Will Northern Ireland and Scotland Say "Adios"?

Even Northern Ireland's unionists are losing heart after England's decisive Conservative victory in yesterday's elections.  The massive blow also has Scotland prepping for another sovereignty referendum.

Irish Times writer, Denis Bradley, says it's time for Northern Ireland to demand a new deal from Westminster.

From this side of the Irish Sea, the decision that England has made (not Scotland), may seem irrational, narcissistic and immature but even if the choice they have made is all those things and more, it is theirs to have, theirs to live with, theirs to celebrate or regret in the future. 

The election has confirmed that England is divided; elated and depressed in near equal measure. The country faces a long period of negotiation about its relationship and its trade with the EU, including Ireland. It will have to reengage with the SNP in Scotland in deciding future relationships; with an SNP who, in relative terms, had an election result that is even more impressive than what the Conservatives had. A second independence referendum for Scotland is firmly back on the political syllabus. 

The new government and especially Boris Johnson will have to tread carefully with the unionist community in Northern Ireland, who are psychologically coming to terms (once again) with the reality that England had no difficulty in betraying them.

...Brexit has propelled us back to the future. The fundamental issues that were present almost a hundred years ago when Ireland fractured into six and twenty- six counties are again seeking attention and resolution. Those fundamentals of identity and sovereignty are the same but the soil that they are embedded in has changed radically.

It's no wonder the unionists are losing heart. Their new prime minister, when pressed on the point a couple of years ago, did say that losing northern Ireland, if need be, was a price he'd be ready to pay to achieve Brexit.

Another Win for FPTP. Another Body Blow for Liberal, Representative Democracy.

Boris Johnson won a decisive victory in yesterday's British elections. The Tories marched to a massive majority leaving the opposition Labour and every other party a smoking hole in the ground.

First Past the Post triumphed again.

BoJo won a powerful majority in the House of Commons - on a minority of votes cast. A majority of Britons (I'm going to miss that word) supported parties that backed a second referendum. The will of the British people was to stay in the European Union but FPTP put paid to that democratic expression.

As Irish Times celebrated columnist, Fintan O'Toole, put it this morning:

A line from the old gambler’s lament takes a whole new twist: “Wherever I roll the dice/ The blues run the game.”

Who needs the "consent of the governed" when you can rely on vote-rigging First Past the Post?

p.s. I'm back, for now. My computer, like the newly elected prime minister of Britain, remains deeply unstable.

Well, We're Killing the Atmosphere but We Can Do Better. How About the Oceans?

We usually think of climate change as what happens to us on dry land. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, severe storm events, that sort of thing. We rarely think that most of the impacts of global warming are swallowed up by the seas that comprise 70 per cent of the Earth's surface.

The oceans take most of the heat (you would be frying without them) and they absorb most of the carbon from the atmosphere. But why not hit them when they're down? I know, let's strip the oxygen right out of them. Fish, who needs 'em?

Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with “dead zones” proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned. 

Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were at particular risk, scientists said, with many vital ecosystems in danger of collapse. Dead zones – where oxygen is effectively absent – have quadrupled in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature presented the findings on Saturday at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where governments are halfway through tense negotiations aimed at tackling the climate crisis.

Farmers often tell us that they're stewards of the land. Land maybe but not the water. That's where they dispose of their excess agricultural chemicals - the fertilizers, the herbicides, the pesticides. That's the blue-green algae blooms that now poison Lake Winnipeg, Lake Erie and many other rivers and lakes. It's the massive dead zone in the Gulf that pours out of the mighty Mississippi.

Some ocean areas are naturally lower in oxygen than others, but these are even more susceptible to damage when their oxygen levels are depleted further, the report’s authors said. Species that can more easily tolerate low oxygen levels, such as jellyfish, some squid and marine microbes, can flourish at the expense of fish, upsetting the balance of ecosystems. The natural oceanic cycles of phosphorus and nitrogen are also at risk. 

The world’s oceans are already being overfished, and assailed by a rising tide of plastic waste, as well as other pollutants. Seas are about 26% more acidic than in pre-industrial times because of absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with damaging impacts on shellfish in particular. 

Low oxygen levels are also associated with global heating, because the warmer water holds less oxygen and the heating causes stratification, so there is less of the vital mixing of oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor layers. Oceans are expected to lose about 3-4% of their oxygen by the end of this century, but the impact will be much greater in the levels closest to the surface, where many species are concentrated, and in the mid to high latitudes. 

Intensive farming also plays a major role. When excess artificial fertiliser from crops, or manure from the meat industry, runs off the land and into rivers and seas, it feeds algae which bloom and then cause oxygen depletion as they decompose.

