All my progressive friends are up in arms because the Conservative government is shutting down the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. This is a Crown corporation that commissions research on sustainable development and reports to the Minister of Environment.

Obviously the Conservative Minister of the Environment doesn’t care to read reports on sustainable development, so the corporation serves no purpose. To keep operating it would be a greater dishonesty, just as it would have been to pretend Canada was going to make its Kyoto commitments. Progressive outrage is misdirected: it’s no surprise that the Conservatives don’t care about the environment.

The government funds universities, NGOs (through tax-deductible donations) and Ministry policy analysts. There are two models for how policy can be generated:

• Impartial Ministry policy analysts summarize impartial academic research and deliver it to Ministers who swallows it whole
• NGO and corporate lobbyists battle it out in biased reports and the Minister’s office, Ministerial aids help the Minister decide who to listen to

The first model was predominant in the past, but New Public Management theory said that policy analysts, as rational economic agents, could not be trusted to deliver impartial advice. Governments concluded that at least with lobbyists the biases were out in the open. Antagonistic processes are considered the least-worst solutions in many parts of our society, such as resource allocation and the justice system. The National Round Table is a relic from an earlier era.

The lobbyist model puts a lot of power in the hands of Ministerial aids (who whisper in the Minister’s ear) and is skewed because corporate lobbyists have more resources than NGO lobbyists. As a public servant, I’d love to see the functions of lobbyists all brought inside the government, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

I believe that carbon emissions should be reduced just enough to stop environmental disaster. Most people are not explicit about this, but I think it’s a view almost everyone shares if they think about it: the climate can absorb some carbon without disruption, so there’s no problem in that amount of emissions. Besides, eliminating all emissions would require the end of civilization if not the end of mammals.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.

BC has been experiencing record-breaking bad, unseasonable weather. On Saturday the Times Colonist ran a front-page story about the economic impact of bad weather in Victoria. Three years ago, the article would have been about the role of climate change in causing the weather, but it isn’t even mentioned – how times change.

It’s amazing how far climate change fell off everyone’s radar when the economy became the top concern. What would it take to make people care again? Apparently the end of summer is not enough.

I would like people to make the connection that their airplane and cruise ship vacations in the winter are the direct cause of the weather we’re suffering. One week on the beach in winter = 4 months holding an umbrella in summer.

There was a point back in 2007 when I thought slow travel might actually take off. (I’ve embraced slow travel since it makes me feel superior when I’m driving my friends to the airport.) But now it seems that people travel as much as they can afford; just like how the financial crisis dropped carbon emissions by overthrowing capitalism – remember that?

The Vancouver Aquarium runs the OceanWise program, which is fairly popular in BC. Their iPhone app includes a find restaurants & markets near me (or an arbitrary address). This seems useful at first glance, but if I have the OceanWise app on my phone, I can make informed sustainable choices at any restaurant. I guess I could prefer OceanWise restaurants because they’ve made a commitment to sustainability, although I’ve noted that OceanWise certified restaurants can still have non-sustainable options on their menus, they just mark the sustainable ones with an OceanWise logo.

SeaChoice is a partnership of environmental NGOs (David Suzuki and the Sierra Club amongst others) that just publishes an advisory list. Their app is nothing but this list, but it’s more user-friendly (and less buggy) than the list portion of the OceanWise app. My favourite part is that you can switch between English and Japanese (called “Sushi” here), because English restaurants never serve anything other than the same six fish.

The SeaChoice list contains pictures and information on why fish are less sustainable unlike Ocean Wise’s curt “don’t eat that shit!”. (I’d love to be able to tell someone not to order the tuna because removing large predators might disrupt the ecosystem.) The
Ocean Wise list has more entries, but I have no idea whether I’m likely to run into “orangespot sardines” on a menu. The OceanWise and SeaChoice apps are both buggy, making me wonder about the capability of Canadian NGOs to develop (or manage contracts for development of) software. Neither of the lists has proper cross-listing between, for example, sardines and herring.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program has an app that is far slicker (although still not without bugs) than either of the BC efforts. It includes a map of user-submitted locations to find specific fish. There are none in Canada right now and there’s no API to do a bulk upload of OceanWise certified locations, but that would be the best solution. Although SeafoodWatch includes Japanese, it bizarrely doesn’t include Spanish.

Greater Victoria (formally: the Capital Regional District) is running some kind of CO2-reducing pyramid scheme (formally: a Ponzi scheme) or multi-level marketing. The idea is to get people to make small steps to stop raping the climate. First, they just ran a bunch of workshops to create contagious meme-zombies. Second, you can get yourself brainwashed online. Third, you can take pledges – here are mine:

• I will drive my friends around in car-share co-op cars to show them how nice they are.
• I will use Google Maps Transit to make the bus even more awesome!
• I will convert my fixie to a free-wheel so it isn’t such a pain to stop.
• I will strut more when I walk near traffic so drivers get jealous.
• I will let my brother try to teach me how to longboard again.

I like that they recognized longboards as a sustainable transportation option – too bad the people writing the Greater Victoria bylaws don’t. Personally, I’d like to see the cops handing out a dozen idling tickets (have they ever handed out one?!) for every skateboarder or cyclist-without-a-helmet they harass.

I subscribe to the theory of cleaning that if you remove all water- and oil-based matter from a non-porous surface and allow it to dry, all the microorganisms will die. If you believe that microorganisms need to be actively killed using bleach or oxygen, then this review will lead you to the conclusion that I’m disgusting. (Hippies take note: vinegar works using the former method, baking soda works using the latter.)

