Obama and Harper, saving a tree

Byoliveridley

Canada hopes to achieve a North American climate-change deal with U.S. president-elect Barack Obama and will begin working on the file within weeks, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Wednesday.Meantime, officials told The Canadian Press the Harper government has been waiting for the departure of President George W. Bush to work with his successor on an integrated carbon market.While states and provinces have been cobbling together a patchwork of approaches, federal officials said they have been eyeing a continent-wide solution for some time.

globeandmail.com: Canada to seek climate deal with Obama

Interesting and potentially promising news. I have thought for a while that Canada would have no choice but to start some kind of emissions cap/trade or carbon tax, given the way the wind was blowing down south. Harper, for all his reliance on Alberta’s oil votes, realises that with or without his say, the country’s leading trading partner is going to impose a carbon tax (a cap and trade is a price on carbon, or a tax, semantics aside) on Canadian-US trade.

It is also interesting that this statement came out right after Obama’s election, and the foreign minister went out of his way to say that they were waiting for Bush to get out of the way. Nice cozying up, Harper, making up for all your stupid previous statements about Obama. But do not worry, this new emperor is more gracious than the previous one!

We are going to be living in interesting times, good ones, finally.

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    Colonialism: Environmental Edition

    Byoliveridley

    Does put recycling in context…

    Independent Online Edition > Environment

    Regardless of how carefully you separate your waste, there is a good chance a disposal firm will dump it all in together with other kinds of plastic trash and ship it to the developing world to be dealt with by a family of migrant workers earning a pittance. They will deal with the salad-bar container, the pistachio ice-cream container and the superfluous bag for carrots in your shopping basket in a variety of different ways – it may be recycled, it may become landfill or it may simply be burnt. Whatever happens, it is generally not a priority for the waste disposal company. Britain dumps around two million tonnes of waste in China every year, everything from plastic mineral water bottles to shopping bags and other forms of superfluous packaging from some of the country’s biggest supermarkets.

    Same for India as well. The article says that all of this “recycling” is illegal. But how do you hide 200,000 tonnes of plastic waste?

    Read the whole article, it is tragic. Some highlights:

    So too are the many and varied health complaints suffered by the local population, who risk multiple skin ailments and exposure to potent carcinogens as they touch the contaminated materials. Poisonous chemical effluents stream into their water supply, turning it black or lurid red, and studies by Greenpeace show that acid rain is the norm in this region. Children are prone to fevers and coughs. Their skin is often disfigured by the toxic plastic waste they have to process.

    A report by the University of Shantou on the town of Guiyu, another Guangdong recycling hub, showed that more than 80 per cent of local children suffer from lead poisoning.

  • Greenscanner: Or how cool is this!

    Byoliveridley

    Courtesy the grist, my favorite environment related website…

    GreenScanner

    This site is a public database of opinions about the environmental friendliness of various products. It has been designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices so you can use it at the food store. Type in a UPC code and hit “Go” to see what people think about the product (1 is bad, 5 is good). Then you can then add a comment and score of your own!

    This is a start. What we need (I was thinking about this making dinner yesterday) is an easy link between a product’s UPC and its Life Cycle Analysis, if it even exists…

  • Trade Agreements Create Pollution Havens

    Byoliveridley

    Interesting paper out of the Berkeley Global Economy Journal
    Trade Agreements and the Environment: An Industry Level Study for NAFTA
    Raymond MacDermott. Global Economy Journal Volume 6, Issue 3 2006 Article 3

    We find strong evidence of both the pollution-haven hypothesis and the positive impact of the NAFTA on FDI.  In addition, we find the trade agreement exacerbates the pollution-haven effect.  That is, the incentive to invest in countries with weak environmental regulations is greater under a trade agreement such as the NAFTA.  Surprisingly, stronger evidence of this effect is found in lower polluting industries than in higher polluting industries.

  • James Hansen disses the Tar Sands

    Byoliveridley

    James Hansen: Obama’s Canada trip defines our critical carbon moment | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

    The tar sands of Canada constitute one of our planet’s greatest threats. They are a double-barrelled threat. First, producing oil from tar sands emits two-to-three times the global warming pollution of conventional oil. But the process also diminishes one of the best carbon-reduction tools on the planet: Canada’s Boreal Forest.

    This forest plays a key role in the global carbon equation by serving as a major storehouse for terrestrial carbon – indeed, it is believed to store more carbon per hectare than any other ecosystem on Earth. When this pristine forest is strip mined for tar sands development, much of its stored carbon is lost. Canada’s Boreal Forest is also the reservoir for a large fraction of North America’s clean, fresh water, home to some five billion migratory birds, and some of largest remaining populations of caribou, moose, bear and wolves on the planet.

    Nothing more to say, except that he does a good job of connecting both the inefficiency of the extraction process, a carbon source, and the destruction of the boreal forest, the removal of a carbon sink. If carbon accounting was in place, the economics would not work. Harper knows this, hence all the aggressive PR to get ahead of the game.

  • Signs of the Rapture – Killer Algae

    Byoliveridley

    This time, it’s the killer algal bloom, to add to the dying bees and the dying fish.

    Algae killing birds, sealife in Calif. – Yahoo News

    A bloom of ocean algae that produces a toxic acid has sickened and killed hundreds of birds, sea lions and dolphins in California, environmentalists said.

    Birds and animals have been washing up on shores from San Diego to San Francisco Bay.

    In the past week, 40 birds have been taken to the International Bird Rescue Center in San Pedro with symptoms of domoic acid poisoning, which attacks the brain and can cause seizures.

    In previous seasons, the center might see seven birds a week, director Jay Holcomb said.

    “I have been doing this work for 35 years and I have never seen anything like this as far as the number of species affected, other than an oil spill,” Holcomb said Thursday.

    Domoic acid is produced by microscopic algae. Birds and sea mammals ingest the acid by eating fish and shellfish who dine on the algae.

    The algae population increases or “blooms” every year as the ocean waters warm but this year’s bloom seems early, extensive and “very, very thick,” said David Caron, who teaches in the biological sciences department at University of Southern California.

    “In five years of study I have not seen a bloom this large at this particular time of year,” Caron said. “It’s having an extraordinary impact on pelicans and many other species.”

    “There are conceivably thousands of animals being affected,” Caron said.

    domoic acidDomoic acid is a naturally occuring toxin from red algae. Increased nutrient loadings into the ocean, and warming ocean temperatures are both linked with an increasing incidence of this toxic “red tide“. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon every year, so it is hard to tease out human inputs and just plain ol’ natural variation. One more thing to keep an eye on, I guess.

    Statutory Disclaimer: I don’t actually believe in the rapture – it’s just a cheap rhetorical trick.