What Is the Role of Politics In an Increasingly Unstable World?

The Holocene has given way to the Anthropocene. Exactly when and how it happened is the subject of endless debate but it has happened. The economic paradigm of the past 40 years, neoliberalism, has proven - beyond doubt - that there is life after death. It has long since outlived its usefulness but 'the next great thing' is in no rush to take its place. Democracy as we know it is on the wane. Our modes of organization - political, social,  economic - have lost much of their utility. Over the past 50 years the population of one species, our own, has more than doubled while the population of all other species of animal life has plummeted an astonishing 68 per cent. All of these things are ongoing and no one has a clue how they end or when.

We're in the throes of climate breakdown, social and economic upheaval, even a pandemic to boot. We're warned of chaos, a dystopian future. More diseases, more severe storm events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration, more loss of biodiversity, more species falling extinct at rates wildly beyond anything we've known as normal, the prospect of mass migration not in millions or even hundreds of millions - far more than that, the collapse of social norms, conventions, perhaps even the rule of law and democracy itself, resource wars, wars of survival, subsistence.

All of those things should be on the political agenda today. Real and looming threats should be reflected in policy. Governments should be marshalling resources, building resilience, mustering the public to meet the challenges. Seen any sign of that. Ottawa? Washington, London, anywhere? No?

We were brought up believing that politics was "the art of the possible." It was an endless game of thrust and parry, accommodation and compromise. Second best was success. Only, this time, we're not even going for second best.

When the engines quit on your airplane, second best is some type of survivable crash landing with as few casualties as possible. You've got to think quick. You have to make some really hard choices in next to no time. You have to find resolve and you have to use every bit of experience you have to put that plane down on the Hudson and get everyone safely out on the wings.

This time the stakes are higher, much higher. Chesley Sullenberger had seconds to respond to his crisis. Our governments have had two decades, even more. Sullenberger took life-saving action. Our politicians haven't and that's true whether Conservative or Liberal. They won't even talk about what's coming except in the most vague, sanitized language. When it comes to climate and social breakdown they squirm like a worm on a hook and they want off.

They're confronted by challenges so huge, so severe, that the art of the possible is meaningless. It doesn't apply. As Churchill pointed out, doing "our best" isn't good enough. Sometimes we must do what is required. We don't have a party, a party leader in Canada who thinks that way. There is no Sullenberger in the cockpit. You're on your own. Happy landing.

"An Apprehension of an Ending"

I'm not convinced that we're watching the end but I'm not confident that what's playing out before us and our lethargy, even indifference to it, admit of some other future.

Guardian Australia writer, Brigid Delaney, weighs in on North America's record wildfire season 

 We too have seen the orange afternoon sky, and felt the soft, strange sensation of soot falling like rain, and watched the edges of the curtains glow in an amber haze long after nightfall.  

 

We too have purchased masks and air filters, and had windless days where it’s been hard to breathe, and inhaled smoke from thousands of kilometres away and wondered if we should be worried about a wheeze that wasn’t there before. 

 

...We too felt a new and special way of being afraid. There was the fear of the thing itself – the wall of flame and its greed, fire chomping through entire towns down to the water’s edge. Then there was the other fear. Flashes of a deeper dread – an apprehension of an ending. 

 

The most rational and Earth-bound among us, not given to hysterical proclamations, fear or strange theories or fantasies about End Times, started to talk in a way that scared us.

 ...In our fear and our fury, we too faced the gross insult to our intelligence: politicians and popular press telling us (embers still burning, the fires raging on, joining other fires now) that it’s not man-made climate change that is to blame.

It’s arson. Its forest management. It’s just one of those freak things that happen and soon “it’ll start getting cooler, you just watch”.

Dear America, we can tell you what happens next – we’re almost a year ahead, your friends at the bottom of the world, speaking from the future.

We can tell you that in the months after the event, when you can breathe again, women who were pregnant during the fire gave birth to babies facing potential long-term health risks.

We can tell you that even the worst fire season in living memory was not enough and that three billion animals dead or displaced is not enough and species pushed to the brink of extinction is not enough and even the birds falling from the sky in a “mass die-off” (a portent so obvious that it feels straight out of the Old Testament) is not enough to make the leaders panic and DO SOMETHING about man-made global heating.

We can tell you how soon such intense fires are obliterated from the collective memory – blasted as if by high-pressure hose – by other events of 2020. Locked in our houses we order other, different masks and forget the taste of ash on our tongues.

Good luck and best wishes. 

Nowhere to Run To, Baby. Nowhere to Hide. America Comes to Grip With Climate Breakdown.

Some Americans are beginning to ask,  "is it time for me to leave?" They're rethinking the choices they made on where they wanted to live, decisions that now seem unfortunate.

The New York Times has a long but riveting read from Abrahm Lustgarten, an environmental scribe for ProPublica that questions how long he and other Americans from the southern half of their country can hold out before they have to seek "high ground" from environmental calamities from droughts and floods, water insecurity, wildfires, severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration, and every other variety of environmental threat.