I dislike scented cleaners and try to minimize my impact on the environment, so I use microfibre cloths for most cleaning. This in itself was a revelation. But the cloths don’t remove soap scum in the bathroom – for that I use either environmentally-friendly cleaners that leave film or evil cleaners that don’t.

The other day my friend Marlene told me that she uses melamine foam (trade name: Mr. Clean Magic Eraser) all over the house and gave me one telling me it will “change my life”. She wasn’t wrong!

• Like a cloth, it picks up dust.
• Like an abrasive, it cuts through oil and soap scum.
• Like a sponge, it holds enough water for a whole cleaning job.
• You don’t have to keep putting soap on it.
• It’s scent-free.

The erasers are a lattice of plastic microblades that gradually wear down as they scrape. Melamine plastic will eventually break down into organic melamine and formaldehyde, but not fast enough to create a health hazard. It’s not great to fill the world with little bits of plastic, but it’s far better than filling it with reactive chemicals. Plus, a bacteria has evolved that eats melamine!

I haven’t used the erasers long enough to get an idea of how much it’ll cost per cleaning and I don’t care – if you’re willing to spend more time cleaning to save money, then I’ve got a French maid outfit you’d look great in.

Kyla pointed me to George Monbiot’s summary of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a critique of the environmental argument for veganism: Outside industrial food production, livestock consume the waste products from agriculture and sustainable-grown feed, not fertilized feed crops grown on prime farmland. A lot of vegan math is based on the worst contemporary practices rather than the global average or Western practices with a reasonable amount of reforming. A general theme in Monbiot’s writing is that we should sacrifice those activities that cannot be made sustainable and reform those that can.

Vegans often disregard the quality of meat compared to other food. At the very least, it needs to be calculated as mass of carbon per calorie:

I don’t know about you, but my diet is calculated, so I would eat the same amount of protein if I became a vegan, not just brown gack. So ideally we’d calculate mass of carbon per essential amino acid. Measured that way, chicken meat and eggs come very close to vegetables, and are a pleasure to eat.

But not all meat is created equal. Shrimp, beef and lamb (grass-fed is worse) are significantly worse than their brethren. I never eat these three meats when alternatives are available and try to get most of my protein from eggs, milk and sustainable fish. If the environmental externalities were added to the price of beef, ground beef would be a luxury rather than the filler it currently is in North American diets.

Unfiltered tap and bottled water in the following cities causes that one Brockovich cancer (the study is of American communities):

1. Norman, Oklahoma
2. Honolulu, Hawaii
3. Riverside, California
4. Madison, Wisconsin
5. San Jose, California
6. Tallahasee, Florida
7. Omaha, Nebraska
8. Albuquerque, New Mexico
9. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
10. Bend, Oregon
11. Salt Lake City, Utah
12. Ann Arbor, Michigan
13. Atlanta, Georgia
14. Los Angeles, California
15. Bethesda, Maryland
16. Pheonix, Arizona
17. Washington, D.C.
18. Chicago, Illinois
19. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
20. Villanova, Pennsylvania
21. Sacramento, California
22. Louisville, Kentucky
23. Syracuse, New York
24. New Haven, Connecticut
25. Buffalo, New York
26. Las Vegas, Nevada
27. New York, New York
28. Scottsdale, Arizona
29. Miami, Florida
30. Boston, Massachusetts
31. Cincinnati, Ohio

David Suzuki once said that if your water is poisonous you shouldn’t buy filters, but advocate for political change. Ideas like that are why he’s a geneticist instead of a game theorist. My humble suggestion is to buy a filter, and then overthrow the corporate kleptocracy.

I’ve been reading and meditating a lot about climate change lately. The issue is usually framed in a larger context of sustainability. The question is raised: how did our society become so unsustainable?

My generation is quick to blame our parents. Baby Boomers make easy scapegoats, because the ex-hippie Boomers that we personally know are quick to apologize that their generation sold out. It’s the right-wing, aggregated Boomers we don’t know that are holding up progress on fighting climate change.

This comment by Van Isle on a Tyee health-reform fantasy piece got me to thinking:

Being an older boomer I made a comment to 90+ year old woman last year about how us baby-boomers have screwed up this world (re; pollutian, world financing ponsi schemes, etc etc). Her come-back was that we were only partly resonsible; her generation too was responsible because they let us get away with it.

But the Boomers didn’t invent the suburbs and the car lifestyle. The Boomers didn’t dismantle the train and streetcar system. The Boomers didn’t start clearcutting the forests and developing every oilfield. Their parents did.

The Boomers produce so carelessly and consume so much only because they were raised that way. It’s the “Greatest Generation” who came back from WW2 with a sense of entitlement and decided to make prosperity happen, whatever the cost.

You can argue that the GI Generation didn’t know any better. They didn’t have climate change models. But it’s pretty obvious that if you cut down all the easily-loggable trees and don’t replant any more, as happened in BC during the 60s, future generations are going to have a hard time making due.

The Baby Boomers shouldn’t have just bought in to their parents’ lifestyles, but their sin is sloth rather than greed. The vote-rich generation still has an opportunity to redeem themselves. You can hate them if they don’t put things on the mend before they hand off power. But the people who got us into this mess in the first place are currently getting seniors discounts and taking a pension out of your pay cheque.

For whom are we saving the planet? Kids?

If you concede that it would be the height of viscousness to bring children into such an unspeakably cruel world, then environmental problems become a whole lot easier.

Namely, BP and Transocean start looking like nicely undervalued investments.

But then, it’s raining inside today.