EnMasse

[Hephaestion]

[Tehanu]

What exactly is a "professional" protester? Is there certification? An oversight body? Salary scale?

Anyway, the Cons are trying to spin this as an NDP plot and greatly relishing the opportunity for faux outrage and rhetoric, the NDP are denying any involvement, there are still mutterings about fake injuries, and in the meantime, climate change continues apace.

[elmateo]

Layton fails again. And he might wonder why youths turn to the Green Party - probably not actually.

I'm sick of the institutions of this country - the parliament, the parties, the media. They will do anything and everything to save their own legitimacy in the eyes of that all important baby-boomer generation, who for whatever stupid reason think everything is hunkydory and that "peace, order in good government" is a gold plated turd that is our political system. It is a generation that will side against their own children's future for a little less disruption in their immediate lives.

At fill the hill I saw youths, young families, and seniors. At every protest that is who I see. Were the most well off in our society - a generation that has voted for tax cuts and buying SUVs - "too busy working" on a saturday to care about the environment? Or where they like these journalists, politicians, and other lackies of the powers that be - more concerned about having the boat rocked and pretending that we live in a comfortable and well functioning society? I'm sick of it, truly am.

[fork]

[swirrlygrrl]

[elmateo]

Like a lobbyist or a Conservative Party member you mean? I seem to remember the Conservative party has a whole section of its website public to manufacturing dissent - and I have heard they paid for 'activist training' for their conservative campus groups. I'm sure lesson number one is "how to pretend you are 'one of them'".

I've now seen photographs of the Jeh Custer - at the exact same time that the CBC reported the video shows no blood - high resolution shots that clearly have the blood on his face. The CBC has lied. The video Evan Sulivan claimed wasn't clear enough to see the blood on his face - CLEARLY shows blood. They posted this video on their CBC website following several links. Their claimed no blood video IS low resolution and grainy.

Meanwhile the damage has been done and the Conservatives are now pretending the blood was fake. In this case, "allegedly faked" is once again being used to say "was faked" without any responsibility to the truth.

[elmateo]

[Senor Magoo]

[elmateo]

Exactly the rationalization that the NDP played. And its why I have no respect for them. They never risk anything for anyone but their party brand.

[swirrlygrrl]

elmateo, I can't find a single article quoting Layton throwing the protestors "under the bus". Unless by that you mean stating that the event wasn't organized by the NDP. Care to share some of these quotes that have you so upset?

[elmateo]

It is his inability to express any solidarity with them. The NDP is spending their time denying association. The bus is being driven by Conservative Party members, climate change deniers, and anyone else who wilfully wants to see these youths destroyed. The NDP is too 'rational' to put its image into the fire for anyone but the NDP. Thats the proverbial toss, and it is nothing new from this party.

[elmateo]

Worth watching ad from Moms against climate change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwrrikNeFZg

[elmateo]

Bloody nose gate and the distractions:
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ben-powless/2009/10/bloodynosegate-...

[Vundo Draxon]

[Raos]

[Hephaestion]

EFF to represent Yes Men in Chamber of Commerce lawsuit

[Tehanu]

Harper's skipping Copenhagen. Figures. Maybe he doesn't want to be personally presented with the Fossil Award, which I expect will be handed to Canada again.

[TS.]

I would think it is because Harper is highly aware that Canada's position provoked a walkout at the Bangkok preparatory negotiations, and he is unwilling to risk the media exposure of such a walkout that would ensue if he was there personally.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Raos]

And it's of course simply out of the question to avoid such negative publicity by having Canada not act like it's actively trying to win the Fossil Award.

[The Evil Twin]

Harpoon simply doesn't care - and he never did. Sure he pretended for a while when polls showed a lot of Canadians had the environment as one of their top priorities (and even had his flunkies Ambrose and Baird proclaim their belief in climate change) but the simple fact is that he never gave a shit or believed in the science. There was also his base in the oil patch that he was always beholden to. IMO what has happened is since his poll numbers have started rising again (not because of anything he's done but rather because the Count and his Libs have imploded - YET AGAIN) he simply figured "Fuck it. Why should I even pretend anymore? With the recession, the environment is no longer Canadians' top concern plus Ignatieff is as big a dud as Dion, I'm gonna win the next election.".
_________________
"Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it." - Stevie J. Harpoon

[Raos]

And the electorate is likely to let him get away with it.

