Now stop hoping, and get doing!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Press conference: 1pm CET, Frederiksholms Kanal 4, Copenhagen
Contact: Margaret Matembe, margaret.matembe@enviro-canada.ca, +45-23960186
Coverage: Click here, or click throughout press release for specific links
Videos:
     Canadian announcement (hi-res download)

     Ugandan response (hi-res download)

     Canadian retraction (hi-res download)

     Climate debt agents take responsibility (hi-res download)

More dream announcements coming soon! Come make your own or stay tuned at good-cop15.org.

Copenhagen Spoof Shames Canada; Climate Debt No Joke

African, Danish and Canadian youth join the Yes Men to demand climate justice and skewer Canadian climate policy

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – “Canada is ‘red-faced’!” (Globe and Mail) “Copenhagen spoof shames Canada!” (Guardian) "Hoax slices through Canadian spin on warming!" (The Toronto Star) “A childish prank!” (Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada)

What at first looked like the flip-flop of the century has been revealed as a sophisticated ruse by a coalition of African, North American, and European activists. The purpose: to highlight the most powerful nations’ obstruction of meaningful progress in Copenhagen, to push for just climate debt reparations, and to call out Canada in particular for its terrible climate policy.

The elaborate intercontinental operation was spearheaded by a group of concerned Canadian citizens, the “Climate Debt Agents” from ActionAid, and The Yes Men. It involved the creation of a best-case scenario in which Canadian government representatives unleashed a bold new initiative to curb emissions and spearhead a “Climate Debt Mechanism” for the developing world.

The ruse started at 2:00 PM Monday, when journalists around the world were surprised to receive a press release from “Environment Canada” (enviro-canada.com, a copy of ec.gc.ca) that claimed Canada was reversing its position on climate change.

[All links open in a new window]

“It isn’t.”

Ok, that was a bit short, but it’s true. The Copenhagen conference is an irrelevance, unless you are one of those kinds of people who like watching thousands of politicians rub shoulders and exchange platitudes, after which they attend a variety of meetings out of which will come precisely nothing that will have the slightest bearing on the future of the planet.

So here’s my promise:

If a watertight deal comes out of the two week conference that promises at least a net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (including deforestation), based on 1990 levels, by 2015; and a net global reduction, again on 1990 levels, of at least 60% by 2030 — then, and only then, will I shut down The Unsuitablog.

These figures are not just finger-in-the-air stuff; they are derived from the work of some of the finest climate scientists working today — those that care about the quality of their work rather than whatever funding they might receive from Corporation X. Funnily enough, it’s just those figures that will spell the end of the Industrial Machine because, except through some fundamental change in the entire global system of energy production and resource consumption, these cuts require the global economy to contract by the same amount.

No one attending COP15 Copenhagen would ever dare entertain the idea of a shrinking economy: there’s no profit in it, and who the hell would vote for it when we have all been told the most important thing we can have is a healthy fiscal system? More importantly, the corporations that run the industrial world will simply not allow it to happen; so it won’t.

My offer still stands. Who’s going to start the ball rolling?

Cast your minds back to 2006, when the UK Conservative Party (actually, still the Conservative and Unionist Party, for completists) snuffed out their “hand holding torch” logo, and switched to the “Green Tree” logo. It was to be a new dawn for the new green Conservative Party; an age of environmental respect and a new found compassion for the natural world, where all was once soaked in the ooze of corporate loving Tory malfeasance. The ecology was to be given (at least) equal billing with the economy; something that was drummed into the British public’s heads with the party’s press releases, and David Cameron’s rhetoric:

I believe that tackling climate change is a key part of my ambition for the Conservative Party to lead a new green revolution. Above all today, I want to recapture climate change from the pessimists. Of course it presents huge challenges. Of course the issues are complex. Of course it will require us to change. But when I think about climate change and our response to it, I don’t think of doom and gloom, costs and sacrifice.

I think of a cleaner, greener world for our children to enjoy and inherit.