When we speak of a climate emergency it's invariably in the context of greenhouse gases and atmospheric warming. We don't include the environmental devastation we inflict on our lakes and rivers and oceans. We go on about desertification and the degradation of our farmlands while ignoring that the main source of protein for the world's poorest 70 per cent is fish. And, what we don't kill off with our aquatic emissions we ravage with our industrial fishing fleets. That's already playing out in all sorts of ways?

Those Somali pirates who seize freighters off the Horn of Africa? They used to be fishermen - until the giant fishing fleets moved in. We took their sustenance. Says who? I heard that from the mouth of a Danish frigate captain on an anti-piracy patrol.  He had a hard time condemning those pirates.

Is This an 'Assault Rifle'?

Depicted above is the venerable 'saddle gun' the Winchester 1873. I'm a fan of lever-action carbines. They're handy in the field. A reasonable hunting rifle but even better if you're walking through bear or cougar or wolf country.

They don't come with 30-round mags. Some, like the Winchester, have a tube magazine under the barrel that, depending on the calibre and configuration, can carry five to eight rounds. My Browning manages one in the chamber and four rounds in the magazine.

Is it an assault rifle? It's not semi-automatic. It's more like a cross between a bolt-action rifle and a semi-automatic. Especially with the Browning's short-throw lever and trigger mechanism, you can get rounds out pretty quick, a lot faster than the usual bolt action. It can make all the difference if a cougar decides you're on the menu for dinner tonight and you need that second or third round to change its mind before it closes the distance.

Today is a solemn day on which we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal.  That murderous lunatic carried a Ruger Mini-14.

In this configuration, the Mini-14 is called a "ranch gun." Good for taking down varmints, wild hogs, that sort of thing.  However, it has a Jekyll and Hyde cousin, what Ruger calls its "tactical model."

Suddenly the ranch gun looks a lot like your typical assault rifle, "black gun." It is sporting a nylon stock, pistol grip, high-capacity magazine, picatinny rail for mounting military-style optics, even a muzzle brake.  Looks way more menacing than the ranch gun above it, doesn't it? Then again, all that add-on gear is intended to replicate this, the "budget friendly" Bushmaster, an AR-15 knock off.

I don't know where we should draw the line on these things. There's obviously no need for "black rifles" or what they connote. But you still have to find that line. Where, how?

Today, like every December 6th for the past three decades, is a day on which we tend to get emotional about the highly charged problems of gun control, man on woman violence. When emotions run high we tend to simplify issues, think in absolute terms, reject complexities and look for quick fixes. Therefore I invite you to read another perspective on assault weapons from SFU professor emeritus, Gary Mauser, a criminologist who has studied firearms legislation. He argues that assault weapons aren't the problem and that popular concerns are misplaced.  Read it and then make up your own mind.

Conspicuous by Its Absence

There was a glaring omission in yesterday's Throne Speech. One word that never crossed Ms. Payette's lips - "emergency." Isn't that curious? Like a growing number of nations, our government just a matter of months ago proclaimed a climate emergency to exist in Canada.

Emergency is a word that conveys something dire, an urgent threat. Emergencies go to the very top of the priority list. That's because they're emergencies. When your house catches fire that becomes more important than mopping the floors or washing the car or cutting the lawn. When you're in an emergency you do what you must, not what you may or may not feel like, but what the emergency demands.  The fire sets your agenda, not the weeds in the flower beds.

So, what about our emergency? What emergency? What would be the logical measures we might expect if our government considered climate change an emergency threatening Canada and the Canadian people?

Would the government, already running substantial deficits, be promising tax breaks? Who cuts taxes in a period of emergency? No, of course not. In an emergency you marshal your resources, you mobilize your people, you harness your industry to do what you must.

In an emergency you try to avoid doing things that make matters worse. You don't squander your resources on annual subsidies to the world's most profitable industries, the fossil energy giants. You don't pretend to cut emissions at home while doing your utmost to ramp up emissions overseas. That's what you call counter-intuitive. The more vulgar of us have a different term - horse shit.

...while the Government takes strong action to fight climate change, it will also work just as hard to get Canadian resources to new markets, and offer unwavering support to the hardworking women and men in Canada’s natural resources sectors

I don't dispute that we're in a grave emergency. That much is unquestionable. While it obviously has made no impression on our government, the latest report from the Potsdam boys - Rockstrom, Schellnhuber, et al - was jarring. They warned that we have probably already triggered six or more major climate tipping points. We have awakened the Sleeping Giant, nature itself. Now nature is actively adding its considerable heft to man-made climate change and its just getting started. We used to have a term for that. What was it? Oh yeah, we called it "runaway climate change." Runaway as in beyond our control, irreversible. Emergency.

