heureusement, ici, c'est james

A "carbon market" sure does sound attractive, doesn't it? It sounds democratic and anti-interventionist. But because this plan - yes, the same one championed by the NDP - includes a government auction scheme, it will in fact mean more government intervention and a larger government bureaucracy.

Rather than simply measuring and taxing carbon output, in a market scheme, the government will not only have to measure and, for all intents and purposes, "tax" the output, but it will also be required to create a bureau that will auction off the credits and then verify that companies have in fact used the credits appropriately. This is a very government-heavy project.

It will likely function as poorly as the government-managed market has in the EU, where huge loopholes have essentially enabled large companies to use the credits as subsidies, with no measurable gains for the environment.

CARBON TAXES

On the other hand, "Denmark, which brought in a carbon tax in the 1990s, reduced its greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, and its economy grew faster than Canada’s."

This might come as a shock to those of us who seem inclined to believe that the tar sands have all but BECOME the Canadian economy, but we're way behind here - economically and environmentally - and we will continue to be for as long as we think that expensive oil will grease rather than grind down our economy. From a recent editorial in the Halifax Chronicle Herald:

"As long as we can run our cars on cheap gasoline and generate electricity with cheap coal, it is not economical to develop greener sources of energy.

When prices go up, the market seeks alternatives. According to a recent survey of the state of the world’s energy economy in the Economist, there is every reason to believe that the market will find alternatives.

Rich, smart innovators from the dot-com world are putting their brains and money into the energy market — billions in private research money. Google, for instance, is investing heavily in a project to develop green energy that will be cheaper to produce than dirty old coal.

Wind power, which used to be expensive, is already as cheap as electricity generated by natural gas, and it has the promise to be even more useful, if electricity grids are managed more intelligently. The price of solar power is coming down, although it is not yet practical on a large scale. Both geothermal and tidal power have great potential.

In Scandinavia, governments committed to reducing emissions in the 1990s. With wind power, energy-efficient buildings and community heating plants that run on waste wood or straw, communities there have radically reduced their energy consumption without ruining their standard of living.

In Canada, the government wasted money with popular but useless incentive programs and advertising campaigns, and our emissions steadily rose, driven by SUVs and the filthy oilsands."

In Japan, they're so far ahead that they're already installing solar panels ON WINDOWS to generate power (see pic below)!

We know we have to put a price on carbon. But if we want to put a price on carbon in the quickest, most effective way, we will select a carbon tax option.

Labels: carbon taxes, economy, environment, global warming, mass consumption, NDP

Their meal was suddenly interrupted by the foreboding, far-off whir of some giant bird, rigid in its constitution, approaching menacingly as if by virtue of its deep, unnatural vibration. They threw down their tools, exchanged them immediately for weapons and indulged the irrational fear that this event might soon threaten everything they've ever known.



















I wonder if there's any chance of getting it right this time. If those who boldly initiate "contact" might consider being patient students of a valuable living history that holds more encyclopaedic knowledge of the Amazon than anything that's ever been catalogued.

There are said to be as few as 100 "uncontacted tribes" in the Amazon, all threatened by illegal logging.

Labels: Amazon, environment, first contact, something different

Judging by its soulless anti-democratic swagger across the global village, the Chinese government thinks it can habitually brainwash the global population -- the same way it brainwashes its own -- into believing it's simply pursuing its national interest.

Today Chinese troops are on the streets of a Zimbabwean city, aiding Mugabe's cronies with another illegal helping at the government trough. This coincided with the arrival of a Chinese weapons shipment in South Africa bound for Zimbabwe.

This is the latest in a string of Chinese transgressions aimed at subverting the political behaviour of other states in their favour. Consider the purblind genocide-for-oil arrangement with Darfur and the habitual cover the Chinese provide for Burmese leadership at the UN. During the Olympics, we should be bearing in mind more than their domestic repression of human rights in Tibet and the live organ harvesting of Falun Gong members -- to say nothing of their gross contribution to a worsening environmental crisis.