The rhetoric hasn’t changed, at least from Tory Central Office – hell, you can buy a Green Tree Keyring, if you really want – but look more closely at Cameron’s speech even back in 2006 and you will see a few things that throw a dirty grey veil over the shiny green promises. The role of the market, is one such thing…

we understand the power of markets, and how they work. We know that markets will have a crucial part to play – internationally and nationally – in driving down carbon emissions and creating green, sustainable growth.

and then…

We have to liberate ourselves from the myth that we have to choose between protecting the environment and promoting prosperity…There’s a direct connection between environmental protection and wealth creation…We have to make it clear that we want, we need – and crucially, that we have the ability to achieve – economic growth and a sustainable environment; indeed that one supports the other.

Economic growth compatible with with environmental protection and sustainability; now where have we hard that before?

Miliband Poznan BBC Sun 13 December 2008

Ah yes, a prominent member of the party that David Cameron hopes to usurp. All reading from the same hymn sheet and preaching the Holy Gospel of Market Capitalism. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you cannot have a growing material economy without degrading the natural capital that sustains all life on Earth. Failure to recognise this is why it is so easy for politicians to push the growth agenda, proliferating the view that we can spend our way out of this mess.

Spend our way into oblivion, is more like it.

But all the time the corporations make deals behind the scenes — deals that will decide who benefits most from a Conservative government –The Conservatives continue to wax lyrical about their commitment to environmental care:

A Conservative Government will make Britain greener by tackling climate change and enhancing our environment.

We believe quality of life and environmental issues must be at the heart of politics – which is why we have pledged to improve Britain’s environment by reversing the decline in our biodiversity, improving urban green spaces, providing incentives to recycle and working towards zero waste.

Well, I say “wax lyrical”, but read on and you see that the agenda is dominated by waste and recycling, not reducing consumption or bringing people back into a deep connection with the real world (heaven forbid!). There is also a bit of that traditional Conservative colonialism creeping in, with the ominous phrases “our fish stocks” and “our marine habitats”, as though humans (or rather civilised, political humans) own the oceans.

Not to let personal agendas get in the way of doing work for the people is Shadow Environment and Rural Affairs Minister, Nick Herbert, a former director of the British BloodField Sports Society, and founder member of the Countryside Alliance, who suggested that “Lord Stern’s call for people to give up eating meat [to reduce greenhouse gas emissions] was totally irresponsible and damaging to our livestock industry”. Although, to give him his due, it seems that he is not in a political minority, as shown by Labour MP Jane Kennedy, who said: “In British sausage week we celebrate a varied diet. If it is a proposal that vegetarianism should save the world then I’m not sure it’s a world I want to live in.”

Well, stick a skewer up my arse and call me a kebab! I guess I’m in a living hell, then.

Further truths about Conservative Greenwashing have recently emerged, with the unsurprising revelation that prominent Tory members and writers are climate change sceptics

David Cameron is facing a growing challenge to his authority from senior members of his own party who say they have doubts about the Conservatives’ stance on global warming.

Leading figures including Peter Lilley, the former cabinet minister, Andrew Tyrie and Ann Widdecombe are openly questioning the political consensus on climate change.

And today David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary, warns in The Independent that the policy of tough targets to cut carbon emissions, supported by Mr Cameron, is “destined to collapse”. He criticises “the fixation of the green movement with setting ever tougher targets, in the face of failure to meet earlier promises”. He adds: “The ferocious determination to impose hair-shirt policies on the public – taxes on holiday flights, or covering our beautiful countryside with wind turbines that look like props from War of the Worlds – is bound to cause a reaction in any democratic country.”

Some Tory frontbenchers are also said to have private doubts about climate change. John Maples, the deputy Tory chairman, told the Commons last year that he no longer accepted the consensus on the issue. “I do not believe that the science is anything like as settled as the proponents of the [Climate Change] Bill are making out,” he said. He declined to comment yesterday.

Backbenchers were happy to speak out. Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, admitted he did not share Mr Cameron’s views on the subject, and warned that a Tory government would harm the economy if it took unilateral action to cut emissions.