Mr. Trudeau has declared, promised, vowed that Canada will be carbon-neutral by 2050. As if. One thing this prime minister has demonstrated is that he's a windbag, a regular Janus. He's a man not to be taken at his word.

Tucker, Mr. Trump Isn't Going to be Happy About This.

Where is Michael Cohen now that Trump needs a man with his skills set? Oh, that's right. He's in prison.

With world leaders caught laughing behind Trump's back, the last thing he needs for Christmas is a return visit from former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal.

Only Karen is back, thanks to a careless remark by FOX loudmouth, Tucker Carlson, who claimed she “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money.”

McDougal has filed suit in a New York state court for defamation. FOX has said it will vigorously defend the claim.

The former playmate has dished the dirt on Trump in lurid detail. She even said that the impassioned couple shagged in Trump's apartments in Trump Tower while Melania was off somewhere recovering from the birth of their son, Barron. Nice touch, Don.

With a disastrous NATO summit behind him, the Americans backing out of the UN climate accord, Congress about to impeach his narcissistic ass, and his poll numbers flagging, a rehash of his affair with Karen McDougal might just drive Trump to despair.

This Sounds Crazy But, Hey, It's Climate Change

Few know the reality of climate change better than the insurance industry. Insurers have to sell policies. If they don't, they put themselves out of business. They have to set premiums large enough to cover anticipated claims while still making some profit. They've got teams of actuaries whose only job is to work out risks.

Places like California are an insurer's nightmare. Homeowners there are unusually vulnerable to wildfire losses (except in the rainy season when those fire swept areas are susceptible to mudslides).

So what to do? A lot of insurers would like to stop incurring these worsening risks. They've been pulling coverage in the more fire-prone areas. That gets the homeowners upset. The homeowners get the politicians upset. It's the actuarial "circle of life."

On Thursday, however, California took the highly unusual step of banning the practice, a decision that exacerbates the insurance industry’s miscalculation of the cost of climate change. 

The new policy imposes a one-year moratorium, preventing insurers from dropping customers in or alongside ZIP codes struck by recent wildfires. The moratorium covers at least 800,000 homes around the state. The state has also asked insurers to voluntarily stop dropping customers anywhere in California because of fire risk for one year. 

“People are losing insurance even after decades with the same company and no history of filing claims,” Ricardo Lara, California’s insurance commissioner, said in a statement. “Hitting the pause button on issuing non-renewals due to wildfire risk will help California’s insurance market stabilize and give us time to work together on lasting solutions.”

A widespread problem.

In a survey of 27 state insurance regulators this year, the consulting firm Deloitte found that just four states said their insurers were “fully” or “largely” prepared to respond to the risks of climate change. The danger of insurers being overwhelmed by worsening natural disasters “is very real,” Deloitte wrote in its report.

...After two years of extreme losses, it is clear that California’s insurers are struggling to prepare themselves for a new era of accelerating climate risk, according to interviews with insurance executives, academics and regulators. New research shows that the wildfires of 2017 and 2018 alone wiped out a full quarter-century of the industry’s profits. Last year’s Camp Fire was the costliest disaster anywhere in the world that year, according to the insurer Munich Re.

In 2018, the giant German re-insurer warned that increasing losses could cause insurance premiums to become unaffordable for many homeowners.

Ernest Rauch, Munich Re's chief climatologist put it bluntly:

“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,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. “Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.” 

Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order. 

“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,” he said. 

Munich Re’s insurance cover in hurricane-prone regions such as Florida is already higher than in northern Europe, by an order of magnitude. 

This has a variety of impacts on the real estate markets. Soaring insurance costs lower property values. New buyers or anyone else needing mortgage financing will get turned down by lenders unless they maintain adequate insurance coverage.  Money they have to pay insurers is money they don't have available to pay the people trying to sell their homes. Worse yet, if your property becomes uninsurable it can become almost worthless. Most people's homes are their biggest asset. Oh dear.

Melania's Delicate Sensibilities

She's America's 'first lady' and, boy, is that a tough gig.

Melania Trump went after impeachment hearing witness, law professor Pamela Karlan, who told the Congressional committee that Trump could "name his son Barron but he cannot make him a baron." That was too much for Melania.

This is the same Melania who apparently wasn't too worried about the impact on her son when it came out that his daddy had unprotected sex with a porn star or shagged a Playboy playmate in their Trump Tower home while mom recovered from birthing the sprog.