Those at the top of the political food-chain in that country must not fool themselves into thinking that global citizens would naively shrug off those of China's problems which extend well beyond their borders.

And for those of us who consider ourselves global citizens, we have to ask ourselves how much we should be opening our pockets in support of this kind of arrogant criminality.

Labels: china, Darfur, environment, globalization, psychopathic behaviour, Tibet, Zimbabwe

Colour me red, but I decided to abstain from blogging before, during, and after the by-election. The MSM stuttered their speculative stake-raising nonsense and bloggers echoed the dysfunction in tune with their respective party lines.

As fun as it was, we may be facing economic problems so serious that we'll be forced to discuss real ideas for a change -- and wouldn't that be charming?

The National's lead story today featured one investor who said "we're looking at a financial crisis equal to that of the 1930s. We should all be very concerned about what that means."

But he wasn't the only one using alarmist rhetoric.

Another said "there is a possibility we could have a depression. We could be looking at 1929. I'm not forecasting that and I don't want to be represented as such, but the dangers are real and apparent."

The TSX plunged 400 points; the loonie saw its biggest single drop in 40 years, and the price of oil -- often called a market 'fundamental' by those with hats over their eyes -- keeps fluctuating so much that any minute we're all going to keel over with acute nausea.

It's just one day's movement, but the ride's not over.

Lyle Gramley, Former Governor of the US fed and 50-some-odd year economic veteran, said, "we need to begin to start thinking outside the box because what we're experiencing now in financial markets is unlike anything I have seen in more than 50 years in looking at the economy."

But just when we think the market's pissing in our sandbox, we hear such soothing words as "the fundamentals of our economy are still strong," usually alluding to the demand for oil. In fact, it's something our own delusional PM said a few months back, and something a good many people were saying at the beginning of the credit crisis, which I dare point out, keeps worsening.


In the midst of all the anxiety, I'd like to take up Gramley's offer and suggest an idea from outside the box:

We have a global market that is ruled by an unthinking, greedy, and growing global mob. At the centre of the mob, we have a huge hulk of a monster -- the US -- deep in debt from a nasty addiction to oil and oil wars, and using dirty money to finance it all. The dirty money comes from bad loans and other grimy, unseemly "quick cash" schemes.

Suddenly, Murphy and his law caught the US with its pants down, and now we have an economic problem that some are comparing to the 1930s.

But have you heard anyone talk about how broken our global financial institutions are? Are we thinking about changing how we finance credit and debt? Are we talking about just how bad an investment expensive oil is in this warming world (for that matter, do we realize how little oil actually contributes to the Canadian economy as a percentage of GDP)?

No, not at all. In fact, we more often than not hear people jabber on about how oil investments will somehow save us from diving off the edge of an economic cliff; that, like I said, it somehow constitutes a market "fundamental."

The problem with this logic is that oil means nothing if its prices is so high that it grinds down -- rather than greases -- the global economy. And if you look at the problem without your economic-fundamentalist blinders on, you notice that dirty, expensive oil is the dumbest investment we could possibly make in the economy, nevermind the planet, especially at this stage in history.

This is a twofold emergency made worse by our short-term thinking. Though whether we ever treat it as an emergency in Canada is debatable. Our present government doesn't believe in intervention, and I wonder sometimes if they even understand global warming.

Most of all, though this may at first seem from out of left-field, we need to reform our global financial practices. Currency-trading and debt-based economics have not served us well. The practice of using the US dollar as a reserve currency needs to end, and we need a globally-neutral currency or resource to replace it.

Not gold.

We don't have the luxury today of thinking that gold is the world's most precious resource. The most precious resource today the proportion of non-carbon elements in our atmosphere.

What am I talking about? We are facing not one, but two global emergencies: One being the credit crunch, the other, as I alluded to, being global warming. With a currency adjustment, we can quickly harness the power of the free market to save our future.

There is no reason why we can't translate the chemistry of our atmosphere into a global, ecologically-backed currency unit that prevents us from further overstepping our ecological limit and launches us toward a sure-footed economic future built on clean energy.