Well, at least Philip Davies got one thing right: dealing with climate change will hurt the economy. Oh yes!

And it’s pretty obvious what the Conservatives will support if they have to make a choice between the Economy and the Ecology…

_____

N.B. The author does not vote any more

No surprises; no surprises at all. As the world’s “leaders” gear up to converge on the vapourware that is the COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Summit, their objectives seem to be diverging: different governments are being seen as wanting different things, with the less-industrialised nations pointing the finger at (giving the finger to?) the industrial world, essentially saying, “You made the mess, you clean it up!” Among the industrial nations, Canada has no intention of even pretending to do anything, Europe is wading around in a greenwashing miasma of its own making, and the USA doesn’t quite know what to do. The Independent, on Friday 6 November, put the situation like this:

British Government officials believe there is no hope of signing a legally binding climate change treaty in Copenhagen next month.

The positions of major world powers are so far apart that another year or even more may be needed to negotiate a world climate treaty, senior British sources said at talks in Barcelona, which end today.

Writing today for The Independent the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, also admits that a deal in Copenhagen is now unlikely. “The barriers to agreement on climate finance remain substantial,” he writes. “Even if countries agree the levels of finance, few will want to hand over money if they lack confidence in the means of delivering it.”

The development has disconcerted observers at Barcelona, where it has become clear over the course of this week’s talks that countries are still so far apart on how to act on climate change – with the American position the farthest from everyone else – that the most that Copenhagen can now produce is a “political” agreement on climate change, which would not be legally binding like the current climate treaty, the Kyoto protocol.

But yesterday’s frank admission, for the first time, that it might take another year or even longer to produce a proper treaty, after 10,000 officials from 192 countries have already spent two years working to a Copenhagen deadline, showed just how bogged down the negotiating process has become.

Although there are various stumbling blocks, there is no doubt that the continued lack of a serious American offer on cutting its greenhouse gas emissions and providing climate finance for the developing nations – the bill which might provide them is stuck in the US Senate – is the principle obstacle to progress. “Copenhagen is one of the most important meetings in human history. But the politicians seem determined to blow it,” said Joss Garman, climate campaigner for Greenpeace.

Leaving aside the Greenpeace comment for the moment, you would think that even the industrial nations are oceans apart; yet anyone who has an awareness of how Industrial Civilization operates will be looking at this and simply thinking, “Business as usual.” And so we should, because neither Copenhagen, nor its successor Mexico City are the slightest bit relevant in the real battle against climate change. This battle, when it is played out, will be a silent, local, underground battle against the forces that comprise every government engaged in the so-called “negotiation” process. What the governments of the world are negotiating is simply the continuation of the industrial machine in the face of global environmental change, but almost no public opposition.

We are so brainwashed into thinking that the system has it right, that it comes as no surprise to hear people like Joss Garman referring to Copenhagen as, “one of the most important meetings in human history”, as though anything that will have any impact on climate change was ever expected to come out of it. We pin our hopes on summits in this way because we have grown up to accept the false authority of “our leaders”, and to deny that we can do anything significant ourselves. As I wrote in “Time’s Up!“:

The system has legitimized all its efforts to prevent change and suppress opposition because the vast majority of people who are subjected to its activities are fully paid-up members of Industrial Civilization. It is ‘right’ that civilization maintains its stability because without stability, civilization collapses and can no longer impose its will upon the population. Does that sound like a coherent argument to you? In all truth, that really is the best argument civilization has for its continued existence: it has to be maintained because it has to be maintained. Even a heroin addict, shooting up to get the fix that he agonizingly craves, knows that his habit will eventually kill him. Even a lifelong nicotine addict will admit that smoking is bad for her and she should stop. Hands up if you think Industrial Civilization should be stopped.

Every environmental organisation, every lone campaigner, every ordinary member of the public that will be holding their breath as the laughably-titled “negotiations” wrap up, is in denial of the reality that we are doomed so long as Industrial Civilization continues to dominate the globe. Copenhagen is just one more pebble in that river of denial.