For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.

In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?

When wealth becomes a pariah.

Census data show us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters. 

The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.

Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.

A Climate Ponzi Scheme

In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.

That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.

As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.

When neighbourhoods spontaneously combust - Santa Rosa, California

The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions.

What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever.  ..Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.

A "Climate Housing Bubble" to rival 2007

Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by [Tulane University's Jesse]Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, [Kennedy School of Government, Harvard] for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.

Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.

Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.

This recalls the warning from Munich Re, one of the world's giant re-insurers, in March, 2019, that climate change could make homeowner insurance premiums unaffordable.

“If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue. Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”

“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly.”

Lustgarten gets the hard truth. Get Out

As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ” 

He cut me off: “Yes.”

The Future?

Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly. 

In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20 percent more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10 percent, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.

The entire article, reprinted in the New York Times magazine, is available without firewall at ProPublica here.

Not Even One? Biodiversity Targets Unmet.

In 2010 the world community agreed that action was urgently needed to slow the loss of biodiversity, a growing risk to humanity itself.  Following meetings in Aichi, Japan, 20 targets were identified for action over the following decade. It was declared the "United Nations Decade on Biodiversity," 2011-2020.

The Decade is to be succeeded by the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework, which is itself a stepping stone to the 2050 Vision of "Living in harmony with nature", which envisages that "By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people."

Here we are ten years later and not one of those targets has been met. There has been some progress but "some" takes on a different context when time is a critical factor. We do not have the luxury of time.

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, published before a key UN summit on the issue later this month, found that despite progress in some areas, natural habitats have continued to disappear, vast numbers of species remain threatened by extinction from human activities, and $500bn (£388bn) of environmentally damaging government subsidies have not been eliminated. 

Six targets have been partially achieved, including those on protected areas and invasive species. While governments did not manage to protect 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10% of marine habitats, 44% of vital biodiverse areas are now under protection, an increase from 29% in 2000. About 200 successful eradications of invasive species on islands have also taken place. 

The UN said the natural world was deteriorating and failure to act could undermine the goals of the Paris agreement on the climate crisis and the sustainable development goals. 

The UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, said humanity was at a crossroads that would decide how future generations experience the natural world. 

“Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity,” she said.

Yesterday I posed two questions. How is it that over the past 50 years humanity has more than doubled in population? How is it that over that same interval the populations of all other animal species have plummeted by 68 percent? Biodiversity is a related but also distinct issue.

Biodiversity is a relatively new concept and there is some variation in how it is defined. In its simplest form biodiversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth - all life whether animal, plant, fungal; from single cell organisms, microbes and spores to blue whales, the lot.

Biodiversity takes a real hammering in the course of mass extinction events (five so far and counting) and can take millions of years to recover, usually with the evolution of new species.  While biodiversity is, on balance, beneficial to humans, humanity has done few favours to biodiversity. There's even a term for it, the Holocene Extinction now being continued as the Anthropocene Extinction.  We've only gotten really good at it over the past few centuries.

So, what's it going to be? Death by good intentions and half-measures? That's the course we're on. These are existential threats. At the risk of appearing uncritical of Winston Churchill, I keep coming back to his observation on grave emergencies. "Sometimes it is not enough that we do our best. Sometimes we must do what is required."  We don't believe that any more, do we?

The Bats in Donald Trump's Belfry

There are many bats in Donald Trump's belfry, some perhaps even more deranged than the lunatic in chief himself. Trump has the loosest connection with reality. At times it rivals his tenuous relationship with truth. He combines malignant narcissisms with the instincts of a compulsive grifter, a sneak thief. 

Trump attracts a cadre of equally mangy types - guys like Stone, Manafort, Flynn, Barr and Cohen and his White House cadre of accomplished liars and miscreants. To work for Trump while retaining some vestige of integrity and honour is to enjoy a very abbreviated tenure.

Which brings us to Trump's former campaign aid and now Health and Human Services fixer, Michael Caputo. This character was a ne'er do well from adolescence. He was eventually mentored by Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and, yes, he lived in Russia for a while.

Caputo recently was revealed as having interceded with the Centres for Disease Control to fudge the Covid-19 numbers so they might look less damaging to the Fuhrer.

Being outed may have led to what the Washington Post describes as an "insane rant" delivered Sunday via a live video talk on Caputo's  Facebook page.

Caputo, who is playing a leading role in dictating the administration’s public communications about the coronavirus pandemic, suggested that “deep state” scientists are shaping their handling of coronavirus around the deliberate goal of not allowing “America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

And Caputo, who admitted that his “mental health has definitely failed,” also referred to leftist “hit squads being trained all over the country,” who will enter into a shooting war to depose President Trump after he’s reelected, and advised his supporters to prepare.

Everyone is understandably aghast at all this. But how far afield is it from what we hear regularly from that guy who happens to be the president of the United States?