Sounds funny, you think, making cash out of thin air? Well just what the heck do you think we're doing right now?

Labels: credit crunch, dead paradigms, debt, delusions of grandeur, economy, election, environment, slow learners, subprime housing crisis

In defense of his budget, Flaherty invoked the spirit of Sir John A. himself, who used to say ‘look a little ahead my friends.'

"If we look a little bit ahead," Flaherty says, "we see how morally deficient it is for us to live high on the hog now and pass our debt on to the next generation.”

Paying down the debt surely counts for a lot in my books, and there were a few other tolerable things in this budget. But like most things, looking ahead and sensing moral deficiencies is relative.

Paying down the debt does dick all to abate a climate emergency, it doesn't pad our seats enough for a hard economic tumble. And most morally deficient of all, this budget may even have set the stage for raising income barriers to the lower and middle income brackets.

Economy: Flaherty says $250M will be earmarked for "greening" our auto sector over 5 years. It's plainly laughable to think that 50M a year shared among a handful of American manufacturers will do anything to actually reduce greenhouse gasses, especially given that we could be facing runaway climate change by the time this measure is implemented.

Infrastructure: It's about bloody time the gas tax fund was made permanent for infrastructure, though it's not nearly enough. This is what the Liberals were calling for ages ago, and the Liberals are still ahead of the curve calling for even greater infrastructure funding to help deal with climate change.

Education: I will laud the proposed new student grant program and the contribution extensions. I also laud the graduate student scholarship, with big caveat: giving a measly 500 students a whopping $50,000 per year kinda leaves the rest of us with a big fat nothing.

Security: More defense spending. More intelligence spending. More police officers. More money for Border Services. It's debatable whether this will do much to make us safer - we'll wait and see - but surely those of us quivering in fear will feel better. The 10-year renewals for passports is nice, though.

Employment Insurance: Is it really necessary to create another Crown corporation to manage our EI fund? I'm a blogger, not an accountant, so let's assume this is a good thing.

Environment: They get around to investing in Chalk River and call it an environmental initiative. They throw $240-million at one small "clean coal” plant and call it an environmental initiative. It's cute, but again, does nothing for the big environmental picture.

Best of all was watching Cons cave into Liberal pressure for a carbon-trading scheme. Wasn't it only a few months ago that the Conservatives said carbon-trading amounts to nothing more than selling "hot air"?

Carbon trading has proven widely ineffective in Europe, so I'm anxious to see how Conservatives plan to one-up the Europeans after only recently catching up with reality.

Tax-free Savings: We can put 5G of investments in our new account without being taxed. Sounds great, right? Maybe...

In effect, the Harper Conservatives are creating a new and important vehicle for those with the wherewithal to save to avoid income tax – leaving those who live month to month to make up the difference.

It is a small but important step toward implementing one of the political right's great dreams: neutralizing the progressive income tax system so that the rich pay less while the poor and middle classes pay more.

True, the new scheme starts small. Individuals will be able to put only $5,000 a year into accounts to earn tax-free interest and/or capital gains. In their first full year of operation, these tax-free savings accounts will cost the federal treasury only $50 million in lost tax revenue.

But the contribution limits are to be both cumulative and indexed to inflation. Within 20 years, the budget estimates that this program will cost the treasury a whopping $3 billion annually, in inflation-adjusted dollars, making it one of the government's biggest programs going.

And last but not least, "in the wake of this week's budget projections of razor thin surpluses that if the economy continues to weaken more than forecast the federal government could slip back into a deficit."

Labels: budget, cons, debt, economy, environment, global warming

Millions living in the Great Lakes basin are in danger from high levels of toxic chemical pollution, cites a new study by the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC).

But like the increasing government censorship of Environmental Science here in Canada, this 400-page study was suppressed by the American government for fear of lawsuits, and God forbid, a public call to action.

Much of the N. American public is still under the false impression that the Lakes are rebounding from near-disaster in the 1970s.

Not so.

