A Little Balance

Since yesterday's post was about the terrible excesses our cossetted and selfish species is capable of, I thought it might be nice to post today about someone who clearly respects her environment and has established a home with what we would call a very modest environmental footprint:

Just Imagine

Just imagine what could be accomplished if people drank tap water, not bottled water. It is, unfortunately, all too symptomatic of the egocentric and selfish lives we lead that few are willing to give up even something as minor as this. The pleasure principle surely prevails, eh?

Oh, and cutting back on soft drinks would help reduce not only plastic pollution but also runaway obesity.

Reports The Guardian:

A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.

But what about recycling?

Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Humans are not immune to the effects of this environmental degradation:

Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.

As always, the fate of the world and all of its creatures is largely in our hands. And as always, warnings like The Guardian's will likely be ignored by the bulk of humanity whose personal preferences and comforts command such an unforgivably high premium.

A Thing Of Beauty: Rick Perry's Comeuppance At The Hands Of Al Franken

If you start at the two-minute mark, you will see the start of Senator Al Franken's public humiliation of Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, as the latter amply demonstrates both his intellectual deficiencies and his abject obeisance to the oil industry.

A Powerful Oration!

His denunciation is powerful and passionate. Watch as Keith Olbermann excoriates those who are aiding and abetting Trump's foul agenda.

Dispatches From Hell

... with a little water thrown in at the end to balance things out.



Meanwhile, Fortune Magazine predicts that things will only get much, much worse in the years to come.

UPDATED: A Litany Of Failure

While I normally do not read the National Post, a tweet by @trapdinawrpool about a column caught my attention. Written by Kelly McParland, the article offers an uncompromising assessment of a Liberal political landscape littered with broken promises coupled with a return to the party's traditional arrogance.

Why is this important? Because with its brilliant campaign to win power, the party was, in many Canadians' minds, the antidote to the poison that had permeated our political system thanks to the long and dark rule of the Harper Conservatives. A "new way" of doing politics was heralded, and hopes were high.

Now, soon coming up to the two-year mark of the Trudeau administration, those hopes have waned, and how that is affecting the many young people who voted for the first time in the last election is at this point unknown. Even old warhorses like me were disappointed, but it is a disappointment borne, and thus tempered, by many years of political observation, so the effect on people like me is likely less dramatic than on less-seasoned voters.

McParland writes:

Balanced budgets have been abandoned. Limited deficits are a thing of the past. Electoral reform crashed and burned like a damaged drone.

Canada’s indigenous people have refused to be jollied along with happy talk and photo ops, signalling that it will take more than a renamed office block in Ottawa to reverse generations of built-up anger.

Better relations with the provinces ran aground on Trudeau’s decision to stick with the Tory funding formula on health care, as well as its decision to side with Alberta on pipelines rather than British Columbia, which is determined to put such projects in their graves.

Trudeau’s victory in 2015 was supposed to be the last election ever held under the first-past-the-post system. What will voters think when they head to the polls in 2019 and awaken to the fact nothing has changed? If they start looking for answers they may have trouble getting factual information, as the Liberals’ pledge of better transparency and openness has been shovelled onto the growing heap of stuff they’re not really going to do.

The inquiry into murdered and missing women? After months of delay, indigenous leaders have complained loudly of poor leadership and bad communications. The justice minister’s own father denounced the affair as “a bloody farce” and demanded firings.

Attempting to explain this sad state of affairs, this chasmic disparity between rhetoric and reality, McParland looks to the Liberals' traditional Achilles heel, hubris,

a chronic ailment that afflicted so many previous Liberal regimes and seems particularly virulent among prime ministers named Trudeau – is a big reason. Trudeau simply shrugged off the possibility that governing might be harder than he thought, or that the world was trickier to deal with than the application of some sunny ways. It didn’t take a genius to recognize that many of the pledges dangled before the electorate were simply impractical or unrealistic, and that no rookie government could push through so much change in so short a time in a democratic system where opposing opinions proliferate and are meant to be respected.

Whatever the cause, the effects are bound to reverberate, and the ultimate damage to our political hopes and sensibilities is yet to be determined.

UPDATE: Thanks to The Mound for pointing out this article in today's Globe which is also less than laudatory of Mr. Trudeau and his merry men and woman. The writer, Andrew MacDougall, offers an interesting view of our prime minister's persistent perambulations:

For anyone peeking into politics occasionally – that is to say, most voters – they continue to see a smiling, upbeat Justin Trudeau on the national and global stages, getting mostly positive ink outside Ottawa. There’s a reason Mr. Trudeau devotes so much time and effort to polishing his image: it keeps the messes hidden from view.

A Corporate Gift?

Recently, the Star's business editor, David Olive, offered some cautious optimism about the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, the scheme dreamed up by the Trudeau government,

to “leverage” its $35 billion in CIB seed money by a factor of four, creating roughly $140 billion in infrastructure spending. It will do this by enticing private-sector partners to put up most of the infrastructure funds, backstopped by Ottawa.

Seen in a charitable light, Ottawa means to stretch taxpayer dollars in a way not possible with the traditional model of purely public spending on publicly owned infrastructure.

Less charitably, the CIB looks like a device for nationalizing the risk and forfeiting the profits from CIB projects that will be largely owned by private interests.

It is the later interpretation I have written about previously, as it seems to me that all of the risks will be borne by the taxpayers who will also, conversely, receive few of the benefits.

Apparently I am not the only one dubious of the benefits of this proposal. A Star letter writer offers his concerns:

Re: Feds bet on bank as social justice tool, Olive, June 17

David Olive’s proposal that public pension funds provide financing for infrastructure is flawed.

First, there is no shortage of low-cost government funds when we own the Bank of Canada — witness the recent $200-billion bailout of big banks and corporations after the 2008 financial crisis, or the government’s sudden decision to increase defence spending by $62 billion.

Second, while pension funds may be non-profit, the public-partnership model eats up enormous accounting, legal and management charges, and pension funds expect a 7- to 9-per-cent return. Such financing is expected to double the cost of projects.

Third, while helping retirees may seem admirable, the monies are extracted through tolls and fees, largely from overstretched middle-class families when they can least afford it.

However, Olive makes a good point regarding CPP’s meagre investments in Canada. At a time when 1.3 million Canadians are unemployed, why is our national pension fund sucking money out of the domestic economy and building up competitor companies overseas?

Larry Kazdan, Vancouver

As the old saying goes, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."