Carbon tax

Carole Taylor, B.C.'s Minister of Finance, says the provincial government is considering introducing a carbon tax to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. This follows a letter last month from professors at B.C.s four universities calling for such a tax.

State of the planet

The UN has released its 2007 Global Environment Outlook report. The BBC has graphics and a link to the full report.

Oil madness

It's mud, sweat, and tears in Fort McMurray, and the environment be damned.

Maude Barlow in Victoria

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians will be speaking this evening at the Da Vinci Hall Centre, 195 Bay Street, at 6:30 p.m. She is on a tour promoting her book Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. The Tyee has an interview with her here.

Bad for your health

Meat, alcohol, and obesity contribute significantly to the risk of getting cancer.

And Gap Kids may endanger the health of Indian children.

Death by biofuel

The Guardian notes that 25 primate species are about to disappear. Habitat destruction is a major factor, according to a recent study.

The report follows assessments in 2000, 2002 and 2004. "Overall the problems are increasing," said Eckhard Heymann at the German Primate Centre in Goettingen, one of the report's authors. Common problems are habitat loss due to logging for timber or oil and mineral extraction, plus bushmeat hunting. The two issues are related because roads cut through tropical forests for logging trucks help give hunters easier routes to wildlife. "Every additional access to remove areas increases the access to hunters," Dr Heymann added.

Another problem is habitat destruction to make space for biofuel plantations such as oil palm. Developed economies such as the US and Europe are pledging to use more sustainable energy sources to combat climate change, but this is having a knock-on effect on tropical wildlife. "It is creating a huge market and now in several countries politicians are thinking of converting tropical forest areas to palm plantations," he said.

This particularly affects orang-utan populations. Although they still number in the low thousands, they are disappearing as a faster rate than any other primate species.

One organization trying to stop us killing off our relatives is the Jane Goodall Institute.

Malthus

Darwin's reading of An Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus, played a key role in his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Malthus's model of exponential growth applied to human society has always been controversial. Albert Bartlett explains the implications of exponential growth using the arithmetic of the "rule of 70".

More drought

Australia is running out of water.

Cowichan River threatened by warming

Climate change is already affecting one of Vancouver Island's principal salmon rivers.

Awake and Dreaming

Kit Pearson reads from Awake and Dreaming in front of the angel in Ross Bay Cemetery.

When smart people say stupid things

James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, has put his foot in his mouth and landed himself in hot water.

Drought

The U.S. Southwest is running out of water.

The U.S. Southeast is running out of water.

Meanwhile, oil hit a record price of $88 U.S. a barrel today. But don't complain -- in years to come, that will seem very cheap.

Update, Oct. 18: Oil hit $90 U.S. a barrel today. $88 a barrel? Those were the good old days.

Nobel Peace Prize

This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to Al Gore and to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They have been honoured for their roles in raising awareness of climate change, which the Nobel committee in Norway views as an important security issue facing humankind. Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a prominent activist and spokesperson on behalf of aboriginal people confronting Arctic warming, had been another leading nominee for the prize.

Bjorn Lomborg is not impressed with Gore's win.

Sceptical about Bjorn

Bjorn Lomborg, the sceptical environmentalist, has published a new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. In it, he argues that there are more immediate concerns that we should focus our attention on: malaria, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, drinking water, and so on. In The Globe and Mail (Sept. 29), Alanna Mitchell ripped into Lomborg with a review titled "The Pollyanna of Global Warming", calling his book "deeply dissatisfying, ignorant and shallow".

In high-school biology class, we used to do an experiment with fruit flies. You put flies and food in a jar, screw the top on tight and wait to see what happens as the flies reproduce like mad. The goal is to see at what point the limits of the jar - air, food, space - begin to affect the ability of the fruit flies to exist. At some point, the jar becomes inhospitable and the flies die en masse. If Bjorn Lomborg ... were to write up that high-school experiment, he would focus on the point just before the flies began to hit the limits. He would wax on about how the population of flies had never been stronger, trot out statistics to show how astoundingly well the population had reproduced over time, and gush boyishly about the excellent living conditions in the jar. ... Given those facts, examined at that specific point in the arc of the experiment, he would have drawn the correct conclusions. But he would have missed the facts that the food supply was getting low, that the air was becoming fouled and that fruit-fly catastrophe loomed. In other words, he would be correct on carefully selected points of fact, but fatally incorrect about the larger picture, or the meaning of the information he was looking at.

Spiked

Spiked is a free-market, pro-technology website that has little use for the green movement. Oddly, some of its members migrated to their present views from the (apparently) radical left.

How bad is it?

Some scientists are so worried about climate change that they are proposing massive geo-engineering projects as possible solutions.

Meanwhile, we humans continue to kill off our last remaining close relatives. Perhaps this isn't surprising, given that we may have been responsible for exterminating our Neanderthal kin 30,000 years ago.

Is the sun causing global warming?

Evidence of warming on Mars and other bodies in the solar system has led to the claim that it is the sun, rather than human activity, that is driving global warming on Earth. The alternative, Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson suggests, is to believe that "Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle."

But scientists say that solar radiation output has actually been declining in recent years, and attribute warming on Mars to other factors.

Which animals feel pain?

In humans, nocioceptors -- neurons specialized for sensing noxious stimuli -- are connected to a central nervous system, and the resulting signals are processed in the brain. ...the human nocioceptive system also includes endogenous opiods, or endorphins, which provide the brain with its natural "pain-killing" ability. ... If we want to know whether it is reasonable to believe that a particular kind of animal is capable of feeling pain, we may ask: Are there nocioceptors present? Are they connected to a central nervous system? What happens in that nervous system to the signals from the nocioceptors? And are there endogenous opiods? In our present state of understanding, this sort of information, together with the obvious behavioral signs of distress, is the best evidence we can have that an animal is capable of feeling pain.

-- James Rachels, "Drawing Lines", in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

Cell phone warning

The Green Party is calling upon the federal government to warn Canadians of the potential danger posed by radiation from cell phones and wireless networks. (The global village may be hazardous to your health.)

Sputnik

Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first artificial satellite. The event was a propaganda victory for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and marked the start of the so-called "space race". But Sputnik also paved the way for communications satellites, which have helped to spin the increasingly interconnected, participatory web of human interaction that Marshall McLuhan called "the global village".

Rats!

One dam thing leads to another.