The Montreal Gazette reports the CDC to have identified "elevated levels of infant mortality in 26 AOCs [areas of concern], and of premature births in four AOCs. The study also identified 108 hazardous waste sites, of which 71 are or could be public health hazards. Powerful lake currents can distribute the chemical and hydrocarbon pollutants including dioxins throughout the Great Lakes system."

Findings echo Health Canada study

Health Canada's own study of the Great Lakes, released in 1998, identified 17 Canadian AOCs. The Montreal Gazette says this study was also kept from the public, circulated only to public health officials in the 17 AOCs.

"The Canadian study, for example, found a series of outbreaks of Minamata disease in Thunder Bay, Collingwood, Sarnia and Cornwall. Minamata disease, which includes cerebral palsy among its symptoms, is caused by mercury poisoning... Canadian research has also found an inexplicable drop in the male-female ratio on the Aamjiwnaang Reserve near Sarnia. The number of male babies had dropped 40 per cent in the mid-1990s. The reserve is surrounded by 46 large chemical plants and refineries."

While the American government cited faulty science as the reason for information suppression, Michael Gilbertson, one of three scientists to peer review the U.S. study, said the reasons behind the suppression were political.

Only one of many problems facing Great Lakes

The study essentially warns us that we are dumping too many chemicals into our lakes and rivers. But at the end of the day, the American chemical industry will still account for a huge chunk of GDP, and we will likely keep using the same pesticides, fertilizers, and lord-knows-what-else on a mass scale.

The problem of Lake toxicity is only in addition to a number of other problems facing the Lakes, including a growing algae buildup and an alarming shrinkage in their water volume. The Earth Policy Institute suggests that "the volume of water in the five Great Lakes could drop by 25 percent by 2040" due to overconsumption and global warming.

This information casts the recent tongue-in-cheek comments by David Suzuki - that politicians should be jailed for failing to heed environmental warnings - in a slightly better light.

Doing nothing to prevent premature births, mercury poisoning, palsy, cancer, not to mention the disappearance of the largest freshwater lake system in the world, surely qualifies as borderline criminal.

Labels: environment, Great Lakes, toxic soup

"A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said."

Toxic plastics, which are said to account for 90% of all ocean garbage, are caught up in currents that eventually sweep them to this depository between the west coast of N. America and Japan. They act as a magnet for DDT and hydrocarbons, making the soup much more dangerous than we might instinctively think. What's more, these plastics can take thousands of years to decompose.

"Unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade," said one researcher.

Perhaps we should find this comforting. To have a legacy like this. To know that we'll always have a toxic creature growing and lingering in our shadow, virtually outside the realm of enforceable law. Something that, after global warming sets in, can melt into a shiny, stain-free new sea-floor.

But I don't. For some reason, I think this is a better idea.

Labels: environment, slow learners, toxic soup

It's a great idea, but then the whole Conservative party would have to be thrown in jail. What would we do without great leaders?

Careful, Mr. Suzuki.

The dear leader has already fired several scientists. If he can't fire you, he might take his wrath out on you in other ways...

Labels: cons, David Suzuki, environment, Stephen Harper

Foreign corporate challenges to Canadian laws continue to grow under NAFTA, says the CCPA, weakening our environmental protection and natural resource management regulations at the whim of profit-seekers.

CCPA calls the trend "disturbing," claiming that these cases have a good chance at success due to the poor wording of the agreement. So far, of the 18 claims against Canada, all three have been decided. In all three cases, settlements have been awarded in favour of corporate interests, one of them out-of-court. Mexico lost all three of their cases, while all four of the U.S. cases have been dismissed. Smell any national bias in these decisions?

Is the Conservative government "standing up for Canada" here?

Far from it. The CCPA points out that our government has been expanding the use of the defective mechanism through new bilateral trade agreements with Peru, Colombia and South Korea. (Yes, Colombia.) Each bilateral agreement contains a version of NAFTA’s chapter 11 rules, "which permit foreign investors to challenge government measures that allegedly diminish the value of their investments.”

