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Andrew Sullivan over at The Daily Dish points to some disturbing words coming from an IEA whistleblower who says that Peak Oil is already upon us.  (Link here.)

Remember when I talked about the Tesla Roadster back in Feb of 2008? Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk was on Letterman recently and gave a nice interview (below). Musk made the first of his several fortunes on Zip2 and PayPal before moving on to do the kind of world-changing work that he’s doing now.

Terrible news out of B.C. yesterday as the CBC reports that yet another ‘positive’ climate change feedback loop has been activated, accelerating the Earth’s rush towards full-blown climate crisis.

Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean?…

Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almost a billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.

What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)

Al Gore updated his talk for TED. See it below.

Al Gore is set to unveil a three-year, $300 million climate change campaign Wednesday that is one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

What I like about this story is where the money comes from. Including this snip:

While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million.

Read more here and see the video below.

Last night Montreal hosted ‘Nuit Blanche‘ a sort all-night winter party that wraps up the Montreal High-Lights Festival. The ‘festival’ itself is really just a glossed-up bundle of disjointed cultural events that would be going on festival or no festival, but it still manages to turn into a pretty good exercise in city-wide cohesion. When you’ve got stuff going on all night, free shuttle buses, communal breakfasts and disco dancing at City Hall, you’re obviously heading in the right direction.

Since I’m interested in the future, the environment, oil and the end times, I decided to head down to the Canadian Centre for Architecture to check out a program that they were offering that included DJs, an outdoor bar made of ice and exibits on the looming global oil problems and a look back at the energy crisis of 1973. It was pretty fun to wander around the exhibit at two in the morning reading about a series of experiments in off-the-grid living that took place in the late 70s.

I’d never heard about the “New Alchemy Institute“, for example, who from 1971 to 1991 conducted a series of experiments whose aim was to discover new sustainable living techniques. They used fish and rabbits and worms. A quote from New Alchemy co-founder John Todd:

We asked ourselves the question: Is it possible to grow the food needs of a small group of people in a small space without harming the environment and without enormous recourse to external sources of energy and material? Could we design a system that is self-sustainable?

We’ve been in trouble before when it comes to expensive energy and the effects hit the Western world hard and fast. We started to put our heads together to work towards practical solutions and then we totally stepped on our dicks, forgot our lessons and were suddenly building McMansions to house our boxy SUVs. A truly huge wtf? moment in human history.

You can catch the “1973: Sorry, Out of Gas — Architecture’s Response to the Global Oil Crisis” exhibit in Montreal until April 20th.

An unprecedented exploration of the architectural experimentation following the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Sparked by the combination of reduced oil production and drastically increased prices, the oil crisis marked the end of a period of constant growth in Western countries following the Second World War. Along with social and economic adjustments came the understanding that unlimited development based on unrestricted oil at low prices was no longer feasible. Taking its title from familiar signs at gas stations throughout North America during those years, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas features over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts to map the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.

The future is now.

The New York Times has an excellent piece up about:

[the world’s] first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture

I know I’m a sucker for apocalyptic end-times talk but you’ve got to admire human ingenuity when we’re doing stuff like this.

The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s official site is here.

I was in Denmark recently and fell head-over-heels in love with the tiny country of 5 million people that seem to be living in the future in almost every way possible.

One of the things you notice as you drive around the Danish countryside is the awesome amount of wind turbines everywhere. I learned that because Denmark took Kyoto seriously, they became a world leader in this type of technology and that more than 20% of their electrical grid is now supplied by wind power (from turbines that are largely owned by small groups, that reap the monetary rewards that come from limitless “free” energy).

The turbines are programmed to keep rotating in low wind (to prevent lock-up) and to lock-down during big windstorms. Here’s what happens when the locking mechanism fails:

Jeanne and I recently became proud owners of a 100% electric Vespa-like thrill ride fun ride called the EVT-168. And if we ever hit the big-time, we hope that the electric vehicle upgrade path leads towards the ready-for-purchase beast above.

I recently wrote about the Tesla Roadster for Lycos and I don’t think they’ll mind if I reproduce the text here where no one will ever notice it (links embedded in the text)…

Tesla Roadster

If the future of transportation looks like this, let’s hit the fast-forward button pronto.

Even though the Tesla Roadster is working through some prototype issues (like trying to find a transmission that can withstand the kick-assedness of an over-powerful engine that supplies continuous torque) the stats on this vehicle are pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor incredible:

0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds in a 220 mile range, zero-emission, 2¢/mile thrill-ride.

It’s electronic, guilt-free automotive sexiness.