Crazy days as the unreal world approaches Copenhagen: corporations and a fair few governments are balking at the potential deals on the table — even though, if we’re being truthful here, they are hopelessly, awfully, ruthlessly inadequate. You will see a HUGE amount of greenwashing going on over the next few weeks, and the astroturfs are going to be piling on the pressure to ensure that everyone, not just politicians, sees a 2 degree temperature rise as something easily avoidable while industry keeps being industrial.

Basically, no one is going to be happy, and the planet will burn because no one in the civilized world will face reality…except one, maybe:

In a sign that some of the oil majors, which are preparing to announce 60pc-70pc drop in net profits this week, are becoming bolder in their opposition to international efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80pc over the next four decades, a senior executive who spoke to The Sunday Telegraph said there was currently a large degree of wishful political thinking about the changes targeted by the global summit.

“If you look at the Copenhagen targets they are basically completely illusory,” he said. “There’s no way to hit those targets and it would be very silly to think that we can.”

At first glance, I reacted with anger; and then realised that, maybe without realising it, he had hit on that very deep truth that needs saying out loud again and again: Industrial Civilization cannot co-exist with a healthy planet.

It doesn’t need an awful lot of analysis to see this; basically, if you are an oil company, the existence of which depends upon people using oil (or a coal company, agribusiness, clothing manufacturer and so on, the existence of which depends on people using whatever you produce) then supporting anything that may hit that business model will be economic suicide. Even if an aspirational 80% reduction in carbon emissions (60% globally) by 2050 has absolutely no chance of stopping runaway climate change, it’s still enough to make the profits crumble, which is one pillar of Industrial Civilization gone, there and then. Make changes that are actually sufficient to rein back climate change — and no one really knows what they are, but let’s say 90% reductions by 2020 — then not only will the entire global economy collapse, but the entire way of life that much of humanity has grown up thinking is its birthright will have to go.

Climate Change Stopped = Industrial Civilization Ended

So, well done, whoever that anonymous source was: you’ve really put the cat amongst the pigeons now.

I sort of hated Stephen Harper before reading the new book by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, but after finishing Chapter Thirteen of “Climate Cover Up“, there’s no “sort of” about it. Whether you believe there is such a thing as Evil or not, by any discription of the term Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada has got to be partaking in Satan’s Brimstone Ball. From my point of view: he is a guy in pathological denial, so utterly inculcated in the industrial economy and all it stands for, that nothing good can exist that challenges this toxic orthodoxy.

So, because I’m feeling generous, I want to share the hate with all of you. Welcome to the world of Harper:

When Conservative leader Stephen Harper campaigned for the prime minister’s job in early 2006, he did so on an interesting two-track campaign. He promised first of all to be a law-and-order conservative who would crack down hard on people who broke the law. And he promised to abrogate Canada’s international legal commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. If any reporters noticed the contradiction, there is no record that they asked him about it. Once elected, the prime minister promptly handed the job of environment minister, which included defending the government’s climate change position, to the Alberta member of parliament Rona Ambrose. Ambrose came across as a Canadian version of the benighted Sarah Palin—attractive, initially popular, and totally out of her depth, which turned out to have been a policy decision. Government scientists in Environment Canada reported to their privatesector colleagues that Ambrose declined to be briefed on the science of climate change.

The Conservative hostility to Kyoto surprised no one. Prime Minister Harper was himself elected as a member of parliament from the oil capital, Calgary (his actual riding is Calgary Southwest), and his party’s base is preponderantly in resource-rich western Canada, and decidedly in oil-rich Alberta.

In 2006 Alberta was awash in cash. Between 1990 and 2006 fossil fuel industry revenues had climbed 61 percent. But that windfall had come with a complicating factor: industry-source greenhouse gas emissions had increased over the same period by 53 percent, accounting for almost half of the total increase in emissions recorded over the same period. Most of the rest came from transportation and from coal-fired electricity generation.