I don't think young Barron is going to be too scarred by professor Karlan's quip. It's his dad that'll do that job on him. Look how screwed up his other kids are today.

Relapse. They're Back to "Rocket Man" and "Dotard"

Hmmm, nice hair!

Maybe it's just another lovers' tiff. It began when the Mango Mussolini revived 'rocket man' when referring to North Korea's Kim Jong-Un. That got up Kim's backside and he fired right back.

A senior member of the North Korean government has again described Donald Trump as a "dotard" after the US President revived the war words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by calling him "Rocket Man." 

Choe Son Hui, North Korea's First Vice-Foreign Minister, was quoted by North Korea's state news agency as saying the foreign ministry "can not repress displeasure over the utterances made by President Trump inappropriately at the most sensitive time." 

Choe added: "If any language and expressions stoking the atmosphere of confrontation are used once again on purpose at a crucial moment as now, that must really be diagnosed as the relapse of the dotage of a dotard."

The dotage of a dotard.

Kim has said that Pyongyang is preparing a Christmas gift for the Cheeto Benito but just what they'll be sending depends on whether Trump is naughty of nice.

What Happens When You Unleash a Pop Culture Columnist on a NATO Summit?

I'm not sure but, whatever it is, it's refreshing. Hanna Jane Parkinson brings her pop culture perspective to the sometimes tumultuous NATO summit.

The last time a group of underachievers with an increasingly shoddy commitment to defence stayed at a “luxury resort” in Watford, it was the England football team. On Tuesday, the leaders of the Nato nations arrived to celebrate the alliance’s 70th birthday. Seventy, coincidentally, is about the average age of the leaders.

Conversation at the mini-summit included how to mess up the Syria situation further, while conversation later at Buckingham Palace, behind Trump’s back, was about how awful he is. Now, I’m no fan of Trump, but watching Justin Trudeau instigating this gossip session leaves you with the impression he is definitely the guy who screengrabs your comments in the WhatsApp group and shadily shares them with others.

It's a fun take on an otherwise dreary and stodgy event, even if Justin can't help stepping in the mud puddles. Enjoy.

25th - That's the Silver Anniversary, Isn't It?

The 25th anniversary is a big deal. It's a milestone, isn't it? Family, friends, everybody celebrates someone's 25th.

The global community of nations is marking a 25th anniversary event in Spain right now but there doesn't seem to be much celebrating. Maybe that's because on this, the 25th UN climate summit, there's not much to celebrate.

After a quarter century of deeply shared concerns and solemn promises, man-made greenhouse gas emissions have reached an all-time (for now) high level. Atmospheric GHG loading is far higher than ever in the history of mankind.

After a quarter century, we're told those GHG emissions are only going up for at least the next twenty years.

After a quarter century, scientists (the best of the lot) are warning that we may have triggered so many tipping points that we might have crossed the point of no return. Nine identified tipping points have already gone "active" and present an existential risk of a cascade.

After a quarter century of feigned sincerity, Canada has just restarted construction of the climate-wrecking Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline intended to flood world markets with the worst ersatz petroleum on the planet, bitumen.

How's that for a Silver Anniversary?

When the Saudis Can't Break Even on Oil...

Saudi Arabia is sitting atop the world's greatest reserves of light, "sweet" crude. That's the really valuable stuff you just pump out of the ground. No need to dig or boil it out. Doesn't have to be diluted, heated or pushed through pipelines at high pressures.

Saudi oil is pretty much the opposite of high-carbon, high-cost, low-value bitumen, the Athabasca sludge, the crap that Ignatieff boasted was the "beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century." We chose not to construct refineries capable of processing bitumen, creating a foreign "buyers' market." In the global oil markets, we're the poor cousin.

We may be in the tar pit basement but we're not alone. Even the Saudis, with their great oil bounty, are losing money.



If the Saudis, with their low-cost, high-value conventional crude oil are losing money, what do we expect from high-cost, low-value, unconventional bitumen?

The Face of the Petro-State

America's Taylor Energy is an object lesson in how petro-states succumb to a toxic, climate-wrecking industry.

The story begins in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan toppled a Taylor Energy oil drilling platform. 15 years later that well is still leaking. 70,000 gallons of crude a day, every day. It has leaked more oil than the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Critics say the lack of action by Taylor and the federal agencies that oversee offshore drilling is a result of a self-regulated Wild West industry that’s allowed to under-report spills while trying to shun responsibility to contain or clean up leaks.

The company says it has done everything possible to stem the flow of oil and that it should no longer be held accountable for the leak. 