[Tehanu]

Further developments ... looks like Harper's saying a bunch of illustrious leaders, including our own, are scuttling the possibility of signing an agreement before they even get there (assuming they're bothering to attend).

And Harper's still, not surprisingly, blaming developing countries.

[TS.]

Harper is so out to lunch. If you compare the positions of the developing countries and developed countries against the positions they took this time last year, developing countries have made 90% of the movement.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Raos]

But Harper is single-handedly responsible for that 10% of progress attributable to the developed world, right? ...right...?

Oh, unless 'movement' were to include the retrograde sort, then I could see Harper being considered responsible.

[Tehanu]

Obama is going to Copenhagen after all. Think that that might make Harper change his mind about attending? He's been waffling a bit recently.

[Tehanu]

HA! Less than 24 hours after Obama said he was going to Copenhagen, Harper has jumped on board. Predictable, or what.

[Hephaestion]

Naomi Klein to focus on climate controversies in new book

[Searosia]

I will be there....it's difficult to get accommodations, but you can find locals willing to go out of their way to house protesters from around the world. Maybe I'll get lucky and get the chance to be arrested for pieing Harper

It's amazing how unaware Europeans are on the oil sands...doing my part to change that.
_________________
Now is not the time for you Liberal fools, its time for a witch hunt. - Bloc Party

[TS.]

Hey! Long time no see, Searosia! And good luck in Copenhagen!
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Searosia]

Been travelling the globe TS...hard to keep linked into an online community (it's also almost 2am here in Edinburgh). Felt I needed to revisit given this link to Copenhagen...anyone else going to be in the region?

I just talked to someone who had a strong opinion on the disaster that is the seal hunt but didn't know what tarsands are. Bandwagon environmentalist, survival of the cutest...annoys the piss out of me.

I enjoy this...if Canadians have a national identity mainly based on what we are not (Americans except better because...), and the Americans have a global campaign to convince people their values are universal and nothing better will ever exist...what does that say about how stuck up we as canadians are?
_________________
Now is not the time for you Liberal fools, its time for a witch hunt. - Bloc Party

[Change]

Now it is the time to discuss the email leaks that got people questioning the seriousness of climate change..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/mon...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/nov/23/globa...


Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
_________________
What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach, so you get what we had here last week which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don't like it any more than you men.

[TS.]

Considering the number of e-mails that have circulated among IPCC scientists in the last twenty one years (the IPCC was established in 1988), it should be immediately obvious that whatever hacker is responsible has done some cherry picking. In all likelihood, those e-mails have been selected which, when read by themselves, paint the IPCC and the science supporting action on climate change in the worst possible light. It is not a coincidence that these e-mails were hacked out and published on the eve of the Copenhagen conference, just as the denial machine is ramping up into high gear in North America. Surely if they are going to be understood, they need to be read in their full context. I'm sure someone going through my twelve thousand-odd posts at EM could pull out a bunch that would make me look like a crazy person when read without their context.

The denialists (I won't call them "sceptics" because that is to bestow the respectable mantle of scientific scepticism on them) use the exact same tactics, and in many cases are the exact same scientists who were involved in the denial project around the addictive nature of nicotine in the last century. The denialists also come on the radio and make the most outrageously bald-faced lies, like a man from the "Friends of Science" (a tar-sands company funded [though they try to hide that fact] pseudo-science group out of the University of Calgary - no surprise there) who was on The Current a couple weeks ago and claimed that it was the oil companies who were pushing for stronger regulation of carbon emissions and that the environmental groups had been co-opted by big-oil. Another favoured tactic of the denialists is to cite "leading scientists" as if all scientific disciplines were equally relevant to the science of climate change. If I am being asked to choose between believing leading climatologists and, say, a leading cosmologist, on this issue I'll take the climatologist, thanks.