Harper’s position on climate change, that of a loyal Albertan, had been on the record—and perfectly unclear—for years. In a story published December 21, 2006 (“pm Denies Climate-Change Shift”), the Toronto Star’s Ottawa bureau chief, Susan Delacourt, chronicled the evolution of the prime minister’s thinking. In September 2002, for example, he passed off the issue as a controversy of little interest to Canadians: “It’s a scientific hypothesis, a controversial one and one that I think there is some preliminary evidence for . . . This may be a lot of fun for a few scientific and environmental elites in Ottawa, but ordinary Canadians from coast to coast will not put up with what this [the Kyoto accord] will do to their economy and lifestyle, when the benefits are negligible.” In 2004, Delacourt writes, the prime minister updated that position to say, “The science is still evolving.” And by 2006 he was still referring to “so-called greenhouse gases.” If you give him the benefit of the doubt, Prime Minister Harper seemed, even as he took over the reins of power, to be like those well-educated Republicans from Chapter 12, so steeped in uncertainty that he couldn’t bring himself even to believe in the existence of the greenhouse gases that Joseph Fourier had discovered in the early part of the 19th century.

In addition to announcing that he had no intention of trying to meet Canada’s Kyoto targets, the Canadian prime minister also set about dismantling all the climate change policies that the previous Liberal government had implemented to date. He shut down the government’s climate change Web site and removed all references to global warming, and especially to Kyoto, from federal communications, except to say that henceforth he would be resisting international pressure and pursuing a “made-in-Canada solution.”

Here Harper begins to use language that was actually made in America. The Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz was in Kingston, Ontario, in May 2006, speaking to the Conservative- linked Civitas Society and making time on the side for a personal meeting with Prime Minister Harper. (The prime minister confirmed in the House of Commons a couple of days later that he and Luntz had been acquainted “for some years.”)

In the weeks that followed, people started listening more closely to the Conservatives and looking for likely connections to the strategy document, as discussed in Chapter 6, that Luntz had written for the U.S. Republican Party (“The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America”). As Ross Gelbspan recorded on the DeSmogBlog on May 31, 2006, the Kitchener Waterloo Record reported the results in a story headlined “Tory Kyoto Strategy Mirrors U.S. Plan”:

In his 2003 memo, [Luntz] told Republicans not to use economic arguments against environmental regulations, because environmental arguments would always win out with average Americans concerned about their health. Luntz also told his U.S. clients to stress common sense and accountability. “First, assure your audience that you are committed to ‘preserving and protecting’ the environment but that ‘it can be done more wisely and effectively.’ Absolutely do not raise economic arguments first.”

Since the Conservatives took office, they have consistently stressed their commitment to clean air and water, and tried to avoid discussion of cutting back environmental programs— although many have been eliminated. “My mandate is to have accountability on the environment and show real results and action on the environment for Canadians,” [Environment Minister] Ambrose told the Commons last week.

Luntz advises that technology and innovation are the keys to curbing climate change, a theme the Conservatives have repeatedly echoed. “We will be investing in Canadian technology and in Canadians,” Ambrose told MPs.

Despite his general aversion to economic arguments, Luntz . . . advises putting the cost of regulation in human terms, emphasizing how specific activities will cost more, from “pumping gas to turning on the light.” Ambrose has claimed that “we would have to pull every truck and car off the street, shut down every train and ground every plane to reach the Kyoto target. Or we could shut off all the lights in Canada tomorrow.”

In this first year that the Harper Conservatives were in power, Canada was also the official chair of the un Framework Convention on Climate Change, which gave the country two special chances to drag down the process. First, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was anything but a champion for action. She dismissed Canada’s own commitments, blew off Canada’s reporting deadlines, and on one occasion at least, declined even to attend a meeting, assuming her position as “chair” over the telephone.

Canada also increased international inertia on behalf of the Bush administration. Having refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the United States was effectively sidelined from the process, forced to sit outside of the most critical meetings awaiting word of how the parties to the accord were planning to proceed. Given that the United States was the world’s number-one producer of greenhouse gases, there was only so much that could be decided by the remainder of the world’s powers, but the United States still feared that its interests could be marginalized by a concerted international effort to discourage emissions.