Costs are extreme, and the technology needed to fix the massive leak does not yet exist, the company has argued in court.

Polluter pays? Well, not so much. And it seems the people of Alberta stupidly imagine their fossil energy companies will foot the bill for the quarter 'T'rillion dollars it will take to clean up the Tar Sands tailing ponds and those countless thousands of orphan wells.

Standing Up To a Thug

Donald Trump's efforts to break Iran have suffered another setback.

It's called Instex, the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges.  Think of it as a blockade runner that uses currencies other than the US dollar to circumvent Washington's trade sanctions against Tehran.

Originally set up by the UK, France and Germany, Instex has now been joined by Belgium, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Instex is the carrot to Donald Trump's stick. It presents the promise of regularizing trade provided Tehran first returns to compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.  Will it be enough to draw Iran back into the fold? No one knows.

The "Age of Fire" - It's Here

You have to work really, really hard not to see it, this Age of Fire. You have to be really, really young not to remember a world where this wasn't normal.

Wildfires are a new reality from the tropics extending well inside the Arctic Circle.  Some of them are deliberate. Brazil's rightwing nutjob, Bolsonaro, has looked the other way as settlers torch the Amazon. In Indonesia, the jungle forests are being burned off to clear the land for palm oil production. Most of them, however, are wildfires, a knock-on effect of man-made warming.

What you're seeing now is just a preview of what awaits our children and grandchildren. It is their future or at least one part of it. It is our legacy.

I won't quote from it at length but this article from The Guardian reveals the scope of what we have done to our younger and future generations. It is beyond grim. It is sobering. I urge you to read it.

What the article brings home, however, is that mankind is now in a war for survival, a war that pits us and our hopes for a viable future against some very well connected, very powerful arsonists out to burn it all down.

Most governments continue to move at glacial pace and turn a blind eye to the nine other mega-threats threats menacing humanity. Why? 

Because a worldwide counter-revolution is under way, intended to paralyse action on climate, environmental loss, extinction, toxic air water and food. It is financed by “dark money” from a terrified fossil fuels sector through shady institutions. It pours hundreds of millions of dollars into global propaganda to discredit climate and environmental science, seduce government and deceive the public. 

More sinister still is the growing control of the fossil fuels lobby over governments and the world media – not only in floundering western democracies, but also Russia, China, Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia.

Now a new UN report says fossil corporates plan to ramp up carbon emissions 50% to 120% by 2030 beyond the limit for a safe human future (1.5C degrees). Despite the renewables boom, fossil infrastructure investment has rebounded in 2019 after three years of decline, the International Energy Agency says. On the face of it, the fossil lobby has turned the tide.

There are only three motives to so hazard civilization: greed, malice and ignorance. Either the returns are so great that fossil executives are willing to cook their own grandchildren, or they are blind to the risks. Since these are technical people, the latter does not ring true: oil majors like Shell and ExxonMobil have revealed in court they understood exactly what they were doing to the planet for nearly 50 years. Ignoring it, they then sought to deceive humanity while ramping up carbon output. 

The world is dividing into two opposing movements: the concerned “survivors” – the young, the old, the wise, the educated, the informed and the pragmatic – and the cynics backing the very global system that will precipitate collapse. 

Some scientists’ estimates for how many lives collapse will cost range from 50%-90% of the human population. The number is not knowable because human behaviour, as war, cannot be foretold. The process starts with famines and water crises, both already in evidence, leading to refugee tsunamis and multiplying conflicts.

These forces and their political collaborators, our elected Quislings, are bringing the word to the cusp of collapse.

It is time to speak the unspeakable. 

Without urgent action to terminate fossil fuel use, return the planet to a state of ecological health and address all 10 mega-threats in an integrated way, our worst fears will become our fate. Collapse becomes inexorable. 

Doing nothing or too little sentences humanity to collapse – economic, societal, even existential. It is time to discuss this, openly, honestly, truthfully.

This is a fight for survival and you have to pick sides. No more wishy-washy nonsense about pipelines promising a Green Nirvana. That's horse shit and we all know it. You know it. You can see it. You can smell it in the air, even gag on it. You can't escape it.

Mark Carney - UN Climate Envoy

Ex-governor of the Bank of Canada, outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney is to be appointed the UN's special envoy on climate action and climate finance.

Speaking at a news conference ahead of a climate summit that opens in Madrid on Monday, [Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres described Carney as "a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate." 

Carney, who is due to step down as head of the Bank of England in January, has urged the financial sector to transform its management of climate risk, and led various international initiatives to improve supervision and disclosure. Carney also served as Bank of Canada governor from 2008 to 2013. 

