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Vote Strategically for the Environment
via Vote For Environment / Voter Pour l’Environnement.
This site wants you to vote strategically to avoid splitting the anti-conservative vote on the assumption that all things being equal, the conservatives are much worse for the environment than any of the other parties. This is not really how you want an election to be decided, but a party that represents the minority of Canadians should not get a parliamentary majority simply because of a flawed voting system.
I would heartily endorse a preferential ballot system for us. How does this work?
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters have one vote and rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes redistributed to the voters’ next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term “instant runoff” is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election.
Under this system, if you like the Green Party the best because of their environmental policies, but know they cannot win, you can still vote for them. Just have the liberals/NDP as the second choice. It is overwhelmingly likely that if you like the Green Party policies, you like the policies of the conservatives more than the policies of the liberals or the NDP. With our current system, that’s exactly what your vote will say. Your vote for a Green Party candidate in this election is essentially a vote for the Conservatives.
In the absence of the preferential ballot, or instant runoff voting, using web 2.0 methods to vote strategically is the next best thing, and a great idea!
You breathe in toxic chemicals too.
Behind a frigging pay wall, as usual! Kelly et al. argue in Science that hydrophobicity, the tendency to favor oil over water (to break it down to the simplest explanation) is not the only factor that explains biomagnification. The underlying theory used to be that compounds that can dissolve in water would swiftly degrade (either chemically or biologically) and not be of any concern to humans. Compounds like dioxins, PCB’s, DDT, etc. accumulated in fat tissue of aquatic animals and these were the compounds that would biomagnify through ingestion (eating!). Kelly et al. uncover another pathway that probably made every scientist go “D’uh”! – Apparently, chemicals animals breathe in can also bioaccumulate if they are not cleared efficiently by the lungs. So, air breathing cows, chickens and pigs can also cause significant bioaccumulation of certain compounds. Which ones? I guess you’ll have to pay to find out more, but this Scientific American article adds some context. Turns out, it is about 10000 chemicals, not all of them known to be harmful, but because they were never suspect, their metabolism is unknown.
Well, if anything, it will keep the biomonitoring folks busy for a while!
Chemical Consequences — 317 (5835): 165g — Science
Global regulators of commercial chemicals apply a scientific paradigm that relates the biomagnification potential of the chemical in food webs to the chemical’s hydrophobicity. However, Kelly et al. (p. 236; see the news story by Kaiser) show that current methods fail to recognize the food web biomagnification potential of certain chemicals. Certain chemicals do not biomagnify in most aquatic food chains, but biomagnify to a high degree in air-breathing animals, including humans, because of low respiratory elimination. Thus, additional criteria for evaluating biomagnification and toxicity in chemicals that biomagnify are required.
U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment – New York Times
A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities.
U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment – New York Times
Gee, I wonder why??
Blogged with Flock
Feds punt on Bisphenol A
By studiously ignoring all the subtle hormone disruption effects of bisphenol A and concentrating on easily observable neurological effects, the CERHR essentially does the industry’s bidding.
Some risk linked to plastic chemical – Los Angeles Times
A federal panel of scientists concluded Wednesday that an estrogen-like compound in plastic could be posing some risk to the brain development of babies and children.
Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found in low levels in virtually every human body. A component of polycarbonate plastic, it can leach from baby bottles and other hard plastic beverage containers, food can linings and other consumer products.
Culminating months of scientific debate, the decision by the 12 advisors of the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction — part of the National Institutes of Health — is the first official, government action related to the chemical. Their recommendation will be reviewed for a federal report that could lead to regulations restricting one of the most used chemicals.
The scientists ranked their concerns about BPA, concluding they had “some concern” about neurological and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children, but “minimal” or “negligible” concern about reproductive effects. The findings put the panel roughly in the middle — between the chemical industry, which has long said there is no evidence of danger to humans, and the environmental activists and scientists who say it is probably harming people.
For a detailed look at how bisphenol research has been corrupted by industry sponsored “focused counter research” – where the goal is to show no effects and the experiment is tiled to ensure this goal, read this excellent article in the The Public Library of Science Biology Open Source Journal. Note, because it is Open Access, you can actually read it without selling a kidney! Some highlights…
The moment we published something on bisphenol A, the chemical industry went out and hired a number of corporate laboratories to replicate our research. What was stunning about what they did,” vom Saal says with a mix of outrage and bemused disbelief, “was they hired people who had no idea how to do the work. Each of the members of these groups came to me and said, ‘We don’t know how to do this, will you teach us?’”
