Perhaps Justin and Cathy were too busy fitting their wreaths of laurels to hear the warning from a climate scientist who was also at the Paris summit, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, then head of the prestigious Potsdam climate institute.

As the political types were high-fiving each other with bold promises to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, max, Johnny Schellnhuber said achieving that goal would require nothing less than the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry. Not milquetoast carbon taxes, no, nothing short of petro-states shutting down their fossil fuel producers and hastening the transition to alternative clean energy.

Do you believe that Justin is undergoing some epiphany over the dire threat of climate change? If you do I sure hope you're right and I'm wrong. Even if he had the moral spine (and he doesn't) he lacks the courage to reverse course and steer Canada to another direction.

Canada Warming at Twice Global Rate - "Effectively Irreversible"

The federal government is scheduled to release a report tomorrow that concludes our Great White North is warming at twice the global rate. Don't worry, we've got a carbon tax to fix that.  Only it won't fix anything.

Entitled Canada's Changing Climate Report (CCCR), the study was commissioned by the Environment and Climate Change Department, and is slated to be officially released on Tuesday. 

The leaked copy of the report says that since 1948, Canada's annual average temperature over land has warmed 1.7 C, with higher rates seen in the North, the Prairies and northern British Columbia. In Northern Canada, the annual average temperature has increased by 2.3 C. 

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), since 1948, global average temperatures have increased by about 0.8 C. 

Along with these temperature increases, the CCCR says Canada is experiencing increases in precipitation, particularly in winter, "extreme fire weather" and water supply shortages in summer and a heightened risk of coastal flooding.

Huffington Post interviewed one of the federal government's very own climate scientists, Environment Canada climate science advisor, Elizabeth Bush, who, one might hope has her minister's ear (although there's precious little sign of that).

"We are already seeing the effects of widespread warming in Canada,'' said Bush. "It's clear, the science supports the fact that adapting to climate change is an imperative. Urgent action is needed to reduce emissions.''

The report makes clear that the climate impacts we're already seeing are going to stay with us for "centuries to millennia'' even if we hit the emissions cuts believed necessary to slow warming to a more manageable pace.

Bush said, however, there are two vastly different pictures for Canada depending on whether the world makes significant progress towards cutting net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050. 

The report shows if the world can do that, the average temperature increases in Canada by the end of the century will be less than 3 C even in the hardest-hit parts of the country. 

But if the world keeps emitting at the same rate, most parts of Canada will see increases of between 7 C and 9 C, with the far reaches of the Arctic seeing temperature changes in excess of 11 C. 

"We are kind of at this fork in the road,'' said Chris Derksen, an Environment Canada research scientist specializing in ice cover. 

In the worse scenario, Canada will see 10 times as many deadly heat waves and twice as many extreme rainstorms, the report says.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

Wait, I know - let's take 11 or 12 billion dollars that we might otherwise dedicate to climate change adaptation and use it to build a massive pipeline to deliver high-carbon Athabasca tar sludge to "tidewater" in Burnaby from where we can flood world markets with that climate destroying crap. We might even destroy the west coast's rich but fragile marine ecosystem while we're at it. There's an idea, one that Justin Trudeau's government has warmly embraced. And you Liberals defend that prime minister.

A Call for Scientists to Rally Behind the Youth Climate Strike

Scientific American magazine is urging scientists everywhere to come out in support of the youth climate strike.

We, the March for Science, an international community of scientists, science advocates, teachers, and parents, emphatically support the Global Youth Climate Strike.

We commit to doing whatever we can to lift up the voices of young people and encourage their leadership. Their generation will be greatly impacted by the effects of climate change. It is critical that their voices are heard.

They are striking because our world leaders have yet to acknowledge, prioritize, or properly address the climate crisis. They are striking because marginalized communities across the world—especially communities of color, disabled communities, and low-income communities— are already disproportionately impacted by climate change. They are striking because their futures are at stake.

Their actions are backed by the best available science which shows that we need to rapidly decarbonize our economy and deeply transform society in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. They are treating the issue of climate change with the urgency that science and justice demand.

We ourselves, as a movement of science advocates, have taken to the streets in our millions over the last two years to fight for our communities and our planet. We offer everyone else who does the same our unreserved support and solidarity.

To adults—particularly political leaders—who are criticizing students for skipping school, please stand down. Our generations have failed to act. It is time to get behind the courageous actions of our young people.

Our youth have done their homework on climate change—it’s about time that our leaders behave like they have done theirs.

I'm pretty sure that Tory supporters will dismiss this out of hand as nonsense. I do, however, hope it makes some of you Liberals, especially the Justin Trudeau fan club, wince. The government, your government, is on the wrong side of this existential threat. By supporting the Liberal government, you've also chosen to put yourself on the wrong side of this. Don't compound that by being hypocritical enough to praise these kids at the same time. You're not on their side.