Guterres warned that not enough was being done by world leaders to combat climate change and called for action. 

"For many decades, the human species has been at war with the planet and the planet is fighting back ... we must stop our war against nature and science tells us that we can do it," said the UN chief. 

"The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is releasing its state of the climate report at this conference and its findings are clear. The last five years have been the hottest ever recorded, sea levels are the highest in human history, ice caps are melting at unprecedented speeds and the oceans are becoming more acidic with all its consequences," he added.

I'm certain of one thing. This will be the toughest job Carney has ever tackled.

What's More Dangerous - Climate Change or Our Political Leadership?

A recurring theme on this blog has been the precipitous decline in political leadership in Canada and many other nations during the neoliberal era.

Professor, historian and celebrated futurist, Yuval Harari, addresses this collapse in his book, "Homo Deus." He writes of governance falling ever further behind technology and losing its way, the reins of power slack in atrophied hands.

In the coming decades it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies - and our bodies and minds too - but they are hardly a blip on the current political radar. Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don't understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Here traditional democratic politics is losing control of events and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future.

Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don't understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone. In Britain voters imagine that power might have shifted to the EU, so they vote for Brexit. In the USA voters imagine that 'the establishment' monopolises all the power, so they support anti-establishment candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone. Power will definitely not shift back to ordinary voters if Britain leaves the EU, nor if Trump takes over the White House.

Fear Not an Era of Authoritarian Rule.

In science-fiction films ruthless Hitler-like politicians are quick to pounce on new technologies, putting them in the service of this or that megalomaniac political ideal. Yet flesh and blood politicians in the early 21st century, even in authoritarian countries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea, are nothing like their Hollywood counterparts. They don't seem to be plotting any Brave New World. The wildest dreams of Kim Jong-un and Ali Khamenei don't extend much beyond atom bombs and ballistic missiles: that is so 1945. Putin's aspirations seem confined to rebuilding the old Soviet bloc, or the even older tsarist empire.  

Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early 21st century politics is bereft of grand visions. Government has become mere administration. It manages the country but it no longer leads it. Government ensures that teachers are paid on time and sewage systems don't overflow, but it has no idea where the country will be in twenty years. 

To a certain extent, this is a very good thing. Given that some of the big political visions of the 20th century led us to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Great Leap Forward, maybe we are better off in the hands of petty-minded bureaucrats. Mixing godlike technology with megalomaniacal politics is a recipe for disaster. Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market. They thereby give politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom. Politicians find it convenient to believe that the reason they don't understand the world is that they don't need to understand it.

...It is dangerous to trust our future to market forces, because these forces do what's good for the market rather than what's good for humankind or for the world. The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything at all about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence.

Some people believe that there is somebody in charge after all. Not democratic politicians or autocratic despots, but rather a small coterie of billionaires who secretly run the world. But such conspiracy theories never work, because they underestimate the complexity of the system. A few billionaires smoking cigars and drinking Scotch in some back room cannot possibly understand everything happening on the globe, let alone control it. Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today's chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else but because they have very narrow aims. In a chaotic system tunnel vision has its advantages and the billionaires' power is strictly proportional to their goals. When the world's richest tycoons want to make another billion dollars they can easily game the system in order to do so. In contrast, if they felt inclined to reduce global inequality or stop global warming, even they wouldn't be able to, because the system is far too complex.

As Harari sees it, human civilization has reached the end of its rope. Nothing proves this better than the abrupt decline of our political leadership. There's a reason they can so often appear to govern as though we were still in the in the 80s. It reflects nothing so much as their inability to evolve beyond that. It is why we remain in the rut of neoliberalism long after it has failed us.

Consider Canada's recently proclaimed climate emergency. In an emergency, governments mobilize the nation. Its industrial base, its people are harnessed to the effort. It is a time, as Churchill put it, in which we must do what is required. It is not enough that we do "our best." What measures typical of an emergency, an existential threat at that, have you observed? Does the government's go-ahead for construction of a new and expanded bitumen pipeline count? No, if that emergency proclamation looks like a farce, that is because it is a farce, one in which, despite all the consequences for the future, we happily collude.

Harari's observation that, "democratic politics is losing control of events and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future," is a damning indictment of our leaders.  There is no vision and, without vision, there is no conception, no planning, no action.

I tried to make this point in a recent post asking whether we were going to fight climate change as ineptly as we fought the Taliban in Kandahar. The approach reveals close and worrisome parallels.  Our leadership is not in it to win. They're not even in it for the consolation prize, a somewhat survivable crash landing. They "have no idea where the country will be in twenty years."  No, they have an election in four years, monies to raise, campaigns to organize.