Trump and his top officials constantly exhort Trump supporters to believe that, broadly speaking, the political opposition is operating via fundamentally illegitimate means and that it poses an existential threat to the very possibility of civil society itself, a claim Attorney General William P. Barr also made during a major speech.

Meanwhile, Trump is simultaneously telling his supporters to believe there is no fashion in which our political system can deliver a verdict removing him from power that is legitimate — that there is no lawful or licit manner in which the political opposition can prevail.

If we’re going to talk about how crazy it is that Caputo suggested that Trump supporters should gird for an armed plot to depose Trump, maybe we should also talk about how crazy all of that is as well. Is it really that big a leap from one to the other?

First It Was the Coronavirus. He Said It Would Simply Disappear. It Didn't. Now Trump Says Global Warming Is On Its Way Out.

His followers are probably stupid enough - rock bottom stupid - to believe him. They believed him when he said that Covid-19 would be gone by April. 

Today, while touring wildfire devastated California, Donald Trump said that climate change, global heating, is going to just go away.

Consider an exchange that took place in California at an event focused on the fires. Wade Crowfoot, head of the state’s Natural Resources Agency, called on Trump to recognize the role of climate change in the historic conflagrations.

“We’ve had temperatures explode this summer,” Crowfoot said. “You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley: 130 degrees. But even in greater L.A., 120-plus degrees. And we’re seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well.”

He acknowledged Trump’s repeated point that ground cover and fallen trees contribute to fires.

“But I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forest — and actually work together with that science,” he continued. “That science is going to be key, because if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together in protecting Californians.”

“It’ll start getting cooler,” Trump replied. “You just — you just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot said.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump responded.

Joe Biden called Trump a "climate arsonist." 

 

Authoritarians are Reactionary. It's What They Do. They're Also Quick to Turn Their People's Suffering to Their Advantage.

Orban, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Duterte, Duda, Modi and Trump, a gallery of authoritarian thugs. They're not alone. There are others who are just getting started or are waiting in the wings.

We decry the global retreat of liberal democracy. It seems not a day goes by without some outrage as these thugs break or overturn some norm, convention, rule or law inconvenient to their wishes. That's what authoritarians do. They are, in their black hearts, reactionary.

Reactionaries tend to follow their own code, a playbook of sorts. They set out to neutralize democracy. A common first step is to undermine the rule of law and that begins by weakening and corrupting the judiciary. In Trump's case that has meant stacking federal courts with new judges chosen for political reliability.  Trump even has an Attorney General who is blatantly corrupt and steers his justice department to suit Trump's needs and demands.

They are also quick to spot ways to turn emergencies to their own purposes.

Foreign Affairs has an excellent discussion of how leading authoritarians responded to and, in some cases, exploited the Covid-19 pandemic.

For authoritarian leaders, staying in power nearly always trumps the public’s welfare. The logic of this priority leads many regimes not only to censor information about a crisis but to exploit crises to augment their power. Adolf Hitler used the Reichstag fire to consolidate his control over the German government. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned a 2016 coup attempt into an opportunity to silence opposition. In the aftermath of a crisis, a temporary state of emergency may become normalized—“no longer the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin put it. 

The coronavirus pandemic tempts such a response among authoritarian rulers. Hungary has already gone down this road. On March 30, Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared a state of emergency, ostensibly to help contain the virus. Over the previous decade, Orban had already domesticated the media, the judiciary, and the Hungarian parliament. The pandemic was the crisis he needed to complete his autocratic capture of the state. Orban now rules by decree, and only he decides when the state of emergency may end.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, used the pandemic to get his impending corruption trial postponed and to allow the state’s internal security service, Shin Bet, access to cell phone data on public safety grounds (the potential for abuse is clear).

U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had just laid the foundations for authoritarian governance when the pandemic came: they discredited the press in their respective countries, used machismo as a strategy of legitimation, and made bargains with cronies, such as rollbacks on environmental protections, in exchange for political support. The two leaders have deployed all of these classic authoritarian tools in their responses to the pandemic. Using misinformation, they have underplayed the severity of the virus, peddled unproven cures, and dismissed experts who would not adopt their messaging. Bolsonaro fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, for warning the public to practice social distancing and to stay at home. Trump barely tolerates Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and has retweeted support for the #FireFauci campaign on social media. To sustain the fiction of their omnipotence, Trump and Bolsonaro have refused to wear protective gear and made a point of shaking hands with everyone in sight, as though they were personally immune from harm.

Yesterday's Guardian editorial addressed how Trump's Indian pal, Narendra Modi, has bungled the pandemic.

Last month Narendra Modi, India’s strongman prime minister, performed the religious rites to consecrate the building of a Hindu temple on the site of a mosque whose destruction two decades ago sparked deadly nationwide riots. The ceremony saw Mr Modi appropriate the role traditionally performed by Hindu kings. “The entire nation is under Ram’s spell today,” the prime minister told his audience. “By God’s grace, a golden chapter is being written by India.”