That was no threat with Canada in the room. Having backed away from its own Kyoto commitments, Canada also chose to join the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, a sort of anti-Kyoto coalition that included the world’s biggest polluters (China, India, Japan, Korea, and the United States) and the second-tier countries that sell them oil and coal (Australia and Canada). Even Republican Senator (and later presidential candidate) John McCain dismissed the partnership as “nothing more than a nice little public relations ploy.” McCain told Grist writer Amanda Griscom Little on August 4, 2005 (“New Asia-Pacific Climate Pact Is Long on PR, Short on Substance”), that the partnership had “almost no meaning. They aren’t even committing money to the effort, much less enacting rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The group’s apparent determination to create an alternative organization that could be used to undermine the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, combined with the Canadian decision to join the Big Coal coalition during a year when Canada was nominal chair of the UN Framework process, dealt the UN body a telling blow.

At subsequent UN Framework conferences, especially in Bali in 2007, Canada’s obstructionist position became so obvious that people started to believe the Bush and Harper administrations were working together—that Canada was trying to prevent any progress that might demonstrate how badly the United States was out of step. But the theory broke down at the Kyoto Protocol update in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008. By then Barack Obama was already president-elect, though George Bush would retain the actual presidency until January 20, 2009. So the Bush negotiators were still in the room, but with no real mandate: everyone expected that the Obama administration would take a more aggressive tack in approaching climate change.

With the United States removed as a contrarian force, some people expected that Canada would shift to a more productive position as well. But if anything, Canada stepped up its obstructionism, urging other countries to back away from greenhouse gas reduction commitments they had made in Bali the year before. For its efforts Canada was granted the “Colossal Fossil” award. The environmental Climate Action Network chose a “Fossil of the Day” for each day of the two-week conference, and the country with the most nominations was judged to be the Colossal Fossil when the meeting wound down. Canada really earned that international embarrassment.

While dragging down efforts to build an effective greenhouse gas reduction policy on the world stage, the Harper Conservatives continued to emulate U.S. policy at home. Where in 2003 the Bush administration had proposed a Clear Skies Act that ignored greenhouse gases almost entirely, the Harper Tories followed with a Clean Air Act in 2006, which focused on smog and particulate pollutants and promised (still voluntary) emission targets by 2020.

With U.S. president George Bush advocating “energy intensity targets” as a way to address climate change, the same policy started appearing in Canadian climate documents only a short while later, such as in Environment Canada’s 2008 regulatory framework for industrial greenhouse gas emissions. An energy intensity target is something you might expect to get from Frank Luntz: it’s very specific. The definitions are clear and concise. But when you implement it succesfully, you get a public relations boost without any corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Consider, for illustration, the following definition from the World Resources Institute: “Greenhouse gas intensity targets are policies that specify emissions reductions relative to productivity or economic output, for instance, tons co2/million dollars gdp. By contrast, absolute emissions targets specify reductions measured in metric tons, relative only to a historical baseline.” That means that you can reduce energy intensity by a lot (the Canadian tar sands giant Suncor cut its energy intensity by 51 percent between 1990 and 2006) while at the same time continuing to make the problem worse (despite the “intensity” cut, Suncor increased its absolute emissions by 131 percent during the same period).

Thus, intensity targets are for people who don’t want to deal with the problem. Consider this May 7, 2001, statement from Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer in response to a question about whether the president would urge Americans to change their world-leading energy-consumption habits: “That’s a big ‘no.’ The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policy-makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one . . . The president considers Americans’ heavy use of energy a reflection of the strength of our economy, of the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy.” True to his word, until oil prices spiked in the summer of 2008, the Bush administration held its position, touting energy intensity cuts while supporting the expansion of the coal-fired power industry and the aggressive extension of oil drilling into parks and oceans.