What can we expect from a school marm or his adversary, a summer-help insurance clerk? How did two visionless men of such meagre talent rise to lead our two dominant political parties? How did their parties choose them? Where has all the real talent gone?

Carbon Taxes - Too Little, Too Late Says Former Liberal Environment Minister

Former Ontario environment minister, Glen Murray, says it's too late to expect carbon taxes to do any meaningful good.

Glen Murray was the minister of environment in Ontario in 2017 when that province introduced its short-lived cap-and-trade carbon pricing system, which was killed off by the new Tory government just over a year later. 

Murray, who is now working as a clean tech entrepreneur, says carbon taxes will take too long to work, given how quickly the planet is warming. 

“If we had 40 years, 30 years, maybe that would work,” he said Wednesday.

“Do we have enough time for incrementalism as slow-motion pricing?” Murray asked. “The answer to that is no.” 

Murray said Canada has spent the better part of the last decade mired in political fights over whether carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems are acceptable and now has “run out runway” to give them a chance. 

He also said those battles have left politicians with a lack of willpower to set the price high enough to be truly effective. 

Meanwhile, international scientists say the world has to cut greenhouse-gas emissions almost in half by the end of the next decade to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Canada has so far pledged to cut them by about a third and the policies in place – or on the way – leave the country significantly shy of even that.

China, China, China

Judging by the number of reports on its website, the CBC appears to have realized that Canada has a China problem. See here, here, and here. As coverage goes, it's C to C- grade stuff, the pedestrian sort of thing we've come to expect from Mother Corp.

In Tuesday's NYT, columnist Thomas Friedman had a more interesting China piece. He argues that the Berlin Wall may be an artifact of the past but there's a new wall emerging, one that will partition America's sphere of influence from China's.

On Nov. 9, European leaders gathered in Berlin to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an anniversary worth celebrating. But no one seemed to notice that almost exactly 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, a new wall — a digital Berlin Wall — had begun to be erected between China and America. And the only thing left to be determined, a Chinese business executive remarked to me, “is how high this wall will be,” and which countries will choose to be on which side.

This new wall, separating a U.S.-led technology and trade zone from a Chinese-led one, will have implications as vast as the wall bisecting Berlin did. Because the peace, prosperity and accelerations in technology and globalization that have so benefited the world over the past 40 years were due, in part, to the interweaving of the U.S. and Chinese economies.

...Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson gave a speech here a year ago trying to kick-start that discussion. “For 40 years,” Paulson noted, “the U.S.-China relationship has been characterized by the integration of four things: goods, capital, technology and people. And over these 40 years, economic integration between the two countries was supposed to mitigate security competition. But an intellectually honest appraisal must now admit both that this hasn’t happened and that the reverse is taking place.”

That reversal is happening for two reasons. First, because the U.S. is — rightly — no longer willing to accept China’s unfair trade restrictions on importing of U.S. goods and its stealing of the intellectual property of U.S. firms — something we tolerated for many years before China became a technology powerhouse. 

And second, because, now that China is a technology powerhouse — and technological products all have both economic and military applications, unlike the toys, T-shirts and tennis shoes that used to dominate our trade — the two sides are struggling to figure out what to buy and sell from and to each other, without damaging their national security. 

The net result, argued Paulson, is that “after 40 years of integration, a surprising number of political and thought leaders on both sides advocate policies that could forcibly de-integrate the two countries across all four of these baskets.” And if that trend continues, “we need to consider the possibility that the integration of global innovation ecosystems will collapse as a result of mutual efforts by the United States and China to exclude one another.”

That, Paulson concluded, is “why I now see the prospect of an Economic Iron Curtain — one that throws up new walls on each side and unmakes the global economy, as we have known it.” Yikes!

Trump Plays the Huawei Card.

...China’s most important technology manufacturer and scores of its affiliates across the globe were blacklisted and could no longer buy parts from their major U.S. suppliers — such as Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Micron and Microsoft — without a special license. U.S. officials argued that Huawei was guilty of facilitating Chinese espionage — or would do so in the future if China’s government asked it to — and had engaged in fraud, technology theft and violations on U.S. sanctions against Iran.

However much justified, this move was the equivalent of China freezing out Apple and Microsoft. In was an earthquake in China’s tech lands. It “woke up everybody in China,” a prominent Chinese telecom executive told me. “We now have to think about this world differently,” the executive explained. “We need to build on a mix of our own technologies to be sure that we are safe. They totally underestimated what they have done.”