Labels: CCPA, cons, environment, NAFTA

It seems Baird has been shocked to find his personal opinions clashing with reality, and like we've seen many times before, the gov't has taken steps to ensure that truth conforms to Conservative Government philosophy.

All scientists at Environment Canada must now use "approved lines" when dealing with the media, and all media queries first directed to the government:

"The new policy, which went into force in recent weeks and sent a chill through the department research divisions, is designed to control the department's media message and ensure there are no "surprises" for Environment Minister John Baird and senior management when they open the newspaper or turn on the television, according to documents."

Surprises. Scientists saying it's hot outside when the government thinks it's cold; or that it's windy when it should be clear. In fact, why don't we just take to manufacturing the weather, like the Chinese?

(Every day, Harper's Conservatives seem to have more and more in common with dictatorial Communists, don't they?).

Labels: cons, dictatorial tendencies, environment, John Baird

Guess who's gonna clean up our environmental mess now?

Not human-made robots, scrubbers or towers, nor those glowing Chinese pigs, but these fancy new micro-organisms made from scratch - the first form of human-made synthetic life.

These newest human bastardizations of life are supposed to "gobble up pollution, produce hard-to-make drugs, pump out clean energy, or, at the whimsical end, flowers designed to bloom on your birthday." Whimsy with genomes.

Leave it up to humans to play with things we don't understand in order to solve problems we created by playing with things we don't understand.

Gobble up pollution? Produce clean energy? Is this supposed to be a "safe" alternative to carbon? (Even safer than hydrogen?)

Indeed. The man at the helm, Craig Venter, says this new "design phase of biology" enables any idiot with a computer to "type up genetic code with keystrokes, e-mail it to a commercial lab that spits it out as chemical dots on a glass sheet, synthesizes it, tucks it into a bacteria for transport and returns a live version to the customer."

I can't wait to try it myself and make a killing in the process (no pun intended).

Though with idiots like Ed Stelmach already in charge of things, our time is limited anyway. Today he announced his swift 2020 target for capping emissions: "our climate-change plan ensures environmental protection while allowing for continued economic growth."

Sorry shithead, but you're growing the wrong industry.

Oh well. Given our ongoing carnival of delirium, we might as well go out with a bang and make a dirty fortune while we still can.

Labels: Ed Stelmach, environment, global warming, synthetic life

The politics of being green briefly rippled across Canada's sea of news again today, a sea filled mostly with loud forecasts of economic doom.

And while there is still some Canadian reluctance to wed economics and the environment, today's announcement by the government of Israel to install an electric car network throughout their country in less than four years underscores the urgency with which we in Canada must dump our paleolithic economic paradigms, and Stephen Harper along with them.

Compare Israel's bold move with Harpers non-interventionist consumer tax cuts, which do little more than boost China's manufacturing sector. Hardly a sound decision in a time when Canadian manufacturers are in financial pain. If you disagree, I dare you to check the manufacturing labels of your latest purchases.

Better yet, compare Harper's laissez-faire mentality with Stephane Dion's proposal to invest $1 billion in green manufacturing and R&D, and his promise to "balance the carbon budget." The idea is simple - give a shot in the arm to green manufacturers rather than let them die along with other industries and position Canada for a softer economic landing.

This isn't a fairy-tale. With the kind of noises being made about Vancouver's hydrogen-powered Angstrom Power Inc., Canada is so well-positioned to be the leader of this energy revolution that it almost hurts to see us be so immobile on the subject. (Maybe we can pull ahead of Israel and install a hydrogen-network or develop a hydrogen-powered vehicle. With a visionary at the helm, the possiblities are endless.)

Smelling an election, Elizabeth May has also has come out swinging by calling Stephen Harper a "climate change denier," embracing the NTREE carbon tax proposal, and calling for "a moratorium on new projects in the tar sands and a total phase-out of nuclear power and uranium mining." They would even "amend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to enshrine Canadians' rights to healthy air and water." All worthy ideas.

But for all the Green's fantastic rhetoric on their will to create local "green economies," they are still short of the kind of specific initiatives that would get us there, which isn't much better than the useless posturing coming from the NDP.