Here’s how things played out in Canada during the same period: the provincial administration in Alberta, home to the largest section of Canada’s huge tar sands deposit, announced a climate change strategy in 2008 that would call for no greenhouse gas emission reductions whatsoever before 2020. In a document titled Responsibility/Leadership/Action, Alberta also proposed to pursue energy intensity targets in the short term (2010), to “stabilize” emissions by 2020 and to “reduce” emissions by 2050 by 14 percent from 2005 levels. Put another way, Alberta was planning to give industry free rein until 2020, after which it would introduce regulations so gently that by 2050, the province still would not comply with the target that Canada promised in Kyoto to meet by 2012. Returning once again to the dark definition of Orwellian, it’s hard to imagine how that could seriously be described as responsibility, leadership, or even action.

Now, I get the feeling that you really want to do something about this imbicile; you’re not alone. Want to know the best way? So do I. But anything you can do to ruin his credibility and upset the system that he merrily wallows in has to be a good thing.

This is a beautiful, sad advert produced by an agency of the British government. Very powerful, very moving.

It tells us that we are responsible for “over 40% of the CO2”, which is caused by ordinary, everyday things, like heating, powering appliances and driving.

The governments and their corporate masters, decided that they couldn’t afford to tell people that around 30% of all the CO2 was the result of the generation of electricity; electricity that ordinary people use directly, or indirectly in the things they buy, and the things that form the infrastructure that we all use. That might make people go to extra efforts, and stop them doing lots of things that keep civilisation moving.

And the same corporations told the governments most emphatically, that they couldn’t mention the other 30% that was the direct result of manufacturing and transporting all the things that the adverts made ordinary people want to buy, for that would mean the ordinary people might stop buying things and the economy would stop growing, and the corporations would hurt.

The outcome of this was that the British government produced a beautiful film that lots of people would be touched by, and decide that, “yes” they would do their bit, and try and cut carbon emissions by just 40%.

And the other 60%?

Don’t tell.

I was going to post something else, and then stumbled upon a film that really seems to show in clear light how utterly abhorrant the practice of tar sands mining is.

ABOUT THE FILM

Ever wonder where American gets most of its oil? If you thought it was Saudi Arabia or Iraq you are wrong. America’s biggest oil supplier has quickly become Canada’s oil sands. Located under Alberta’s pristine boreal forests, the process of oil sands extraction uses up to 4 barrels of fresh water to produce only one barrel of crude oil.

It goes without saying that water — its depletion, exploitation, privatization and contamination — has become the most important issue to face humanity in this century. At the same time, the war for oil is well underway across the globe. A struggle is increasingly being fought between water and oil, not only over them.

Alberta’s oil sands are at the centre of this tension. As the province rushes towards a large-scale extraction, the social, ecological and human impacts are hitting a crisis point. In only a few short years the continent will be a crisscross of pipelines, reaching from the arctic all the way to the southern US, leaving toxic water basins the size of Lake Ontario, and surface-mines as large as Florida.

H2Oil follows a voyage of discovery, heartbreak and politicization in the stories of those attempting to defend water in Alberta against tar sands expansion. Unlikely alliances are built and lives are changed as they come up against the largest industrial project in human history.

Ultimately we ask what is more important, oil or water? And what will be our response?

With hope and courage H2Oil tells the story of one of the most significant, and destructive projects of our time.

Whether “hope” is an appropriate response remains to be seen — the industry is getting bigger by the day — but if I can get hold of a copy then I’ll post a full review over on The Sietch, and tell you more.

I was digging around for a recording of something today and found this gem from December 2008 hidden away in the dark recesses of my hard drive. After listening to it and nearly spraying a mouthful of coffee over the keyboard, twice, I felt it had to go on The Unsuitablog as possibly the best example of Un-Joined Up Government ever committed to a sound file.

Click to play file, or right-click to save

[The silence halfway through is not a break in recording, just telephone silence]

Next time you feel like calling a civil servant or a government minister, remember this recording, then get on the train and visit the Department personally. Better still, just accept that governments have no intention of making things better, and do a bit of undermining — it’s far more satisfying, and ultimately a lot more effective.

(They never did phone back, by the way)