India used to boast of having the world’s fastest-growing major economy. It now has the fastest-growing coronavirus crisis, with almost 100,000 new infections reported each day. Its GDP has contracted by almost a quarter. The country makes up one third of the world’s new Covid cases and appears to have underestimated the disease’s prevalence.

Rather than rebuild India’s social fabric, Mr Modi wants to build a panopticon. Critics of his government’s woeful performance have already been muzzled or locked up. A cold war with China blows dangerously hot in the Himalayas. To buttress support Mr Modi stokes Hindu nationalism. The temple ceremony is a way of stirring the emotions of Mr Modi’s fanatical supporters. It also reveals the depths of his denial about India’s Covid crisis.

The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, adds this:

In Thailand, Cambodia, Venezuela, Bangladesh, and Turkey, governments are detaining journalists, opposition activists, healthcare workers, and anyone else who dares to criticize the official response to the coronavirus. Needless to say, ignorance-is-bliss is not an effective public health strategy.

When independent media is silenced, governments are able to promote self-serving propaganda rather than facts. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for example, downplayed the coronavirus threat for weeks, apparently wanting to avoid harming Egypt’s tourist industry. His government expelled a Guardian correspondent and “warned” a New York Times journalist after their articles questioned government figures on the number of coronavirus cases.

The government of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan implausibly denies that there are any COVID-19 cases in its prisons, and a prosecutor is investigating a member of parliament—himself a doctor—who says that a seventy-year-old inmate and a member of the prison staff have tested positive. Thailand’s Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-ocha warned journalists to report on government press conferences only and not to interview medical personnel in the field. 

Of course, a free media is not a certain antidote. Responsible government is also needed. US President Donald Trump initially called the coronavirus a “hoax.” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called the virus a “fantasy” and preventive measures “hysterical.” Before belatedly telling people to stay home, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ostentatiously held rallies, and hugged, kissed, and shook hands with supporters. But at least a free media can highlight such irresponsibility; a silenced media allows it to proceed unchallenged.

Recognizing that the public is more willing to accept government power grabs in times of crisis, some leaders see the coronavirus as an opportunity not only to censor criticism but also to undermine checks and balances on their power. Much as the “war on terrorism” was used to justify certain long-lasting restrictions on civil liberties, so the fight against the coronavirus threatens longer-term damage to democratic rule.

Out of Other Options, Trudeau Turns Green

It seems Justin is rethinking his fossil fuel fuckups. The world's just not digging that high-carbon, low value crud that he once figured was worth pursuing even when the private sector was running for the exits. Not his most lucid moment.

Michael Harris writes that the Dauphin's moment of truth has arrived. Everything else he's tried has failed so, at last, he's going green.

On Sept. 23, Trudeau will put his government, and his legacy, on the line with a throne speech. It faces a confidence vote. If the Liberals should lose that vote, the government would fall. 

Then Canadians would be plunged into their first national campaign held during a pandemic, left to scratch their heads over myriad questions. 

Who would the citizenry blame for sending them to the polls with COVID-19 still very much on the prowl? 

Everything depends on the essence of the throne speech, including the federal government’s plan to revive the COVID-battered economy. Expect them to spend the numbers off the national credit card. Money for child care and health services, maybe even pharmacare, will be there. Liberal caucus members are clamouring, too, for a guaranteed basic income. How does the NDP oppose that? 

And every signal coming out of Ottawa suggests that the prime minister is finally ready to put flesh on the rhetoric of his vision of a new, green economy, a Canada moving away from fossil fuels with solid plans to substitute renewable energies. Why is that so risky? History. The country has seen this movie before under the Liberals. It produced no Academy Awards.

...Some key clues to what the government might unveil on the climate change front are contained in remarks made by the PM in the riding of Burnaby South just prior to the 2019 federal election, four months before COVID-19 arrived in Canada. 

It was the classic “big-vision” speech. Trudeau told his audience that politicians would have to move “faster than ever” to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The words he used are telling: 

“That means not putting any more carbon emissions into the air than we take out.... It’ll require us to slash our emissions, transform our economy, and use the power of nature — like planting trees and protecting ecosystems — to bring us to net zero.... We will hit net zero by 2050 — not only because we can, but because we must.”

...Expect Erin O’Toole to go after Trudeau exactly as Harper went after Dion. The CPC will declare that the government must not ignore the traditional energy sector in its zeal to create a brave, new economic world in Canada based on green energy 

As the leader of what remains a western-based party, O’Toole will continue to champion Big Oil, and even Jason Kenney, Alberta’s reverse-visionary premier who thinks that open-pit coal mining in the foothills of the Rockies is the answer to climate change. 

Refusing to accept the fact that they can never return Albertans to the happy days of $100 a barrel oil, the Conservatives will resort to all the usual threats of economic disaster, as well the spectre of Wexit — a notion nearly as wacky as Brexit.

Can Trudeau stop trying to ride a dead horse?