Denialists also make ridiculously fallacious arguments, like that we shouldn't believe the functional consensus in the relevant scientific communities because back in the middle ages the consensus was that the earth was flat. That particular claim is insipid and moronic on a fair few levels, the most obvious of which is that the claim that the earth was flat was never based on any science at all, simply the fact that unless you are at extremely high altitude the curvature of the earth is invisible, whereas the current consensus that humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases and especially carbon dioxide are causing an overall warming of the earth and will result in a substantial disruption of the earth's natural processes, is based on climatology, chemistry, physics, geography, geology, oceanography and biology among other disciplines.

There is no time to "reconsider the science". This is already the eleventh hour. If we delay substantial action much longer, it will be impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change. We are already seeing some of the effects, as deserts expand across the equatorial belt, especially the Sahara, the level of rainfall in many temperate areas has begun to careen radically between drought and flood and every year the northern polar sea-ice gets smaller and smaller. The Greenland icecap is beginning to melt, and since it is land ice that will flow into the ocean as opposed to sea-ice that was already displacing water, we will begin to see sea-level rise. Other glaciers and snow-packs are melting as well. Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, is expected to be snow-free within twenty years. Already, low-lying areas are seeing more and more severe floods. Venice is under water more days per year every year, and this will continue until the flood-gates project at the entrances to the lagoon are complete.

Reconsidering the science now will simply further delay the rollout of action, when the time to act is already ticking away. It is far better to act on what could, theoretically, turn out to be botched science, than to take years to reconsider the science (and don't kid yourself, it will take years given the scarce supercomputing resources needed to run full-scale climate models) and come too late the the conclusion that taking the time to reconsider the science took us past the point of no return.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Hephaestion]

[Hephaestion]

Starving polar bears turn to cannibalism

[Vundo Draxon]

Well, that hacker is brilliant. The timing is perfect. Nobody has the time to sort through every single one of those e-mails in order to provide accurate information on what remains after the cherry-picking has been done. That's not to say that the e-mails that have been picked aren't a cause for concern. It's just not relevant anymore because the question of what the actual truth is has been rendered moot. The consequences of the hacking incident will be measured entirely in how effective the anti-environmentalist spin machine is. It will cut down any real effort in the USA to introduce legislation that mandates emission reductions. It will embolden the flat-earthers everywhere to cut down on past regulations and commitments. Then in response China and India will want nothing to do with emission reductions whatsoever, as they will correctly perceive the West as insincere and ineffective at giving them one good reason why they shouldn't continue carbon-intensive development.

Yep, the hacker sure is brilliant. With one simple well-planned and expertly executed act he or she has dealt a massive blow to my confidence that we'll ever be able to stop the climate change juggernaut.
_________________
If you can read this, you've already lost the game.

[Maestro]

Well, Vundo, it's unlikely that it would be stopped in any case. All of the economic resources of world capitalism are arrayed against any attempt to limit their ability to exploit, and in the end they would just ignore the demands of people and governments.

I believe that was behind the recent paper of the Royal Society detailing methods of amelioration rather than methods of stopping. They took the unfortunate but probably realistic view that nothing was going to cause the heaviest producers of CO2 emissions to limit their output. Thus the only choice was to try and find ways to lessen or delay the impact.

I personally believe they were wrong to take that approach, but the only other option is to get right down to it and focus the fight on capital itself. Most, if not all, of the so-called green movement is unwilling to take up that battle, so the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

One only needs to read the publications of the right wing to see that for the last number of years they have spent most of their propaganda efforts in preventing any 'green' measures from being taken. This release of a handful of emails will do little to change the situation.

Meanwhile climate change continues apace, and the Easter Island syndrome comes ever nearer.

Woody Guthrie wrote a great song many years ago after seeing a dust storm in Texas. He described that storm as 'big as the ocean and black as thunder'. We should be singing it now.