Lots of Chinese tech companies are now thinking: We will never, ever, ever leave ourselves again in a situation where we are totally dependent on America for key components. Time to double down on making our own. 

At the same time, U.S. manufacturers are saying to themselves: We’d better think twice about building our next factory in China or solely depending on a supply chain from there. 

The ripping sound you hear is the sound of two giant economies starting to decouple.

Look Who's Here - Thucydides, and He's Brought His Trap!

For some time I've been following China's economic ascendancy and the ripples emanating from it. There's a powerful neo-nationalism spreading across China at the popular level, the government level and especially throughout the officer class of China's fast-catching-up military.

If Hank Paulson is right and the economic ties that bind China and the United States are dissolving that could be a very dangerous event in China's economic ascendancy. It could energize a Thucydides Trap scenario, a term that refers to the far better than even chance that the displacement of a dominant power by an ascendant rival will result in war between them. Remember, this is a country that still craves revenge for its "Century of Humiliation" that has been observing National Humiliation Day since 1916.

For decades we've assumed that the tight integration of the US and Chinese economies would deter open conflict between them. What if....

Will Canada Fight Climate Change the Way We Fought the Taliban?

Canada, like most ISAF member nations, did a lousy job in Afghanistan. Harper said we were in it to win. We would drive the Taliban out - for good. We would transform Afghanistan into a democratic nation where the rights of women and children would be respected. We would never cut and run.

How did that turn out? The Talibs never left, not on our watch, not since. They've been taking control of more territory in that country than ever before. Now the United States is negotiating with them privately, without the Kabul government. Afghanistan has never overcome the dual scourge of tribalism and warlordism so toxic to democracy. The women and children? Well...  And, yes, we cut and ran.

Now we seem to be doing something quite similar in our supposed fight against climate change. How so?

We're falling back on efforts that are plainly gestural. We're not in it to win.

In Afghanistan that meant never measuring the commitment, force levels and such, to the challenge. We foolishly took over the Kandahar mission with a minuscule force, it's numbers somewhere between 10 to 20 per cent of what was needed to defeat the Talibs given the population of Kandahar. We had no choice but to become a garrison force, ceding control of the province to the bad guys at night and much of the day time when we didn't put in an appearance outside the wire. We would mount missions. When we did the enemy would fade away and wait until we went back to base. Whack-a-Mole.  When you're fighting an insurgency and you can't protect the civilian population, you lose. No surprise, we lost.

On climate change 'gestural' means ineffective measures that are disconnected from the enormity and urgency of the threat. We don't talk about what's coming, how soon, and what we must do to avert the worst possible outcomes.

We don't talk about the inadequacy of our emissions targets or why we're in no position to meet them.  Why not? We point to a $30 per ton carbon tax but we never talk about how much or how little good that might do. Why not? We're really dropping the ball on the mitigation side just as we dropped the ball in Kandahar. We want a blue ribbon for participation just like what they give kids at preschool track day.

We never, ever, but never talk about the other side of the coin - adaptation. We're like the little pig in the straw house as the wolf draws ever closer. We don 't talk about what's coming or what we can still do to weather the storms. Why not? We have the longest coastlines of any nation but we're not doing much if anything to prepare for sea level rise. Why not? We have this worsening wildfire problem that's spreading black soot and small particulate matter, the PM 2.5 stuff that embeds carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and heavy metals in our lungs but we're not talking about it. Why not? We have ocean acidification and aquatic heatwaves that spawn algae blooms and dead zones that threaten our fisheries but we're not talking about it. Why not? We have a wide range of threats to our domestic food security from droughts to floods, severe heatwaves, pest and disease migration and proliferation. We're not talking about it. Why not? 

Then there's the big one - our outdated, inadequate and decaying infrastructure, the circulatory system of our economy; bridges, roads, railways, sea and airports, electrical grids.  A lot of that was built in my late father's time. It was designed and engineered and constructed for a time that is now past, a gentler time. It was never designed to withstand the demands of our new climate. Replacing, repairing and upgrading our existing critical infrastructure could be the greatest public works programme in our country's history, not that far off from European reconstruction in the immediate postwar years. We're not talking about it. Why not?

Our approach to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation, is every bit as half-assed as was our commitment to the men and women we sent on a hopeless mission to Kandahar.

Why aren't we talking about this, all of it, in meaningful detail? I expect that's because talking about these things would reveal just how much trouble we're really in and both the enormity and urgency of the threats and what is required to at least blunt them. That's a conversation our leaders would rather put off for a future government to handle.