With the economy switching gears, we need a leader who knows "where the puck is going to be," to quote a great Canadian visionary. The timing of this election highlights how Harper's ideological opposition to the new economics of progress makes him and his party all but irrelevant.

Labels: economy, election, environment, Israel

Here's a recent bout of analytical verbiage from Chantal Hebert on the National, which aired the night before these recent poll results came out, giving the Liberals a marginal lead and the progressive majority a landslide victory:

"the economy is starting to be on the radar again because of the high dollar; because of what's happening in the United States; because of rising energy prices - go through the list. But I also think that Conservative strategists don't see Stephane Dion as someone who is strong as economic issues. He has made poverty and the environment his two issues and I think they're trying to use tougher times on the economic front to try to portray Dion as someone who would be reckless with public money in difficult times; who would imperil the economy by going overboard on the environment and who would be a spending Liberal"

That might be a great old-fashioned political narrative, but the logic just doesn't hold up.

She thoughtfully omitted Dion's much advertised "third pillar" - the economy - and relied on that dead paradigm where the environment and economy are mortal enemies; the latter always poised to move in for the kill.

But when you turn your brain on, you quickly realize that the high dollar will continue to soar along with the price of energy as long as we pursue oil-intensive economic policies; that oil prices won't come crashing down with the big demand from Asia; that the conservative economic ideology - relying commodity exports - will have the eventual effect of driving up global inflation, and inflation here in Canada as a result; that the trouble in the U.S. economy from the sub-prime lending crisis will carry on for as long as Americans (and much of the rest of the world - us included) continue to finance a debt-based fiat economy through large loans and mass consumption rather than savings.

All this economic bullshit is part of the same ecological crisis.

At the risk of being unkind, I'm not sure what's more harmful to our well-being: dinosaur-pundits egging on our childish, chauvinistic government, or Harper's ancient neoconservative orthodoxy in action.

I never thought I'd see the day when our journalists would be unapologetically confusing Conservative games with actually governing, and then legitimately seeming to respect them for it.

I think it's because their jobs increasingly hinge on the made-up fluff of political soap operas rather than the real-life ramifications of policy positions, which frees them up to rake Dion's personality over the coals with adjectives like "pallid," "inept," "weak," and "incompetent." After all, it makes for a better political narrative.

Believe it or not, it wasn't his charm that won over the party in the first place. It was his priorities. But far be it from me to suggest that they actually figure this out before they spit uncontrollably at the people who are watching them on TV.

Pundits not only underestimate the depth and importance the environmental issue has for Canadians - especially of my generation - but, according to the polls, their comments expire only a few hours after they spit them out.

Harper, it seems, can any weather number of short-sighted flip-flops on the economy, income trusts, the environment, or even the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, by virtue of an emasculated and intellectually decrepit media which continues to laud his "considerable abilities." What a joke.

Believing that conservative orthodoxy will cure any of these persistent problems would be like cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Labels: dead paradigms, environment, Stephane Dion, Stephen Harper

"Canada-U.S. income gap widens" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 18, 2007.

[According to the University of Toronto's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity], Canada's “prosperity gap” with the United States was wider in 2006 than in previous years, and will continue to widen unless policy-makers and business leaders take significant steps to boost productivity.

Quick, somebody call the prosperity police.

"Canada-U.S. income gap narrows" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 22, 2007.

[According to Statistics Canada] Canada's per capita real income grew by 15.5 per cent between 2000 and 2006, nearly two-thirds faster than the 9.1 per cent growth in the U.S.

Whoops, I guess we don't have to feel so poor and unwashed after all.

The Statscan report measured "real income growth," which measures the actual change in our purchasing power, while the first report focused on Canada's low productivity and manufacturing output per person.

So what we call "growth" in Canada has nothing to do with good economic planning or innovation at home. It's solely due to a rise in commodity prices, the fruits of which then finance our lucrative foreign investments.