The watchwords these days in the petro palaces are falling prices, unsustainable dividends to investors, rising competition from alternate energy technologies, sector disruption and stranded assets. A financial horror show. Freddy Krueger with an adding machine. Saudi Armaco saw its profits drop 73 per cent. 

There’s only one thing better than being on the right side of history; being on the right side of the future. 

If the hounds of scandal don’t bring him down, a green Trudeau just might be on to something.

I do hope Harris is right but I wouldn't bet the farm on this prime minister growing a spine.  If he is sincere there are two clear steps he must take. He has to cut off federal subsidies to the fossil energy sector. That means no more handouts, no more tax deferrals and market-pricing of resources such as freshwater ruined by the fossil fuelers. The second step is to cancel the treasury-sucking vampire, the Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline, a.k.a. Trans Mountain. Yes, he might have to write off the billions he's already committed but the remaining billions can be put to far better use elsewhere.

We'll see but Justin has a track record of breaking solemn promises.

UPDATE:

The latest 2020 outlook from OPEC on oil demand should stiffen Justin's resolve.

Why Can't We Understand Something So Simple?

It's simple. Straightforward as it can be. No elaborate theories needed. Just two facts, mathematical certainties.

Since 1970, the population of non-human animals species has declined by 68 percent.

Since 1970, the population of that other species, homo sapiens or humans, has more than doubled.

D'ya think they're connected somehow, one species skyrocketing in numbers while the rest of the species' populations plummet? Do you think that's just an incredible coincidence? Do you think any of this bodes well for that outlier species, homo sapiens?

When was the last time you heard your government talk about this? Never? What about the leader of your party of preference? Does this come up in their conversations? No? Isn't that curious?

A wall of silence is a wall of indifference and that leads to a wall of inaction.

We should be scared out of our wits at these two, oh so simple facts. We're not. We don't want to know.

First Things First

Covid 19 party, Vancouver

It's happening in Israel and Europe, Asia and the United States, Canada too perhaps. These places (and others) are seeing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections.

It could be many things - end of summer parties, exuberant college students returning to campus, Covid-fatigue leaving some people hostile to masks, social distancing, constant handwashing, etc.

In the Spring, when British Columbia had achieved a decent result in 'flattening the curve' of Covid infections, the provincial medical officer of health, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said it was inevitable that people would want to get outside and enjoy the summer weather (such as it was) and that we might have to redouble our efforts to suppress the virus in September.

A couple of days ago, CTV News interviewed a Toronto epidemiologist who raised a different explanation for this global resurgence. He said the data 'increasingly' suggested what we're seeing is the onset of the 'second wave' of the Covid-pandemic.

This doctor added that, if this is the second wave, that doesn't mean it has to be as devastating as the second wave of the Spanish flu of 1918, the real killer of that pandemic. Our knowledge is better than it was a century ago. We have established medical infrastructure built up since the spring of this year. The organization is still in place and we know how to lock down if that again becomes necessary.

We can't lockdown society again, not without good cause, unless we're willing to start eating our lawns. But we need to know what's behind this resurgence of infections. Is it the second wave and, if so, how do we get ahead of it? What must we do?

What concerns me most is our students, especially grade school kids. We closed down their schools in the spring. If we're embarking on a second wave is it really the right time to send them back to classes? Is it safe?

This is plainly the sort of question that triggers the "precautionary principle." \

"The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is [not] harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. ...The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result."  

In 2015, the Federal Court of Canada upheld the precautionary principle as part of the substantive law of our country. The Supreme Court of Canada has also applied the precautionary principle.

It is the substantive law of Canada. Why does our government pretend otherwise? Why do our premiers and our prime minister act as though it doesn't exist? Is it because complying with this fundamental, substantive law doesn't suit them?

America's Democracy Goes Terminal

A disturbing article in The Guardian on the perilous state of democracy in America. The article presents the views of the leaders of several major US organizations and they're worried, very worried. They include Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; Michael Waldman president of the Brennan Center for Justice; Dierdre Schifeling, founder of Democracy for All 2021 and former head of advocacy for Planned Parenthood; Derrick Johnson, president, NAACP and Sabeel Rahman, president of the thinktank Demos.

There is no way to do this article justice with excerpts. It really does deserve to be read in its entirety and the link above. Here, however, are a few passages.

Waldman

“Our democracy is deeply imperiled,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, the go-to authority on all things electoral. “We have relied on democratic norms and expectations for years that now turn out to be very weak in the face of somebody with an authoritarian bent.”

As Waldman, an authority on the subject, put it: “In the US in 2020, widespread claims of voter fraud are not a charge, they are a lie. Voter fraud is vanishing rare, as every study has shown over and over again.”



Rahman

“A set of actors in the Trump administration and the Republican party have made it very clear that their intention is to hold on to political power at the expense of democratic institutions,” said Sabeel Rahman, president of the thinktank Demos.