Tesla is planning to offer more modestly priced versions of their cars in the future (the Roadster retails at about $100,000) and is also going to sell fun add-ons like solar panels that can be installed on the roof of your garage that give enough juice to power you through about 50 miles per day. That’s 100% off-the-grid sweetness. George Clooney already has one, shouldn’t you?

(Don’t have the scratch for that kind of electric ride? Why not look into one of the many, ever-improving, electric motorcycles and scooters that are coming down the pipe?)

What’s that smell? Oh, it must be George-W.-Bush-style repression wafting out of Stephen Harper’s cabinet meetings…

A page 14 story in today’s Montreal Gazette reports that:

Environment Canada has “muzzled” its scientists, ordering them to refer all media queries to Ottawa where communications officers will help them respond with “approved lines.”

‘Cause shutting up our scientists will solve the planet’s global warming crisis right? <sound of me gagging> More:

Climatologist Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria, works closely with several Environment Canada scientists. He says the policy points to the Conservative government’s fixation with “micromanagement” and message control.

“They’ve been muzzled,” says Weaver of the federal researchers. “The concept of free speech is non-existent at Environment Canada. They are manufacturing the message of science.”

The Gazette buries the story across from a full-page car ad (see below) but at least they’re reporting it.

There are rumblings of an upcoming federal election in Canada. Let’s send those stone-age Tories a lesson by stripping them back to post-Kim Campbell strength. This shit has got to stop. Science is not the enemy of Canada.

I don’t eat mammals for the following three reasons: 1) Cruelty to the Earth, 2) Cruelty to humans (read Fast Food Nation to find out what that’s about), and 3) Cruelty to intelligent, emotional animals.

There’s an article in the Globe and Mail today that says that Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nation’s Nobel Prize-winning scientific panel on climate change, has asked the world to “please eat less meat.”

Like the article says, this is unlikely to receive much traction in the media at-large as the commercial meat-packing industry is big-business, mainstream Western society has a lot of built-in meat-eating tradition and politicians hate to tell people that they have to make lifestyle changes if they actually want to stop the world from turning into an oven that drowns and starves all the polar bears.

Speaking at a press conference in Paris [Pachauri] said meat was a very carbon-intensive commodity, a fact established by UN research showing that livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than all forms of transport combined.

globeandmail.com: Care about the environment? Eat less meat

Check out this cool real-time Earth simulator that shows births, deaths and carbon emissions.

It’s over at BreathingEarth.

I hope that the MSM keep close tabs on this one, “What’s our oil doing under their sand?” mentality at work…

reportonbusiness.com: Oil giants taking Canada to court

Back in December I pointed to a great Slate article that talked about how the U.S. Supreme Court was going to be deciding what powers the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency has with regards to regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Turns out that despite decisions made by the previous government, George W. and his administration felt that CO2 was not a gas that the E.P.A. had jurisdiction over. They fought against the EPA’s authority to regulate it. From the Slate piece:

Section 202 of the Clean Air Act empowers the federal government to regulate “any air pollutant” that may “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In 1998, during Clinton’s presidency, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that the CAA gave it the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. In 1999, environmentalist groups petitioned the agency to regulate CO₂ emissions from new cars and trucks, because they contribute to global warming. But in 2003, now under the Bush administration, the EPA denied this request, arguing, among other things, that it lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases because they aren’t “air pollutants” as defined by the statute. The EPA also said it wouldn’t regulate CO₂ emissions because of the “scientific uncertainty” of their effect on climate change.

So, back in November, both sides marched off to the Supreme Court.

And now, a couple of months later, the Supreme Court judges have weighed in with a decision that kicks Geoge W. right in the pills.

From the NYT piece:

The Supreme Court ruled today, in what amounts to a rebuke of the Bush administration, that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobile emissions, and that it has shirked its duty in not doing so.

Seems like sanity is being brought to George Bush’s Whitehouse one legal decision at a time.

Does the Montreal Gazette’s opinion page editor want you to believe that global warming isn’t happening? (And why?)

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a dodgy opinion piece that the Gazette printed called “Is Recycling Really Worth It?”. The Gazette didn’t publish my letter, but my thoughts did elicit a response from the article’s author Barry Cooper (more on that in a future post).

Today’s Gazette features an opinion piece with the unwieldy title “Documentaries are trendy, but only the sexiest - or most alarmist - survive” by Meghan Daum. The Gazette-chosen subhead reads “Al Gore’s film wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation with good lighting.”

Meghan Daum’s article is full of contradictions and errors, however, as with the recycling article, what bothers me most about the 800 word screed is why the Gazette’s Opinion-Page Editor Wayne Lowrie would choose to publish re-publish it in the first place.

Daum’s article was first printed in the L.A. times over two weeks ago under the headline, “Documentaries or Propaganda?” The piece argues that while documentaries are shedding their “elitist reputation”, today’s most popular documentary directors “don’t know the difference between hammering us with their opinions and laying out the evidence so that we can decide.”