More…
The HCRA report, commissioned before Schwartz’s tenure, concluded that “the weight of the evidence for low-dose effects is very weak” [15]. Industry groups hailed the report as a comprehensive review by independent experts and quickly disseminated its findings. Yet the “comprehensive” report reviewed just 19 of 47 studies available in April 2002, and when it was published more than two years later, three panelists asked not to be listed as authors.
What the hell, just read the whole article, especially the bit about the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and its well documented industry shillness.
The key to understanding bisphenol research is to realize that it is a hormone disruptor that works at low doses. At high doses, normal toxicological testing doses that is, it floods the hormone receptors and slows down the receptor pathways. So, the usual technique of testing in rats and mice at high doses and extrapolating will not work.
The U.S Emperor's new edict on regulation
Wow, plutocracy-protectionary principle alert.
Chemical & Engineering News: Latest News – Changing The Rules On Regulations
A new directive from President George W. Bush to federal agencies adds layers of bureaucracy to the process of issuing regulations and gives the White House greater control over agencies’ rules. Critics say the directive, issued Jan. 18, will slow down regulation. They say it also shifts regulatory priorities, which were set by Congress in federal laws, away from protection of health and environment to economic rationales. Some industry groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, praise the directive. “It’s the first truly significant attempt by an Administration to hold federal bureaucrats to account and insist they act with discretion when imposing new and expensive burdens on businesses and consumers,” says William Kovacs, the chamber’s vice president of environment, energy, and regulatory affairs. Under the new directive, agencies can regulate only when they can demonstrate to the White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) that the free market is not producing the desired results of the rule, such as health protection. To show that a new rule is warranted, agencies must identify what economists call “market failures”—such as when an industrial sector with unfettered pollution sells its products more cheaply than it would have had it included the cost of pollution control into the price of its goods.
Sounds reasonable, does it not! All the good buzzwords thrown in there, “Cost-Benefit Analysis”, “Market Failure”, etc. But note that the burden of proof is on the regulating body to come up with a clearcut “proof” before passing regulation.
In addition, the directive requires each agency to have a presidentially appointed “regulatory policy officer.” The agency cannot begin work on a new rule—even one required by Congress through a law—until it gets a green light from its regulatory policy officer or unless the head of the agency gives approval.
The Emperor gets to appoint a viceroy to police the agency to ensure that no such regulation will get passed.
Note the modus operandi:
- Appoint lackey to head agency
- Appoint viceroy to oversee regulation
- Rewrite rules to increase power of executive over legislative
- Shift burden of proof away from the regulated to the regulators
- Slash budgets so regulating agencies cannot do the work adequately
- Hound competent employees out of the agency
- Routinely bash said agency as an example of “big government”. Repeat steps 4-7 as often as necessary to ensure “success”
Banana republic, indeed.
Recycling better than landfilling even to China
Sending old newspapers and plastic bottles 10,000 miles for recycling in China produces more carbon savings than landfilling it in Britain and making new goods, reveals a study from the government body charged with reducing UK waste.In the last 10 years annual exports of paper, mainly to India, China and Indonesia, have risen from 470,000 tonnes to 4.7m tonnes, while exports of old plastic bottles have gone from under 40,000 tonnes to half a million tonnes.Now the counterintuitive conclusions of the report from the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap) suggest that the advantage of recycling over landfilling is so great that it makes environmental sense to ship waste right round the world if it can be used again.
One of the issues with carbon footprint calculations like these is that they are very dependent on the assumptions made and the calculations used. So, without going through the study line by line, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it is good to know that sending recycling waste many thousands of miles at least does not result in increased resource use. However, the environmental justice implications are still weighted against the receiving country, especially in the recycling of toxic electronic waste. This particular study only dealt with plastic and paper, so the toxic implications were fewer.
Of course, reducing the stuff you use and reusing your stuff always beats recycling, oh ye iphone lusters, let your old phone die first!