In other words, In Canada, we're raping the Earth and proudly enjoying every minute of it. Not only are we making more money, but we're making more by doing less. We can sit and watch the world go round, extract a few somethings out of our home and native land, sell it to China or the US, and then use that money to cherry-pick a few sweet deals overseas. Then we move the money around a bit and buy a bigger set of widgets to stare at or drive in; and then we do it all over again, but with more gusto.

All the while, policy makers and business leaders are lamenting the fact that we don't manufacture anything of great value here at home.

Why bother?

We can't justifiably whine about Canada's low productivity while also celebrating globalization or the "integration of global markets" or whatever else we happen to enthusiastically call it on any given day. The whole point of globalization was to become a cog in the global economic machine! If we get rich just by digging in the dirt and finding shiny things, hard metals and combustible liquids, why should we have to do anything else?

In this machine, we have become a proud nation of extractor-investors. From here on in, we Canadians can officially retire our brains and just enjoy the widgetfest until the worlds melts into oblivion.

Labels: canada, environment, globalization, income gap, productivity, prosperity

"Dow plunges 360 points on credit fears" and "Citigroup downgrade causes global shockwaves." All because a few banks tried to mortgage homes to unqualified buyers.

Mortgage-fueled investment is one of the heavy engines of cashflow and mass consumption in our debt-based economy. Was it liquidity or profit they were desperate for? Just an economic ripple in the water.

--
Fear leads to speculation: large-scale credit trouble and record-high oil prices are said to point to an economic recession. Mentions of oil woes. Another, bigger ripple.

--
The NY Times reports that record oil prices - the third energy shock in a generation - are here to stay. Prices have gone from $20 in 1997 to a nearly unthinkable $100 today.

The current oil shock has "broad, long-lasting implications" because India - and especially China - will keep demand at peak capacity almost indefinitely, unless we see significant economic downturns in Asia or America.

Permanent oil woes. A "permanent" economic wave.

No mention of global warming though - publishers wouldn't want to seem scattered or alarmist.

--
Fears of a global sell-off of the American dollar, spurring an economic downturn in the US due to the compounding effects of its massive current-account and trade deficits. Federal reserve may be unable to control spending due to currency devaluation. But for now, the slide remains undramatic.

Tremors or ripples. Nobody knows yet.

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PetroChina becomes the world's largest IPO after a surprising jumpstart on the public exchange. A semiotic shockwave.

--
Rising food prices. The Economist reports that oil is still cheaper than milk and bottled water. No mention that prices of milk and water include oil for transport (therefore must be more expensive). Or that bottled water is itself the child of oil-enabled transportation.

More lucrative biofuel crops are overtaking cropland formerly used for food. Farmers are happy; the poor aren't. But the poor don't read the Economist. No ripples.

--
The prospect of a recession lingers. But growth in China seems to keep the world economy stable. Millions of Chinese are lifted out of poverty. A wave of joy.

--
Canadians wave hello to renewed economic confidence. The loonie reaches record highs due to its standing as a "commodity-based currency." Large deposits of oil and other increasingly rare commodites make it necessary to trade in the Canadian dollar, though Canadian manufacturers warn of a potential trade-deficit backlash.

--
It's reported that C02 emissions are up 35 per cent today from 1990 - far faster than anticipated - due to increased industrial use of fossil fuels, and a dramatic handicap in the ability of oceans to absorb C02. Several international agencies support the findings.

The changes "characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing," the researchers report.

A wave of anxiety.

--
The US government stays out of the credit crisis. Cash flow is ensured by encouraging consumption. Uneasy economic calm and unseen, unheard environmental ripples. A little silence never hurt anyone.
More debt, more growth economics, more energy to fuel it all. My favourite "practical" solution to this teetering tower, so far, has been to conduct a colossal experiment by making oceans vast carbon sinks again - through the use of artificial electrochemical weathering.

It's pretty useless in the long term, but it sure feels exciting, doesn't it? With all the heightened stakes that come with this experiment, I daresay it even beats the thrill that comes with making a risky investment. The only way it could possibly get better is if they found a way to broadcast the experiment LIVE on a cable news channel.

Labels: debt, economy, environment, growth, oil