“It sounds outlandish to say that in an American election one party would refuse to admit the legitimacy of the result, but that’s very much where we are and all the rhetoric right now is about creating the atmospherics that would enable that kind of power grab on 4 November,” Rahman said.

“Distrust is being stoked and weaponized,” Rahman said, “and a huge chunk of the country has been primed to disbelieve the legitimacy of the result – whatever that result is.”


Schifeling

A few years ago [Schifeling] came to the realization that there was a growing disconnect between the will of the American people and their political representation in federal and state governments. 

“I was talking to my colleagues in a range of organizations and we were sharing our frustration at not being able to make progress on our missions,” she said.
They began to compare notes and found their experiences overlapped. In key areas such as access to healthcare, worker rights, combating the climate crisis and policing reform, “We the people” were on the side of progress by a clear majority. 

She reached a reluctant and unhappy conclusion: “Our government is not able to represent the will of the people.”

Johnson 

On top of foundational irregularities (i.e. the Electoral College), a slew of dirty tricks has been crafted over the years in the form of voter suppression. The practice is generations old, dating back to the days of southern segregation when African Americans were discouraged and intimidated from voting. 

Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the largest civil rights group in the country, the NAACP, noted that such sleight of hand used to be confined to the deep south but in recent years has metastasized nationwide. “What used to be a regional problem in the south has become a national critical issue. We’ve fought against it since our creation 111 years ago, but there’s been a huge uptick in efforts to misdirect, mislead or outright suppress the right of African Americans to cast a ballot in this election cycle.” 

As Johnson indicated, skulduggery and US elections have gone hand in hand long before Trump came along. But in the run-up to this election, voter suppression techniques are being taken to the next level. 

“We have not seen this level of intentional overt exclusion since the 50s and 60s,” Johnson said.

 Gupta

“This is a perfect storm in this country,” said Vanita Gupta, who heads the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition. “We can’t take American democracy for granted, as for a long time we did.” 

Then Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, used a word not usually associated with America. “Things are happening on our watch that are clear signs of authoritarianism,” she said, “and we have to push back.”

A Constitutional Coup D'Etat? Roger Stone Says 'Go For It'

One of Donald Trump's oldest 40 Thieves, Roger Stone, says Trump should seize power if he loses to Joe Biden in November.  Night of the Long Knives?

Roger Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Russia investigation was commuted by Donald Trump, has said Trump should seize total power and jail prominent figures including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg if he loses to Joe Biden in November.

The long-time Republican dirty trickster, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, offered the startling advice on Thursday, in a call to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars online show.

Citing widely debunked claims of fraud around early voting, absentee balloting and voting by mail, Stone told Jones Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act and arresting the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity”.

Trump and his campaign have also consistently claimed without evidence that “antifa”, or anti-fascist, activists represent a deadly threat to suburban voters that will be unleashed should Biden win. Commenting on a Daily Beast report about leftwing activist groups planning what to do “if the election ends without a clear outcome or with a Biden win that Trump refuses to recognise”, Stone told Jones the website should be shut down.
“If the Daily Beast is involved in provably seditious and illegal activities,” he said, “their entire staff can be taken into custody and their office can be shut down. They wanna play war, this is war.” 

Stone also advocated “forming an election day operation using the FBI, federal marshals and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections [to results] and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity”. 

In an interview broadcast on Saturday night, Trump told Fox News he would happily “put down” any leftwing protests.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that,” he told Jeannine Pirro. 

“We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in and we, we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that, because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes.”

"If we had to," is that code for "if we lose"?

The Lakehead by Tuesday

Wildfire smoke from the Oregon and Washington forest conflagrations is beginning to head east. The 48 hour outlook from Firesmoke.ca shows Calgary getting hard hit. The smoke could spread to the lakehead by Tuesday.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes wonders whether, with a pandemic, droughts, floods and now uncontrollable wildfires painting much of the U.S. in heavy smoke, the American people are finding it all too much to absorb.

California Can't Catch a Break

There's a bad moon rising for California. Reeling from a resurgence of Covid-19 infections the state ran headfirst into an outbreak of wildfires that have now beset Oregon and Washington.

Now we have another problem - La Nina has reared her ugly head. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, NOAA, has a graphic depicting what La Nina brings.

For California and Oregon it usually means a dry winter, just what that region doesn't need. The NOAA shows a band of wet conditions for the Pacific Northwest but Environment Canada thinks BC will have a warmer than normal winter with reduced snow accumulations on coastal mountain ranges. We had a pretty cool and wet summer up to mid-July. I'd be happy to see it back soon.

Finally, In Open Court - Bill Barr is Corrupt. The Attorney General of the United States is Corrupt.

A shakeup in the Michael Flynn case. The retired judge, John Gleeson, appointed to advise the court pulls no punches. The Attorney-General's attempt to have the charges dismissed against Mike Flynn, charges to which Flynn already pleaded guilty and stands convicted, is an act of pure corruption.