Goin' Tactical

If there's one thing no society needs it's "black guns." There is a whole family of these things out there, "tactical" semi-automatic assault rifles that can be yours for just a few hundred dollars.

Those patterned directly on the Colt M-16 require a "restricted" gun licence but there are plenty of others, just as sinister and Rambo-manly, that you can get with an ordinary, non-restricted licence.  Follow the link above, take a look.

I use the word "sinister" deliberately. That's what sells these guns, the idea that you too can join the warrior class. They're short, really easy to conceal. They're black. They've got Picatinny rails, ready to mount your scope, laser sight, red-dot sight or accessory flashlight in case you get a hankering to start blasting away in the darkness. Like the kid in the photo above with his accessorized Bushmaster.

And, if you don't have a couple of grand to plonk down, don't worry. You can get a Chinese SKS, with folding bayonet, on sale right now for $199.

People who buy these black guns often claim they're for hunting. Yeah, right. Take a look at this baby, priced at a modest $599. It's a knock-off of the German, WWII MP-40.

That's a shoot-from-the-hip blaster. You won't be heading out to take a deer with that. It just screams "Wehrmacht" all day long.  It's very inaccuracy makes it more dangerous, not less.

I'm not an anti-gun zealot. I have rifles, real hunting rifles, that I periodically take to the range for an hour of target shooting. They're not for "self-defence." It takes me more than 20 minutes just to get everything unlocked, assuming I can locate the keys and figure out what key works on which lock.

I think there's a place for rifles, some rifles. There's a place for handguns - cops, armoured car crews, competition shooters - but that's about it.

We need to ratchet down access to a lot of these firearms. If you want a tactical rifle, join the army. If you want a handgun, demonstrate that you have a legitimate need for one.

It's time the federal government cracked down on black rifles and automatic pistols - but don't hold your breath.

UPDATE:

New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, vows to reform her country's lax gun laws.

“Our gun laws will change,” she said. “There have been attempts to change our laws in 2005, 2012 and after an inquiry in 2017, now is the time for change.” 

She said five guns were used by the primary perpetrator of the attack, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns. The shooter was in possession of a gun licence obtained in November 2017.

Australia banned semi-automatic rifles. Britain has strict gun control. Now, New Zealand is going to follow. That leaves Canada the last bastion of assault rifle access.

Right Now, It's a Spectator Sport. Before Long It Could Become a Blood Sport.

Trump has people in Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe a bit worried about how we'll fare in a trade war with the United States. We're told we could be heading toward a recession, a drop in GDP of perhaps 2 per cent.

Trump's abuse of America's traditional allies is small potatoes. The Big Show is the Clash of the Titans, Washington versus Beijing. There's the one to watch because it's possible that could end in fireworks.

It would be much less worrisome if America had a mentally sound president. It doesn't. It has Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is in the White House and the reasonable people, the boys in the long pants, are pretty much gone. Trump has now surrounded himself with some pretty sketchy types like Pompeo, Bolton, Navarro and Haspel. They're the sort who can play on Trump's worst instincts, his deranged sense of grievance, his fears and every base instinct - they are legion. Trump embodies a malignant narcissism. He's extremely sociopathic, utterly lacking in empathy. He's impulsive and more than a little sadistic. These are the foundational attributes that Donald Trump has consistently exhibited his entire life. They're also America's Achilles Heel.

Trump may be attempting to restore America's dominance in the world. He can't. America's days as the world's industrial powerhouse are over. Trump blames that on foreign predators. Not hardly. It was America's industrial giants that, unleashed by globalism, offshored their manufacturing operations to low-wage, minimal-regulation regimes abroad. The United States quite deliberately transitioned to a "fire" economy - finance/insurance/real estate.

A few years ago I read a fascinating analysis by an American labour economist about the state of industrialism in his homeland and why so much of it was gone for good. He pointed out that manufacturing generates stable albeit modest returns on investment. Typically it's something in the range of 3 per cent. At the same time, the fire economy, Wall Street, was generating returns of 9 to 12 per cent. To encourage financial investment the feds began cutting capital gains taxes. The Triumph of the Rentier Class. Trump has no appetite for undoing that.

Do we imagine Chairman-for-Life Xi hasn't taken the measure of Trump and the box he's in? Do we think only Trump will ruthlessly exploit every opportunity, every vulnerability?

Could Trump's trade war be the very opportunity Xi has been looking for? This could be China's opportunity to cement its ascdendancy. History tells us that most of these superpower transitions lead to warfare. That was predictable when ships were made of oak, cannon were cast iron and fired grape shot. This transition will be the first we've seen in the Nuclear Age.