Who are the offending film makers in Daum’s opinion? Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Al Gore.

I’m only going to deal with what Daum says about Al Gore, specifically this part:

Recently, there have been rumblings from the scientific community about Gore’s grasp of the details [of Global Warming].

This is simply not true.

No respected member of the scientific community is arguing that Al Gore doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Even William J. Broad’s hatchet job on Al Gore (well debunked here) includes this graf:

“[Al Gore] has credibility in this community,” said Tim Killeen … director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way.”

I think Daum’s opinion piece is actually about her discomfort with documentaries that tackle “big issues” like obesity, global warming and the Iraq War. Each of the docs that Daum lists as favourites (Capturing the Friedmans, Grizzly Man, The Staircase) deal with much smaller topics. Topics that don’t demand that their viewers do much about what they’ve just seen. That’s fine. Change can be scary. And changing your mind can be terrifying.

And while I don’t think I’ll be heading over to Daum’s place for movie night anytime soon, what bothers me most is why the Gazette would publish this article at all. Don’t we have enough homegrown opinion in Montreal? Is the Gazette is forced to buy stale L.A. Times castoffs? Articles that weren’t even that good when they were fresh? Articles that cast doubt on the science behind global warming?

You might think I’m being nit picky, but this is how denialism works. It’s sneaky. It slips under the radar with its slimy truthiness.

If you think that some well-accepted bit of science is wrong there’s one surefire way to fight it: better science. If, on the other hand, you know that the science is sound but you don’t like what is says, the way you fight it is to introduce doubt. The tobacco industry taught us that.

All of this has me wondering what the Gazette’s Opinion-Page Editor Wayne Lowrie thinks about global warming… I’m going to drop him a line and find out.

On Thursday, the Montreal Gazette printed an op-ed piece by Barry Cooper, called “Is Recycling Really Worth It?” (I put screenshots of the article above, ’cause I think you have to be a subscriber to view the Gazette online).

Although I definitely have a beef with guys like Barry Cooper, my bigger concern is with the Gazette perpetuating the spin cycle.

Barry Cooper has written before on why he thinks recycling is bullshit using, for the most part, economic models that don’t put a dollar value on animal habitat, air quality, or greenhouse gas emissions. That’s fine. You want to stick your head in the (oil) sand, go right ahead. But if you think everybody else should be facedown with you, you’d better present some damn good science to demonstrate how your ideas are good for humanity and the planet in the long run.

Unfortunately, Barry Cooper’s policy ideas don’t pass the smell test. And that’s probably because they’re downwind of the refineries…

Here’s the letter that I sent to the Gazette:

I’m not surprised that Barry Cooper thinks recycling is a waste of time (”Is Recycling Really Worth It?” Montreal Gazette, March 15, 2007). After all, as stated on Dr. Cooper’s University of Calgary homepage, he’s affiliated with the “Friends of Science”.

“Friends of Science” is made up a group of people who, according to their website, “believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable.” The group should more properly be called the “Friends of Spin” because their activities are heavy on PR and light on actual peer-reviewed science. Little wonder that the group’s coming-out-party in Ottawa was sponsored by Imperial Oil, as detailed in Fifth Estate’s recent program “The Denial Machine” (viewable online).

So, like I said, I’m not surprised when Barry Cooper’s thoroughly unscientific opinion piece says things like “future generations can never exhaust natural resources” or that Cooper refers to “so-called greenhouse-gas emissions” after 2000 scientists in over 100 countries recently linked global warming to human activity. When you run up against the Barry Coopers of the world you sometimes have to throw up your hands in despair — you can’t reason someone out of a position that they weren’t reasoned into.

What surprises me is that the Gazette would choose to publish such laughable garbage.

And while we’re on the topic of the Gazette, why are they so behind the times in enabling their readers to leave comments on their articles online? They cynical part of me thinks that they prefer the old media system of picking and editing one sentence reader responses. That way it looks like you’re giving your readers a voice without all the messy complications of, you know, long well-reasoned arguments and, uh, facts.

(I did find this good short letter though at the Calgary Herald…)

On November 27th, I wrote about Laurie David’s Washington Post op-ed piece on the National Science Teachers Association’s refusal to distribute 50,000 copies of An Inconvenient Truth to its high school science teaching members.

Since then, I have followed the ensuing shit-storm with interest as it played out on Laurie David’s Huffington Post blog and on the NSTA’s website.

Being a former journalist, I decided to get in touch with the NSTA myself and ask a few questions. Specifically I was interested in knowing how they had arrived at the 2001 anti-endorsement policy that they give as the primary reason for not distributing the DVDs.