Fauci Says, We're In This For Another year

When it comes to Covid-19, we've shown ourselves to be a pretty reckless bunch. Trump wants to persuade voters that he'll have it wrapped up shortly after the election. Plenty will believe him even though he's  a proven liar.

So, what's up?

I think Wolf Blitzer's interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci clears the air.



So there you have it. There's hope that a vaccine will come along somewhere around the New Year. It probably won't be completely effective. 75 per cent would be great. It's going to take months to produce hundreds of millions of doses and many more months to get the population, or enough of the population, vaccinated. Because the chances are really slim that we'll see a "magic bullet" vaccine, we will have to do the now familiar routines - handwashing, masks, social distancing, quarantines - for at least another year.

Another Trump/Stone/Manafort Gopher Bursts Into Flames

 He was a frequent guest on MSNBC panels, a weasel who dutifully tried to defend Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and, above all, Donald Trump.

Michael Caputo somehow rose to become the spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services where his main contribution has been to fix the reports on Covid-19 so they wouldn't make Trump look so bad.  Because sometimes Trump's lies need a little help along the way.

A former Trump campaign official now spokesman for the US health department sought to change key reports on the coronavirus pandemic, in some cases “openly complaining” that they “would undermine the president’s optimistic messages about the outbreak”, according to internal emails seen by Politico.

The official, Michael Caputo, told the website he was attempting to stymie “ulterior deep state motives in the bowels” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.

Politico reported that under Caputo’s direction, CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports were subject to “substantial efforts to align … with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether”. 

“Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings,” the website said, “including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior.”

The Left Coast Isn't All Blue

While the western states are predominantly Democrat-leaning, Republicans control a lot of territory in the central and eastern regions. That includes parts of Oregon currently beset by wildfires.

The state of Oregon says it's bracing for heavy loss of life. Some 500,000 have left the fire zone but an undetermined number are known to have stayed in their homes. Why?

In preceding days, Facebook pages associated with the town were filled with rumors of looters and Antifa raids. On its Facebook page overnight, Molalla police were forced to amend an earlier call for residents to report suspicious activity.

“This is about possible looters, not antifa or setting of fires,” the edit read. “There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02am. Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense.”

The effects of this disinformation were dangerously evident on the ground.

On Thursday afternoon, three journalists were confronted by men with AR-15s and summarily ordered to leave Molalla. One of them, Sergio Olmos, who was on assignment for Oregon Public Broadcasting, said that the orders were given by the men – apparently civilians – without explanations or identification.

Further afield, other men with similar sympathies appeared to be on patrol. Although few vehicles were left in Mulino save those belonging to emergency services, on the trip there and again on back roads en route to Oregon City, men in trucks bearing thin blue line flags – a badge of membership for rightwing movements – were observed in states of hypervigilance. Some appeared to be noting the faces and number plates of passersby.

Others sent horn honks and supportive gestures towards trucks bearing similar regalia. 

Who is behind the fear mongering that led Oregonians to lose their lives? Not any BLM protesters, not Antifa demonstrators. It was the radical right's doing. White nationalists, gun-toting rednecks.

Trump Treasury Department Withholds Funds to Treat 9/11 First Responders

The New York Daily News reports that the federal Treasury Department has skimmed millions in funds designated for tracking and treatment of 9/11 first responders.

The Treasury Department mysteriously started withholding parts of payments — nearly four years ago — meant to cover medical services for firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics treated by the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, documents obtained by The News reveal.

The payments were authorized and made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees the program. But instead of sending the funds to the city, the Treasury started keeping some of the money.

“This was just disappearing,” the program’s director, Dr. David Prezant, told The News. “This is the most amazing thing. This was disappearing — without any notification.”

Prezant said he was docked about half a million dollars each year in 2016 and 2017. Then it crept up to about $630,000 in 2018 and 2019. This year, Treasury has nearly tripled its extractions, diverting $1.447 million through late August, according to Prezant.

“Here we have sick World Trade Center-exposed firefighters and EMS workers, at a time when the city is having difficult financial circumstances due to COVID-19, and we’re not getting the money we need to be able to treat these heroes,” said Prezant, the FDNY’s Chief Medical Officer.

“And for years, they wouldn’t even tell us — we never ever received a letter telling us this,” he explained.

Has Bowler Hat Britain Become a Giant Criminal Enterprise

 

George Monbiot claims, when it comes to corruption, The City (as London is known) takes second place to no one.

When you connect the words corruption and the United Kingdom, people tend to respond with shock and anger. Corruption, we believe, is something that happens abroad. Indeed, if you check the rankings published by Transparency International or the Basel Institute, the UK looks like one of the world’s cleanest countries. But this is an artefact of the narrow criteria they use.

As Jason Hickel points out in his book The Divide, theft by officials in poorer nations amounts to between $20bn and $40bn a year. It’s a lot of money, and it harms wellbeing and democracy in those countries. But this figure is dwarfed by the illicit flows of money from poor and middling nations that are organised by multinational companies and banks. The US research group Global Financial Integrity estimates that $1.1tn a year flows illegally out of poorer nations, stolen from them through tax evasion and the transfer of money within corporations. This practice costs sub-Saharan Africa around 6% of its GDP.