I would bet that Xi has a critical advantage. He can probably weather the domestic reaction to a recessionary trade war much better than Trump. Trump's base will be hit. The Gullibillies are quite vulnerable. But it will be the Kochs, the Coors and the Adelson's who will be gunning for him if they see he's launched a ruinous trade war without much chance of success. They're already incensed with Trump's trade wars. They'll be unforgiving if Trump loses his war with China or winds up groveling for terms. And let's remember who owns America's "bought and paid for" Congress.

Trump is no Simon Bolivar but he may wind up as America's Don Quixote. He cannot endure humiliation and he's now surrounded with people like Bolton, Pompeo, Navarro and Haspel. With those people steering Trump, it's Xi's advantages that I find truly worrisome.

Remember, America is flying solo this time. It has viciously turned on its allies.

Let's hope this doesn't get out of control.

What Then Must We Do? Canada's Place Alongside the United States in Turbulent Times.

Do you ever wonder how close the United States may be to abandoning democracy? Do you ever wonder what that might mean for Canada? Are you familiar with the word, "anschluss"?

Even The Economist recently rated the US as a "flawed democracy."  That might have been overly generous. A paper released by Princeton in 2014 written by two professors, Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern), contrasted the voting record of Congress to the public will and reached the compelling conclusion that democracy had yielded to plutocracy in the American state. America's "bought and paid for" Congress had been "captured" by narrow, powerful interests and had ceased to serve the public interest. America was in the process of transforming into an oligarchy.

We watched as America's legislatures, state and federal, were captured. The telltale signs included the thwarting of campaign finance reform, the rise of a dominant corporate media cartel (think Sinclair Broadcasting) and the arrival of organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, where captured legislators made pilgrimage to be given industry-drafted bills to take back and pass into law.

This sort of big money corruption is gangrenous and, true to form, it quickly spread to regulatory capture where representatives of regulated industries come to control the quasi-judicial boards that regulate those same industries. Trump's poster boy for this is EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who is out to dismantle most environmental regulations.

A lot of the corruption-fueled decline in American democracy predates Donald Trump but the Mango Mussolini has been a powerful catalyst who may propel the United States into a new level of authoritarianism, possibly extending into outright fascism.

When it comes to global leadership, Trump spurns America's traditional allies but has revealed a preternatural affinity for tyrants including some of the most murderous. Trump sees the retreat of liberal democracy through much of the world and will not come to its aid or defence.

Trump has little time for America's vaunted system of checks and balances. He does not recognize three co-equal branches of government. He regularly attacks law enforcement and the judiciary. He is intent on contaminating the US Supreme Court by transforming it into a partisan political agency. Neither Congress nor the American people seem to realize that a partisan political Supreme Court cannot uphold justice in the land. The Rule of Law becomes meaningless. Trump insists that the Department of Justice works for him, not the nation. When impartiality is extinguished what remains is one party rule and when that is coupled with an imperial presidency you have one-man rule.

As American public intellectual, Henry Giroux, recently wrote:

While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism, are at the center of power in the Trump administration. 

When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices.

Before America's Electoral College handed Trump the presidency, several scholars who listened to his campaign rhetoric observed that Trump's vision of reforming the United States government strayed well into the extra-constitutional. Trump would have to go rogue, unconstitutional. To do that he would need to subdue or disable both the judicial and legislative branches of government. He's done a good job with House leader, Paul Ryan, and Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. With two, possibly even three more, Supreme Court vacancies in the near future, he can probably capture the already compromised judiciary also. Then it's just a matter of a Reichstag Fire.

These are problems that the American people will have to address. Perhaps they're willing to accept a post-democratic authoritarian government, strong man rule. That's their call.  Canadians, however, will be impacted by developments south of the 49th parallel perhaps more than ever in the history of our two nations.

We need to start considering how the decline of American democracy will alter the relationship between our nations; how it may impact us as individuals; whether we need to formulate some bottom line or red lines that will limit or regulate dealings between our countries. Are we at risk of succumbing to this American contagion? Should we be taking steps to rehabilitate and renew liberal democracy in Canada? Is democracy really all that secure in the True North or are we deluding ourselves? Can we afford this "open border" policy we once took such pride in? There are doubtless many issues we need to consider, questions we need to ask.

We're going to have to figure this out somehow. America is changing. It already has changed. It's not the beacon of democracy any more. To ignore that, to pretend that it's still Ozzie & Harriet and that the 2020 presidential elections will provide some magical reset button is delusional. Being next door neighbours leaves us uniquely exposed and vulnerable to this new America that seems intent on trying to forestall its decline by throwing out the rule books and exacting tribute from friend and adversary alike.

Churchill famously opined that America could always be counted on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted every other option. I wish that still held true. It doesn't. The right thing seems to have lost its currency in Washington.

This is as good a time as any to start talking among ourselves. We have a lot of catching up to do.