The church it was jammed,
The church it was packed,
That dusty old dust storm it blowed up so black
The preacher could not read a word of his text
So he took off his specs and he took up collection, singing

So long, it's been good to know you
So long, it's been good to know you
So long, it been good to know you
That dusty old dust is gettin' my home
And I've got to be driftin' along...
_________________
On the wilds of the Drive

[Hephaestion]

[Hephaestion]

George Monbiot: The Urgent Threat to World Peace is … Canada

[Tehanu]

Yeah, I just came across that article on AlterNet. Thanks, Stephen Harper, thanks 38% or so of Canadian voters, we're now behaving so badly that the American left has started to notice. Sigh.

[TS.]

I think the American left is desperate to get the US itself off the hook. Frankly, Canada is only getting away with acting as badly as we are because Obama is also out to sabotage the talks. The US has taken a consistent position that they will not accept international oversight, the thing that makes binding targets binding. They have proposed instead something called "national schedules" in which a country would put forward a list of actions that it was willing to take, rather than putting forward a hard reduction target that it would meet. The US hardline has given Canada, and to a lesser extent Australia, the political cover they need to really do the work to wreck any potential deal. I was talking with my Climate Change Law professor on Monday and he was saying that in his mind the best reasonably possible outcome from Copenhagen now is collapse. He is more afraid that a very weak deal will come from Copenhagen, and provide the political cover needed for further inaction for the next ten years.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Rufus Polson]

Well, that's fine and all, but isn't Monbiot a Brit? So he's not actually part of the American left, and whatever they might be desperate to do can't really relate to his article. For that matter, the American left, the real left, has never been very shy about blaming the US for anything.

Fact is, while the US is certainly a bad actor on climate change, and they're bigger'n us and all, Canada under Harper isn't just following along dutifully but spearheading the push to scuttle all prospect of useful action. Heck, climate change is one of the few files where Obama has at least shown some desire to pursue a useful path . . . he's not going to, of course, because he's so used to caving to any hint of pressure from his bankrollers. But Harper is clearly on the side of that pressure rather than mitigating it.

[TS.]

I wasn't meaning to refer to Monbiot. I quite agree with him. But to an extent Canada has been a stalking-horse for the US. Harper acts really badly, and Obama gets to look like a climate-moderate in contrast.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[Rufus Polson]

Won't argue with that.

[Hephaestion]

Greenpeace ads featuring aged politicians in 2020 apologizing for climate change

[Raos]

Hah! As if Harper will apologize or admit they could have done something. It'll be just like the financial crisis, with 'nobody could have seen this coming' and 'Canada is already situated to whether this crisis better than most nations despite all our efforts to dismantle safeguards and accelerate the problem thanks to regulations previous governments enacted we're responsible for'.

[Cartman]

I am old enough to remember a time when even Conservatives pretended that we had an independent government. Jim Prentice has openly stated that we will do whatever the US does on climate change. So I ask, why the fuck do we even bother having a government if we are just gonna do what the US decides to do!? If this is the way it works, we might as well just save a tonne of cash by eliminating our "leaders" starting with that useless Senate.

[Maestro]

Excellent op-ed piece in the Globe & Mail today, written by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Andrew Weaver.

Homer-Dixon is at the University of Waterloo, and holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems in the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Andrew Weaver is a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria. He is also chief editor of the Journal of Climate published by the American Meteorological Society.

They answer four of the main arguments currently being used by climate change deniers. It sure is nice to finally have real scientists respond to the deniers, instead of the usual parade of commentators doing their 'yes it is, no it isn't' routine.

The four arguments they tackle are:

1. Global warming has stopped

2. Recent warming is mostly due to increased solar radiation.

3. The climate is always changing

4. Scientific uncertainty is so great we can't make firm decisions.

Here is a short quote that I think is the most important part of the piece.

[Hephaestion]

So, just before the Copenhagen cofab, Greenpeace protesters hung huge banners from the Parliament buildings to highlight the inaction of both the Harpokons and the Liberals. The uproar was instantaneous -- how had they done it? (The more important point, that Greenpeace was trying to highlight, has largely been ignored.)

RCMP to review parliamentary security after rooftop protest

[TS.]

I must say that I am really glad to see Greenpeace going back to direct action. It was a tactic that they had gotten away from for too long.
_________________
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[bshmr]

T'would appear that the RMCP is as competent in important areas as the government of the CPC + LP(C).