The looters rely on secrecy regimes to process and hide their stolen money. The corporate tax haven index published by the Tax Justice Network shows that the three countries that have done most to facilitate this theft are the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. All of them are British territories. Jersey, a British dependency, comes seventh on the list. These places are effectively satellites of the City of London. But because they are overseas, the City can benefit from “nefarious activities … while allowing the British government to maintain distance when scandals arise”, says the network. The City of London’s astonishing exemption from the UK’s freedom of information laws creates an extra ring of secrecy.

The UK also appears to be the money-laundering capital of the world. In a devastating article, Oliver Bullough revealed how easy it has become to hide your stolen loot and fraudulent schemes here, using a giant loophole in company law: no one checks the ownership details you enter when creating your company. You can, literally, call yourself Mickey Mouse, with a registered address on Mars, and get away with it. Bullough discovered owners on the Companies House site called “Xxx Stalin” and “Mr Mmmmmm Xxxxxxxxxxx”, whose address was given as “Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Mmm, MMM”. One investigation found that 4,000 company owners, according to their submitted details, were under the age of two.

By giving false identities, company owners in the UK can engage in the industrial processing of dirty money with no fear of getting caught. Even when the UK’s company registration system was revealed as instrumental to the world’s biggest known money-laundering scheme, the Danske Bank scandal, the government turned a blind eye.

...Processing everyone else’s corruption is the basis of much of the wealth of this country. When you start to understand this, the contention by the author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano, that the UK is the most corrupt nation on Earth, begins to make sense.

These activities are a perpetuation of colonial looting: a means by which vast riches are siphoned out of poorer countries and into the hands of the super-rich. The UK’s great and unequal wealth was built on colonial robbery: the land and labour stolen in Ireland, America and Africa, the humans stolen by slavery, the $45tn bled from India.

 

The World Ahead

 

Expect the next few months, the next few years, the next few decades to be - tumultuous. 

The fires that ravaged a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos are a harbinger of a tsunami of migration in the years ahead as vast swathes of the world are rendered unviable, in some cases uninhabitable. 

We don't know how many. Some predictions speak of tens of millions, some hundreds of millions. One I ran across yesterday predicted 1.2 billion people leaving their homelands by 2050. In essence, no one really knows because no one knows what the future holds. 

20 years ago many would have laughed derisively at the suggestion that the Pacific rainforest could be swept by wildfires. It's right in the name - "rain"forest. I was flummoxed two years ago when wildfire spread through Washington State's Olympic peninsula. How could that be? That's how it is today.

In barely a month the EU and the UK will run onto the shoals of Brexit. Boris Johnson, whose Tory government is already reneging on some aspects of the agreement, says it'll be a good thing. The Irish can't see it. What they can see is a flare up of "the troubles" that plagued the Republic and Northern Ireland for generations. Scotland, meanwhile, watches warily, its finger on the trigger. Boris Johnson is a prime minister of great principle. He has so many he can effortlessly discard them in favour of others.

As the EU and the UK are still convulsing, Americans will select their next president, a new House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. It should be the ultimate electoral shit show. The Russians are meddling. The Chinese are meddling. So too, we're told, are the Iranians. It's said the Russians want Trump back, the Chinese want Trump gone. 

Four years ago people thought Trump would be laid low by the Access Hollywood tapes that had Trump talking about chasing married women and his amazing ability to just walk up to women and "grab them by the pu##y." What a deviant! Trump lost the popular vote but it wasn't enough to stop the Electoral College from appointing him president.

Now there are more audio recordings of Trump admitting that he deliberately misled the American public about the Covid-19 virus. A straight up admission of dereliction of duty. A choice that cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the lasting injury of vastly more. Trump even invited his faithful supporters to flock to crammed airport hangars for rallies where they mingled, shoulder to shoulder, no masks for hours.

53 days until the election. Will it really matter what Trump was caught saying by the time November 3rd rolls around? Will his base care? Will Trump's hunchback Renfeld, Attorney General Bill Barr, ride to the rescue announcing criminal indictments of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer? If the Trump campaign can't reverse the slide will they resort to other means to disrupt the election? The possibilities seem endless - and nauseating.

In a nation whose people are so angrily divided as America, what will ensue following the election? Will today's white nationalists, heavily-armed neo-nazis who brazenly infest the most peaceful protests, lose their minds if Trump loses his job? Will that be America's 21st century Fort Sumter moment? As a number of pundits are suggesting, is America already too broken to be fixed by a general election? 

These are just a few examples of life in this era of revolving emergencies. We seem deficient in the will or the ability to effectively, even rationally, respond to these perils. 

Will these emergencies slow down? Will we get some breaks that resemble what we used to consider normal? A chance to recharge our batteries, rebuild? I hope so. I think we all do.