When the NSTA sent me this flimsy document I left them a phone message requesting more details.

The man at the centre of the controversy, Dr. Gerry Wheeler himself, called me back to talk about it.

The NSTA’s Executive Director told me that the his agency doesn’t keep detailed minutes from board meetings, but that he had been the board member to make the recommendation to terminate NSTA endorsements and that to the best of his memory:

At that time [the NSTA] had about 5 or six products or services that we had endorsed […] and what I was recommending was that we didn’t have the expertise or resources on-staff to go and look at all these things and that we’d be better off to just take the high-road and have a policy not to endorse anything.

Fair enough. But the producers of An Inconvenient Truth weren’t asking for an endorsement were they? Dr. Wheeler:

If you’re a member and I send you [the DVD] without you asking, my interpretation of that is it’s an endorsement. […] My guess is that [Laurie David] wanted to say, “NSTA thought this was so important, they sent it to all their members.”

Dr. Wheeler talked about NSTA’s offer to put up a link on the NSTA website and have science teachers request copies directly. He didn’t think Laurie David wanted to go for that because:

She didn’t want to give away all those DVDs. She just wanted a finite number to be given out by the NSTA. […] She’s a multimillionaire who doesn’t like to hear the word no and it’s really done a hell of a lot of damage.

And what does he feel about global warming?

Endorsing or not endorsing a movie about global warming by Al Gore is not the same as saying global warming is important or not important. […] Global warming is important and CO2 buildup is true.

Good to know where he stands on all of this, but Dr. Wheeler’s organisation does continue to receive millions of dollars from the oil industry, and despite his insistence that this is “no strings attached” money, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Still, I gotta give the guy props for calling me back to talk about it.

Next up on the hotseat: Laurie David. We’ll see if she returns my calls…

Have a great weekend!

Hey, guess what happens when you go up against Big Oil in George W’s America?

For 22 years, Bobby Maxwell (pictured above) combed through the books of major oil producers. Maxwell’s job was to keep tabs on the billions of dollars worth of oil and gas that oil companies were extracting from land and coastal waters belonging to the U.S. tax-paying public. Along the way, Maxwell and his team uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of royalties that oil companies were keeping from the American people.

In 2003, Bobby Maxwell received a citation from Gale A. Norton, who was secretary of the interior at the time. Norton said that “Mr. Maxwell’s career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions.” Norton went on to praise Maxwell’s “perseverance and leadership” while detailing his “many outstanding achievements.”

So what happened next? You guessed it. He was fired.

From the NYT piece:

Less than two years [after receiving his citation], the Interior Department eliminated his job in what it called a “reorganization.” That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments.

And check out this other blood-boiling graf from the Times piece:

In February, the Interior Department admitted that energy companies might escape more than $7 billion in royalty payments over the next five years because of errors in leases signed in the 1990s that officials are now scrambling to renegotiate. The errors were discovered in 2000, but were ignored for the next six years and have yet to be fixed.

This shit has got to stop.

(Maxwell is currently unemployed and in court, fighting one particular oil company who he claims still owes the government millions of dollars. The company looks like they want to settle out of court. Under the whistleblower legislation, Maxwell might be entitled to as much as 30% of the earnings that are owed to the government, which would make him a wealthy man. Packback’s a bitch. Hope he comes out on top.)

This post kicks off a new category on “Sitting Down to Stand Up”: the Environment.

In a previous post, I had labeled an environment-related piece as “Politics”, however an amazing CBC Fifth Estate documentary called The Denial Machine has changed my mind.

In The Denial Machine, master political propagandist Frank Luntz, an environmentalism “convert” urges people to uncouple the environment from politics. And if anyone should know how the environment and politics have been coupled, it’s Frank Luntz.

Luntz polled test audiences’ immediate reactions to certain key environmental words and authored a memo that taught the Bush administration how to use Orwellian double-speak to dance around the whole issue. Now, for instance, instead of Global Warming, conservatives use the friendlier, more gradual sounding moniker, “Climate Change”.

(Luntz’ memo btw, is a real eye-opener. Stomach churning stuff that has, without question, informed the strategy of Canada’s current Anti-Environment Minister, the “honorable” Rona Ambrose.)

In the doc (watch it online) Luntz says:

If you really care about the environment […] take it out of the political sphere. Take it out of trying to beat each other up over the head. And be honest, and do not yell, and focus on solutions that will actually make a difference.

I agree. As long as preventing the earth from becoming hostile to life is a partisan issue, we’ve got trouble.

OK, ramble/preamble complete. Now go over to Slate and read about how the U.S. Supreme Court is going to be deciding what responsibility the EPA actually has in trying to stop Global Warming. We’re living in pretty interesting times.

Have a great weekend!